The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War (review)

The antebellum southern economy has undergone increased scrutiny in recent years, including rewarding studies of individual counties, such as those by Tom Downey and Bruce Eelman. Brian Schoen, a professor at Ohio University, has joined these historians by taking a close look at the political economy of the antebellum South and finding current interpretations wanting. Schoen, however, does not give us an intensive study of a specific place but rather pulls back and takes the broad view, effectively weaving together domestic and international politics and economics in a fascinating tale. In so doing, he charts the development of a secessionist logic and its interpretation of free trade, foreign relations, internal improvements, and a host of other issues. He also helps give cotton itself a history, rather than assuming that it was an unchanging background fixture of the entire antebellum era. Although readers of this journal will find little in his book about technology per se, The Fragile Fabric of Union will prove crucial for all students of the antebellum United States.

Schoen traces the growth of cotton in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century from a crop of little notice to a powerful driver of regional interests. The growing English market for cotton meant that the former colonial ruler now served as an important trading partner. Southerners benefited by having a market for their staple, of course, but so too did northern merchants, who "flocked to southeastern ports" in hopes of gaining a part of the trade (p. 49). Thus, North and South staked the young country's economic future on a partnership: the North's manufactures and the South's staple crops. Seeing points of intersection makes the southern claims of betrayal on the topics of tariffs and free trade more comprehensible, and Schoen pays close attention to the changing political alliances that created the grounds for southern complaints. Southerners were proud of the economic sacrifices they had gladly made in the Jeffersonian era to fight Great Britain, but found themselves increasingly boxed in by tariff policies which did not address their interests, capped by the 1828 "Tariff of Abominations." Southern cotton planters felt that their earlier attempts at economic unity with the North had not yielded a balance of benefits.

Such experiences caused southern economic leaders to turn their eyes to the west, hoping to ally with farmers in these new lands to secure their joint economic future. Conventions for projects such as the never-realized Louisville, Cincinnati and Charleston Railroad illustrate both the conviction for such bonds and the difficulty in bringing any project to fruition. Around the same time, a robust proslavery ideology began to emerge, which argued that slavery "merge [d] good business practice and moral purpose" by making profits for the master and lifting the Africans into a better condition than on their home continent (p. 167). As the gap in political economy between North and South widened, southerners began to fill the void with arguments for their independent political and economic strength.

Schoen concludes with secession, shrewdly noting that antebellum secessionists hoped to unite their preferred social order with economic development. Thus, in the decade prior to the Civil War, southerners pursued railroads and manufacturing with renewed vigor. They proved slavery could easily mix with both, even if their accomplishments fell short of their ambitions. The Confederate Congress kept a commitment to free trade, and southerners assumed that "King Cotton" would bring France and England to heel after the Confederacy announced its independence.

In all of this they proved mistaken. France and England did not recognize the Confederacy, manufacturing and industry in the South proved too feeble to support a war effort, and there would be no continued experiment in slavery. Schoen notes that in defeat southerners began to change their story about cotton's power: in Lost Cause mythology, the relentless antebellum focus on cotton agriculture doomed...