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

Property is a central focus of the recent historical literature on the American South, slavery, and secession. John Huston and Gavin Wright, for example, emphasize the South's disproportionate investment in slaves and its importance to the southern economy as the key factor for understanding the severing of the Union.¹ In The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War, Brian Schoen agrees with this line of argument, but directs our attention to the main product of slave labor—cotton. Just like Huston and Wright, Schoen concentrates on the political economy of the nineteenth-century South and U.S., but analyzes the global power of cotton. King Cotton is not a new topic, but by connecting the Lower South planters and politicians who depended on it and chattel slavery with the world economy, Schoen makes a significant contribution to reframing U.S. history in trans-Atlantic and global terms.²

The Fragile Fabric of Union links the rise of cotton production with the increased demand of British textile manufacturers and the peaceful political relations established by Jay's Treaty in the 1790s. "By the beginning of the nineteenth century," Schoen argues, "a vast and intricate web of commerce already had created a regional, national, and global interest grounded in the raw cotton of the Lower South" (49). The Cotton South's support for Jefferson's Embargo Act in the early 1800s, when global politics turned sour (specifically over British impressments of U.S. sailors), reflected the region's nationalist impulses. In turn, the region's opposition to the subsequent non-intercourse and non-importation policies aimed solely at Great Britain and France demonstrated "sectional" and "sectorial" interests in staple agriculture. This interweaving of politics and economics, region and nation, and sectional and international perspectives is the main strength of this study.

Schoen reemphasizes the importance of the tariff debates to national and sectional development during the early nineteenth century, showing how Lower South anti-protectionists spurred regional self-awareness. "Only by probing the specific logic of the Cotton South's embrace of free trade theory and practice," he argues, "can regional thought and the politics of the Jacksonian period be properly understood" (111). This probing reveals that spokesmen of the Cotton South pursued liberal economic principles, despite their attachment to slavery. In the 1820s, such free traders as Professor Thomas Cooper at South Carolina College "promoted a vision of America as a dynamic commercial agrarian nation" (124), one that sought national wealth and international peace through the global cotton trade. During the 1830s and 1840s, railroad projects, southern commercial conventions, and direct trade with the West and Europe spearheaded the Cotton South's interests. This is interesting terrain that follows a trend toward refashioning the South as a region in pursuit of modernization, not mired in "static agrarianism."³

Pro-slavery theorists such as William Harper of South Carolina likewise based their arguments on the idea of "global commercial expansion" through slave-produced cotton. As Schoen indicates, this was a decidedly modern view for the time period, albeit imbued with a twisted racial-moral logic. In this respect, the study might have benefited from a more complete examination of such theorists before turning to a discussion of the southern indictment of British emancipation in the West Indies. All the same, Schoen does provide the global context for understanding the tariff debates of the 1840s and the annexation of Texas (which spurred Democrats to the forefront in the Cotton South) to move the analysis to the main topic—secession and the Civil War.

Schoen argues that the Cotton South's efforts at economic diversification in the 1850s were quite impressive in comparison with the rest of the world (besides the U.S. North, Western Europe, and the Upper South). Likewise, southern plans for expansion into the Caribbean and debates over...