Empire of Cotton

by Sven Beckert

  The insatiable demand of cotton planters dominated the politics of the new nation, not just because of their reliance on the state to secure and empty new land, but also because of their need for coerced labor. Planters in the United States, unlike elsewhere, enjoyed access to large supplies of cheap labor—what the American Cotton Planter would call “the cheapest and most available labor in the world.” Cotton, until the advent of mechanized harvesting during the 1940s, was a labor-intensive crop. Even more than the hours required to spin and weave, the shortage of workers to harvest was the most constraining factor in its production. “The true limitation upon the production of cotton,” argued the southern journal De Bow’s Review, “is labor.” In the complex agricultural structures of Mughal India and the Ottoman Empire, rural cultivators had to first secure subsistence crops for their own use, thus limiting what they harvested for the market. Indeed, as we have seen, the shortage of labor had been one of the principal constraints on production in western Anatolia and had frustrated efforts to create cotton plantations in India. In Brazil, where slave labor was available, cotton competed poorly with the even greater labor requirements of sugar plantations. And with the British abolition of the slave trade in 1807 it became difficult for West Indian planters to recruit labor.21

  In the United States, however, nearly any shortage could be fixed, with the right amount of money. The slave markets in New Orleans and elsewhere boomed as cotton did. And as significant, hundreds of thousands of slaves were available to grow cotton because tobacco production in the states of the upper South became less profitable after the American Revolution, encouraging slave owners there to sell their human property. As one British observer remarked perceptively in 1811, “The cultivation of tobacco in Virginia and Maryland, has been less of late an object of attention; and the gangs of negroes formerly engaged in it, have been sent into the southern states, where the American cotton planter, thus reinforced, is enabled to commence his operations with increasing vigour.” Indeed, by 1830 fully 1 million people (or one in thirteen Americans) grew cotton in the United States—most of them slaves.22

  The expansion of cotton production, as a result, reinvigorated slavery and led to an enormous shift of slave labor from the upper to the lower South. In the thirty years after the invention of the gin alone (between 1790 and 1820), a quarter million slaves were forcefully relocated, while between 1783 and the closing of the international slave trade in 1808, traders imported an estimated 170,000 slaves into the United States—or one-third of all slaves imported into North America since 1619. Altogether, the internal slave trade moved up to a million slaves forcefully to the Deep South, most to grow cotton.23

  To be sure, not all cotton in the United States was grown by slaves on large plantations. Small farmers in the southern upcountry produced cotton as well, and they did so because it provided ready cash and its cultivation, unlike the growing of sugar or rice, did not require significant capital investments. Yet despite their efforts, in aggregate they produced only a small share of the total crop. As we have seen the world over, small farmers focused on securing subsistence crops before growing marketable commodities. Indeed, 85 percent of all cotton picked in the South in 1860 was grown on units larger than a hundred acres; the planters who owned those farms owned 91.2 percent of all slaves. The larger the farm, the better the planter was able to take advantage of the economies of scale inherent in slave-based cotton production. Larger farms could afford the gins to remove seeds and presses to compress loose cotton into tightly pressed bales to lower shipping costs, they could engage in agricultural experiments to wrest more nutrients from cleared soil, and they could buy more slaves to avoid any labor constraints.24 Cotton demanded quite literally a hunt for labor and a perpetual struggle for its control. Slave traders, slave pens, slave auctions, and the attendant physical and psychological violence of holding millions in bondage were of central importance to the expansion of cotton production in the United States and of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain.

  Better than anyone else, slaves understood the violent foundation of cotton’s success. If given an opportunity, they testified in vivid detail to its brutality. John Brown, a fugitive slave, remembered in 1854 how he was “flogged…with the cow-hide,” and how overseers “hunt[ed] ‘stray niggers.’ ” “When the price [of cotton] rises in the English market,” he remembered, “the poor slaves immediately feel the effects, for they are harder driven, and the whip is kept more constantly going.” Henry Bibb, another slave, remembered the fearful violence: “At the sound of the overseer’s horn, all the slaves came forward and witnessed my punishment. My clothing was stripped off and I was compelled to lie down on the ground with my face to the earth. Four stakes were driven in the ground, to which my hands and feet were tied. Then the overseer stood over me with the lash.”25

  The expansion of cotton manufacturing in Great Britain depended on violence across the Atlantic. Cotton, emptied lands, and slavery indeed became so closely connected to one another that Liverpool cotton merchant William Rathbone VI, on a trip to the United States in 1849, reported to his father that “negroes & everything here fluctuates with Cotton.” So crucial was slave labor that the Liverpool Chronicle and European Times warned that if slaves ever should be emancipated, cotton cloth prices might double or triple, with devastating consequences for Britain. While brutal coercion weighed like a nightmare upon millions of American slaves, the potential end of such violence was a nightmare to those who gathered the fabulous profits of the empire of cotton.26

  Slaves picking cotton in a Georgia field (illustration credit 5.4)

  To make such a nightmare less likely, planters in the United States also drew on the third advantage that turned them into the world’s leading cotton growers: political power. Southern slaveholders had enshrined the basis of their power into the Constitution with its three-fifths clause. A whole series of slaveholding presidents, Supreme Court judges, and strong representation in both houses of Congress guaranteed seemingly never-ending political support for the institution of slavery. Such power on the national level was enabled and also supplemented by the absence of competing elites in the slaveholding states themselves, and the enormous power slaveholders enjoyed over state governments. These state governments, in the end, also allowed North American cotton planters to amplify their good fortune of navigable rivers near their plantations by building railroads deeper and deeper into the hinterland. In contrast, Brazilian cotton farmers, competing with the interests of the country’s powerful sugar growers, were unable to command infrastructure improvements to facilitate cotton exports. Transporting cotton over long distances on mules or horses remained expensive; transporting cotton from the São Francisco River region to the port of Salvador, for example, almost doubled the price of cotton. In India, transportation infrastructure remained similarly poor (it was said that transporting cotton to the port added about 50 percent to its cost in India, but as little as 3 percent in the United States), as cotton merchants and growers in India lacked the capital and power to effect its rapid improvement. The political influence of slaveholders in the American Republic was also decisive because it allowed them to expand the institution of slavery into the newly acquired territories of the South and Southwest, while successfully committing the federal government to a policy of expropriating Native Americans.27

  In a roundabout way, American independence had turned out to be a blessing for the European, especially the British, cotton industry. Bowing to a century of abolitionist persuasion, Britain in 1834 outlawed slavery within its empire. Some American revolutionaries envisioned a similar extinction of slavery as their own nation evolved, only to see the institution become the engine of the most important cotton-growing region of the world. And independence removed restraints from expropriating Native Americans as well, with the relationship between white settlers and North American Indians now removed from the complex negotiations of European politics. The disjunction of political from economic sp
aces in fact proved to be crucial for the world’s most dynamic industry—with cotton-growing slave owners dominating regional governments and exerting significant influence on the national government, their interests and the policies of the state could be aligned to a stunning degree, an impossibility for slaveholders within the British Empire.

  A cotton carrier, Brazil, 1816 (illustration credit 5.5)

  How these factors came together can be seen, for example, in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. Here, in an area of approximately seven thousand square miles, the mighty Mississippi had unloaded its rich sediments for millennia, becoming the seedbed of the world’s most productive cotton land. In 1859, as many as sixty thousand Delta slaves produced a staggering 66 million pounds of cotton, nearly ten times as much as was exported from Saint-Domingue to France during the height of its production in the early 1790s.28

  For the Delta to become the chief grower of the industrial world’s most important commodity—a kind of Saudi Arabia of the early nineteenth century—its land had to be taken from its original inhabitants and labor, capital, knowledge, and state power had to be mobilized. Between 1820 and 1832 a series of treaties backed by skirmishes and armed confrontations transferred much of the land from the Choctaws—its native inhabitants—to white settlers. Using wagons, rafts, and flatboats, hopeful cotton planters brought slaves from elsewhere in the South to clear that land of its “jungle-like” vegetation, and later to hoe the soil, sow seeds, prune the young plants, and then harvest the cotton. The news that the Delta was “the most certain cotton planting area in the world” spread through the South; planters who were able to draw on sufficient capital (mostly in the form of labor) and expertise moved in. The plantations they built became substantial businesses: By 1840, Washington County, in the heart of the Delta, counted more than ten slaves for every white inhabitant. By 1850, each and every white family in the county held on average more than eighty slaves. The largest Delta planter, Stephen Duncan, owned 1,036 slaves and the value of his property by the late 1850s was estimated at $1.3 million. While not typical cotton farms, plantations in the Delta were highly capitalized businesses, indeed among the very largest in North America, and the investments necessary would have been beyond the reach of nearly every northern industrialist. Wealth, as viewed from the front porches of the lavish and elegantly furnished mansions in the Delta, appeared to flow out of the soil, the result of a strange alchemy that combined emptied lands, slave labor, and, as we will see, the never-ending flow of European capital.29

  The growing domination of global cotton markets by planters in fact fed upon itself. As cotton cultivation expanded in the southern United States and as British and eventually continental European consumers became more and more dependent on that supply, institutional links between the South and Europe deepened. European import merchants sent agents to Charleston, Memphis, and New Orleans. They corresponded with business partners across the Atlantic on a regular basis. These merchants built a dense network of shipping connections and integrated the trade in cotton with their other businesses. People engaged in the cotton trade crossed the North Atlantic frequently, forging close business connections, friendships, and even marriages. Such networks, in turn, made transatlantic trade more secure and more predictable, thus lowering costs and giving the United States another decisive advantage over its potential competitors, such as India or Brazil.

  At the core of all of these networks was the flow of cotton from the United States to Europe and of capital in the opposite direction. This capital more often than not was secured by mortgages on slaves, giving the owners of these mortgages the right to a particular slave should the debtor default. As historian Bonnie Martin has shown, in Louisiana 88 percent of loans secured by mortgages used slaves as (partial) collateral; in South Carolina it was 82 percent. In total, she estimates that hundreds of millions of dollars of capital was secured by property in humans. Slavery thus allowed not just for the rapid allocation of labor, but also for a swift allocation of capital.30

  With enormous riches gained from expropriated land and labor, planters invested in agricultural improvements, another illustration of how success begot further success. They experimented, for example, with various cotton hybrids drawing on Indian, Ottoman, Central American, West Indian, and other seeds, creating cotton strains adapted to particular local climates and soils, eventually crafting hundreds upon hundreds of different kinds of cotton. Most significantly, in 1806 a Natchez planter, Walter Burling, brought cottonseeds from Mexico, which had larger bolls that could be more easily picked and, according to experts, “possessed better fiber quality, especially fiber length, and was resistant to ‘rot.’ ” This type of cotton had been cultivated by Native Americans in the central Mexican highlands for centuries, and once brought into the United States it was appropriated by American planters, becoming the “basic germplasm for all subsequent upland cotton cultivars in the United States and around the world.” The new cotton could be picked three to four times as fast as the then common Georgia Green Seed cotton. The cruel irony was that Amerindians’ ability to develop a strain of cotton well suited for the American environment gave considerable impetus to the expropriation of their lands, and made slave labor on those lands much more productive.31

  Such innovations in labor control and agriculture were increasingly institutionalized by the construction of dense but distinctly regional networks for the dispersal of knowledge. Books, agricultural institutes, journals such as De Bow’s Review and the American Cotton Planter, along with regional agricultural conventions, all spread information about how to select seeds, how to organize a labor force, how to read the market, how to hoe and plant, and where to invest—in short, how to perfect a “Practical Plantation Economy.”32

  The Industrial Revolution in Europe also actively influenced the evolution of slavery in the American South. Gang labor, by no means new but never so prevalent as on cotton plantations, exemplified the new rhythm of industrial labor, or what one author has called “military agriculture.” The systematic mobilization of slave women and children on cotton farms further expanded their output. As a result, cotton production in the United States increased much faster than the number of slaves employed on farms. Some of that increase was related to the embrace of different cotton plants, but there was also a systematic intensification of exploitation. Plantation slavery in the nineteenth-century United States allowed for an organization of labor unlike what was possible in the world’s newly emerging industrial heartland. Because plantations were frequently larger than factories and required more substantial capital investments, and because aside from the spike in innovation around the invention of Eli Whitney’s gin in the 1790s technological progress in cotton agriculture was limited, productivity gains on plantations could only result from a reorganization of labor. Slave owners secured these productivity gains by taking almost total control of the work process—a direct result of the violent domination of their workers. Nothing of that sort was possible in the world’s emerging textile mills, where workers succeeded in maintaining some of the rhythms of the farms, small workshops, and craft guilds from whence they came.33 The all-encompassing control of workers—a core characteristic of capitalism—experienced its first great success on the cotton plantations of the American South.

  Because planters dominated labor in ways radically different from English merchants’ connection to agricultural cultivators in India, or Ottoman landowners in Anatolia, they could drive their slaves ever harder, as they came up with increasingly brutal methods of disciplining their workforce. Indeed, torture, according to historian Edward Baptist, was at the root of the ability of American planters to produce ever more cotton. Innovative ways of labor accounting further helped planters squeeze more labor out of their workers. As management scholar Rob Cooke has argued, “There is no real question nowadays…that it [the plantation] was a site of early development of industrial discipline.” And with rising productivity on cotton plantations, prices fell, al
lowing British manufacturers to become even more competitive in the markets of the world, a move that, among many other things, would eventually undermine manufacturing in India and elsewhere and make the later integration of that countryside into the global cotton empire much easier.34

  The rhythm of industrial production also entered the plantation in other ways. Since the expansion of cotton agriculture depended on the advance of credit, sometimes secured by mortgages on slaves, most of which derived from the London money market, its patterns now followed the competitive logic of markets rather than the whimsy of personal aspiration and regional circumstance—capital moved to wherever cotton could be produced in the greatest quantities and at the cheapest cost. To the great lament of southern planters, the factor—a merchant who would sell a planter’s cotton, supply him with goods, and provide credit—and with him the London money market, was a decisive source of their wealth and power. But the London money market and the Lancashire manufacturers depended just as much on the local experts in the violent expropriation of land and labor. The old paternalism of East Coast planters, shielded partially by the mercantilist logic of mutually beneficial and protected exchange between motherland and colony of the greater British imperial economy, had given way to a freer, more competitive, and fluid social order mediated by merchant capital. The voracious appetite for accumulation sped the “social metabolism” of cotton production. The logic of war capitalism in fact now emanated from its industrial (wage labor) center in Lancashire. While in the eighteenth century, slavery had enabled industrial takeoff, it now became integral to its continued expansion.35