Part Two: Contradictions · The Rise of the Cotton Kingdom

EMBEDDED IN THE very birth of the United States in 1776 was a contradiction. The Founding Fathers had declared the "self-evident truth" that "all men are created equal," but in 1787, they wrote into the Constitution a provision that implicitly legalized slavery: the number of representatives each state would send to Congress would be determined by the number of "free persons" and "three fifths of all other persons," the code phrase for slaves. By then, slavery had become a waning institution, offering hope that the contradiction between the nation's principles and what had come to be called the "peculiar institution" would resolve itself. The northern states proceeded to abolish slavery, and many slaveholders in the South were manumitting, or freeing, their slaves. Like Jefferson, they were feeling morally uncomfortable over slavery. Facing problems of soil exhaustion in the tobacco fields of Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina, slaveholders were finding slavery unprofitable. In South Carolina and Georgia, slavery was confined to the coastal region where sea island cotton could be grown. This type of cotton had few seeds and was ideal to process into fiber for textile production. A second type of cotton, short staple cotton, could be grown in the upcountry region, but its abundance of seeds made it prohibitively expensive to extract by hand. This static and even slumping economy changed in 1793: Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin made it viable to process short staple cotton. After 1800, slavery became enormously profitable not only in the cotton-producing states from Georgia to Texas but also in what became the slave-breeding states of Virginia and Maryland. In turn, cotton production ushered America into the era of the Market Revolution -the "take-off" years that transformed America into a highly complex industrial economy.¹ At the core of this economic boom was the ascendancy of the Cotton Kingdom.

In 1800, the United States had a population of six million, of which only three hundred twenty thousand were listed as urban. A large percentage of the rural population was engaged in subsistence farming, growing food crops mainly for their own needs. Living in the interior regions, many of these farmers found that the transportation of surplus crops to the market was too expensive. The cost of carrying a ton of goods only thirty miles overland was as much as shipping it three thousand miles from America to Europe. Thus, commercial activity was limited to the areas near the seaboard and navigable waterways. By 1860, however, the U.S. economy had become complex and robust. Advances in transportation such as the steamboat and the railroad now linked the three major regions-the East, West, and South. Each region represented a division of production. New England and the Middle Atlantic states concentrated on manufacturing and commerce and relied on the West for foodstuffs for its growing urban population and the South for raw cotton to supply its textile factories. In 1860, the total value of manufactured goods in the East was $1,270,937,679, compared to only $540,137,811 for the other two regions combined. The western states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois exported grain and livestock to the East and South while depending on the East for manufactured goods. In 1860, the West shipped a million barrels of flour and thirty-one million barrels of grain through Buffalo to the East, and $185,211,254 worth of produce through New Orleans to the South. The South, mainly Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, produced fiber for the textile mills of the East and purchased food from the West and manufactured goods from the East. The causes of this tremendous economic transformation were multiple. The shipping boom of the early 1800s had enabled merchants like Francis Lowell to accumulate capital to invest in manufacturing ventures. The proliferation of banks and the expansion of the credit system made it possible for farmers to borrow money and buy land for commercial agriculture. Introducing new machinery, technological progress paved the way for factory production. Government intervention in the form of protective tariffs and the development of transportation also contributed to the advance of the market. The transportation revolution laid vast networks of turnpikes, canals, and railroads across the country: between 1815 and 1860, freight charges for shipments overland had been reduced by 95 percent. ² But the most "decisive" impetus of the Market Revolution was cotton. "Cotton was strategic," observed economist Douglass C.

North, "because it was the major independent variable in the interdependent structure of internal and international trade. The demands for western foodstuffs and northeastern services and manufactures were basically dependent upon the income received from the cotton trade."³ The tables below do the telling:

The development of the cotton export sector depended on the appropriation of Indian lands and the expansion of slavery. The major cotton-producing states-Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana-were carved out of Indian territory. Tribe after tribe in the South was forced to cede its lands to the federal government and move west of the Mississippi River. Eleven treaties of cession were negotiated with these tribes between 1814 and 1824; from these agreements the United States acquired millions of acres of lands, including one-fifth of Mississippi and three-quarters of Alabama. Sales of Indian lands were followed by increases in the slave population in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, and the slave population by increases in cotton production. Dominant in the export trade, cotton was crucial in the development of interregional specialization. The capital derived from the export of cotton to England and France helped to finance enterprises throughout the economy and buttressed the industrialization of America.⁴ The Market Revolution created an even more diverse population,' for it led to the massive influx oflaborers from Ireland, the incorporation of Mexicans with the annexation of the Southwest territories, and then the migrations of the Chinese east to America. The inclusion of these new groups of Calibans led to a greater "pluribus," a more racially and culturally diverse "giddy multitude." The economy fastened these different peoples to each other, their histories woven into the tapestry of a greater "unum" called America. Working in the textile mills of New England, Irish immigrant women manufactured fabric made from cotton grown on former Indian lands and picked by enslaved African Americans; meanwhile, Irish immigrant men labored in New England shoe factories, making shoes from hides shipped by Mexican workers in California. Chinese and Irish railroad workers laid the transcontinental tracks that closed the frontier and changed forever the lives of Indians in the West. America was becoming a nation peopled by the world.