Cotton and Race in the Making of America

The Human Costs of Economic Power

Gene Dattel

• Publisher: Ivan R. Dee
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781442210196
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Since the earliest days of colonial America, the relationship between cotton and the African-American experience has been central to the history of the republic. America's most serious social tragedy, slavery and its legacy, spread only where cotton could be grown. Both before and after the Civil War, blacks were assigned to the cotton fields while a pervasive racial animosity and fear of a black migratory invasion caused white Northerners to contain blacks in the South.

Gene Dattel's pioneering study explores the historical roots of these most central social issues. In telling detail Mr. Dattel shows why the vastly underappreciated story of cotton is a key to understanding America's rise to economic power. When cotton production exploded to satiate the nineteenth-century textile industry's enormous appetite, it became the first truly complex global business and thereby a major driving force in U.S. territorial expansion and sectional economic integration. It propelled New York City to commercial preeminence and fostered independent trade between Europe and the United States, providing export capital for the new nation to gain its financial "sea legs" in the world economy. Without slave-produced cotton, the South could never have initiated the Civil War, America's bloodiest conflict at home.

Mr. Dattel's skillful historical analysis identifies the commercial forces that cotton unleashed and the pervasive nature of racial antipathy it produced. This is a story that has never been told in quite the same way before, related here with the authority of a historian with a profound knowledge of the history of international finance. With 23 black-and-white illustrations.

Table of contents

• Part 1: Slavery in the Making of the Constitution
• Chapter 1: The Silent Issue at the Constitutional Convention
• Part 2: The Engine of American Growth, 1787–1861
• Chapter 2: Birth of an Obsession
• Chapter 3: Land Expansion and White Migration to the Old Southwest
• Chapter 4: The Movement of Slaves to the Cotton States
• Chapter 5: The Business of Cotton
• Chapter 6: The Roots of War
• Part 3: The North: For Whites Only, 1800–1865
• Chapter 7: Being Free and Black in the North
• Chapter 8: The Colonial North
• Chapter 9: Race Moves West
• Chapter 10: Tocqueville on Slavery, Race, and Money in America
• Part 4: King Cotton Buys a War
• Chapter 11: Cultivating a Crop, Cultivating a Strategy
• Chapter 12: Great Britain and the Civil War
• Chapter 13: Cotton and Confederate Finance
• Chapter 14: Procuring Arms
• Chapter 15: Cotton Trading in the United States
• Chapter 16: Cotton and the Freedmen
• Part 5: The Racial Divide and Cotton Labor, 1865–1930
• Chapter 17: New Era, Old Problems
• Chapter 18: Ruling the Freedmen in the Cotton Fields
• Chapter 19: Reconstruction Meets Reality
• Chapter 20: The Black Hand on the Cotton Boll
• Chapter 21: From Cotton Field to Urban Ghetto: The Chicago Experience
• Part 6: Cotton Without Slaves, 1865–1930
• Chapter 22: King Cotton Expands
• Chapter 23: The Controlling Laws of Cotton Finance
• Chapter 24: The Delta Plantation: Labor and Land
• Chapter 25: The Planter Experience in the Twentieth Century
• Chapter 26: The Long-Awaited Mechanical Cotton Picker
• Chapter 27: The Abdication of King Cotton