King Cotton
"King Cotton" is a slogan that summarized the strategy used before the American Civil War (of 1861–1865) by secessionists in the southern states (the future Confederate States of America) to claim the feasibility of secession and to prove there was no need to fear a war with the northern states. The theory held that control over cotton exports would make a proposed independent Confederacy economically prosperous, would ruin the textile industry of New England, and—most importantly—would force the United Kingdom and perhaps France to support the Confederacy militarily because their industrial economies depended on Southern cotton.
For other uses, see King Cotton (disambiguation).
By 1861, many of the most powerful governments, now including the North of the United States, had made commitments against slavery, and for this reason, the Confederacy realised that they had to use cotton as the "selling point" of their new republic and not slavery.[1]
From an economical standpoint, the emancipation in the West Indies and the general abolishment of slavery was a failure for Britain, and this was one of the reasons why southerners believed that they were susceptible to changing their minds regarding anti-slavery policies, and thus intervention on their behalf.[2]
The slogan, widely believed throughout the South, helped in mobilizing support for secession: by February 1861, the seven states whose economies were based on cotton plantations had all seceded and formed the Confederacy. Meanwhile, the other eight slave states, with little or no cotton production, remained in the Union.
To demonstrate the alleged power of King Cotton, Southern cotton merchants spontaneously refused to ship out their cotton in early 1861; it was not a government decision. This did not just include holding back the exportation of cotton, but the burning of cotton too, authorised by the Confederate Congress in 1862, in circumstances where there was a danger of the Union gaining Southern territory and taking the cotton.[3] By summer 1861, the Union Navy blockaded every major Confederate port and shut down over 95% of exports. However, the British were able to acquire cotton from alternative sources such as India, Egypt and Brazil. Britain had already abolished slavery, and the public would not have tolerated the government militarily supporting a sovereignty upholding the ideals of slavery.[4]
Consequently, it proved a failure for the Confederacy, as the strategy did not succeed in making the new Confederate polity economically prosperous. The blockade prevented the earning of desperately needed gold. Most importantly, the false belief led to unrealistic assumptions that the war would be won through European intervention if only the Confederacy held out long enough.[5]
Economics[edit]
When war broke out, the Confederates refused to allow the export of cotton to Europe. The idea was that this cotton diplomacy would force Europe to intervene. However, European states did not intervene, and following Abraham Lincoln's decision to impose a Union blockade, the South was unable to market its millions of bales of cotton. The production of cotton increased in other parts of the world, such as India and Egypt, to meet the demand, and new profits in cotton were among the motives of the Russian conquest of Central Asia. A British-owned newspaper, The Standard of Buenos Aires, in cooperation with the Manchester Cotton Supply Association succeeded in encouraging Argentinian farmers to greatly increase production of cotton in Argentina and export it to the United Kingdom.[15]
Surdam (1998) asks, "Did the world demand for American-grown raw cotton fall during the 1860s, even though total demand for cotton increased?" Previous researchers have asserted that the South faced stagnating or falling demand for its cotton. Surdam's more complete model of the world market for cotton, combined with additional data, shows that the reduction in the supply of American-grown cotton induced by the Civil War distorts previous estimates of the state of demand for cotton. In the absence of the drastic disruption in the supply of American-grown cotton, the world demand for such cotton would have remained strong.
Stanley Lebergott (1983) shows the South blundered during the war because it clung too long to faith in King Cotton. Because the South's long-range goal was a world monopoly of cotton, it devoted valuable land and slave labor to growing cotton instead of urgently needed foodstuffs.
In the end, "King Cotton" proved to be a delusion that misled the Confederacy into a hopeless war that it ended up losing.[16][17]