As discussed in chapter 7, the Lower South suffered serious setbacks during the early years of independence. Even the market for tobacco stagnated, especially after the Embargo Act of 1807 and again after the War of 1812 allowed tobacco from other regions to enter and gain greater shares of the world market.
The hope of the South was in cotton. Obtaining their supplies of raw cotton from the Orient, the English had increasingly turned to the manufacture of cotton cloth instead of wool in the late seventeenth century. The inventions that came a century later—the steam engine, the spinning jenny, the water frame, the spinning mule, and the power loom—all gave rise to an enormous demand for cotton fiber. The phase of the Industrial Revolution that made it possible to apply power to textile manufacturing occurred at just the right time to stimulate and encourage the planting of cotton wherever it could be grown profitably. In the southern United States, the conditions for profitable agriculture based on cotton were nearly ideal. Only some way of separating the green seed from the short-staple “upland cotton” had to be devised. One of the contributions of Yankee genius Eli Whitney was the invention of a gin that enabled a good worker to clean 50 pounds of cotton per day instead of only 1 pound by hand. With the application of power to the gin, the amount of fiber that could be produced appeared almost limitless.
On the humid coasts of Georgia and South Carolina, planters who had grown indigo turned to cotton. Even some rice fields were recultivated to produce the new staple. The culture moved up to North Carolina and Virginia and over the mountains to the beautiful rolling country of middle Tennessee. In the early 1800s, the piedmont of Georgia and South Carolina became the important cotton center; these states were vying for first place by 1820, with South Carolina slightly in the lead.
With the end of the War of 1812, the really important shift in cotton production to the west began (see Map 8.4). Almost unerringly, the settlers first planted the loamy, fertile soils that extended in an arc from Georgia through Alabama into northeastern Mississippi. A second major cotton-growing area lay in the rich bottom land of the lower Mississippi River and its tributaries. In this extremely fertile soil, the cotton even tended to grow a longer fiber. The culture spread into western Tennessee and eastern Arkansas. A jump into Texas then foretold the trend of cotton production.
By 1840, the early cotton-producing states had been left behind. In 1860, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana were far in the lead, with Mississippi alone producing more cotton than Georgia and South Carolina combined. This shift in the realm of King Cotton was to have the most far-reaching consequences on the economy of the South.
Just before the Civil War, cotton was indeed king. As Douglass North has remarked, it is difficult to exaggerate the role of cotton in American economic growth between 1800 and 1850 (North 1961). The great staple accounted for more than half the dollar
MAP 8.4
Shifts in Cotton Cultivation
The tremendous growth of the world demand for cotton propelled the westward movement of cotton cultivation after the War of 1812 and up to the onset of the Civil War.
Part of Jefferson’s vision of western settlement as portrayed in the Northwest Land Ordinance was the fair and proper treatment of Native Americans. Except for the prohibition of slavery clause, southwestern settlement also followed the 1785-1787 ordinances, including Article 3 (1787):
The utmost good faith shall always be observed toward the Indians; their land and property shall never be taken from them without their consent; and in their property, rights, and liberty, they shall never be invaded or disturbed, unless in just and lawful wars authorized by Congress, but laws founded in justice and humanity shall from time to time be made, for preventing wrongs being done to them, and for preserving peace and friendship with them.
Along the southwestern path of expansion lay the lands (see Maps 8.4 and Map 8.5) of the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole tribes. In spite of Jefferson’s words, many whites, both north
And south, began calling for the removal of tribes to land farther west. White cravings for Cherokee lands, in particular, were intensified by the discovery of gold on Cherokee lands in 1828. President Andrew Jackson and other supporters of removal argued that the Cherokee would not be able to survive in the East because the game on which they mainly depended for food was disappearing. It was an opinion only (Economic Reasoning Proposition 5, evidence and theory give value to opinions). Research by David Wishart (1999) confirms that the Cherokee had achieved a remarkable degree of success beyond hunting and skinning deer and other animals. In fact, most Cherokee were farmers, practicing a diversified agriculture. Productivity in corn production was comparable with that on similar white lands. Other Cherokee earned their livings in market activities such as weaving and spinning, innkeeping, operating ferryboats, and so on. A minority engaged in large-scale plantation agriculture based on slavery. In economic terms, the Cherokee were similar to their white neighbors, but the facts were of no avail. Indeed, the improvements they had made on their land increased white demands for removal. In 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act. The Choctaw, Chickasaw, and
Their holdings for new lands west of the Mississippi, while the Cherokee resisted until finally forced, eight years later, to march in severe winter weather to what is now Oklahoma. An estimated 4,000 people, nearly one-fourth of the Cherokee, died on the “Trail of Tears.” A few Cherokee remained in North Carolina through assimilation and special assistance. Approximately 50 families forsook their Cherokee citizenship to become citizens of North Carolina; other families from the Snowbird community bought back 1,200
Acres of their land. State law prohibited Indians from owning land (until after 1864), but the purchase was made using names of sympathetic whites.
Farther south, in Florida, the Seminoles resisted both assimilation and removal. Ten thousand federal troops, 30,000 citizen soldiers, and $40 million in war expenditures finally prevailed (with 14 percent losses of life by action and disease over seven years). Nearly 3,000 Seminoles were removed to lands west of the Mississippi.
MAP 8.5
Tribal Lands of the Chickasaw, Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole before 1830
Value of U. S. exports—a value nearly 10 times as great in U. S. foreign trade as its nearest competitor, the wheat and wheat flour of the North. At home, cotton planters furnished the raw materials for textile manufacturers in the North, who by 1860 were selling half again as much cotton cloth as wool cloth. As we will see in chapter 10, cotton goods were the leading manufacture in the United States in 1860 when ranked by value added (second when ranked by employment). It was not surprising that even as antislavery forces strengthened in the late antebellum period, southerners could scarcely envisage a North, or even a world, without their chief product.
There was both a slight push and a major pull to the new lands of the South. The push had begun in colonial times as tidewater lands began to lose the natural fertility that staples grown there required. The small farmer, impelled by hardship, had moved into the piedmont. The shift had been especially pronounced in Virginia and North Carolina, from which struggling families tended to sift through the Cumberland Gap into Tennessee and Kentucky. The frontiersman—the professional pioneer—was then pulled into the rich new cotton country, mostly from Georgia and South Carolina, but partly from Tennessee and even Kentucky. Following closely came the yeoman farmer; almost
FIGURE 8.3
U. S. Public Land Sales and Cotton Prices, 1814-1860*
Source: North 1961, 124.
*Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas.
Simultaneously—and this is what clearly distinguishes the southern migration—came the planter, the man of substance, with his huge household establishment and his slaves.
As with the surges in the Northwest, the 1810s, the 1830s, and the 1850s were the boom decades for the new southwestern areas. It was, of course, the favorable returns expected on cotton cultivation that brought the great, irregular surges of movement toward the southwest. As shown in Figure 8.3, there is close correlation between the price of cotton on the one hand and the volume of public land sales in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas on the other. Here again, we observe the responsiveness of individuals to favorable economic opportunities.
World History
