The Cotton Kingdom, Abolition, and Manifest Destiny

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Monocultures. Human trafficking. Nationalism. One might associate these concepts with modern times, but in fact they are ancient issues. People have always over farmed or overgrazed their lands, captured slaves to work for them, and gotten caught up in the jingoistic war dance of King and Country. The Civil War era in the United States was no exception.

The United States—and, indeed, the world—is facing those same issues today: food shortages, worker exploitation, soil depletion and the subsequent move to ever newer, greener pastures. Perhaps, by examining the following three events, lessons can be learned about the treatment of land as well as the people who live upon (and from) it.

Agricultural and cultural practices in the pre-Civil War's Cotton Kingdom in part fueled the rise of the abolition movement. Plantation practices, unsustainable without the use of slave labor, depleted the natural resources of the South. At the same time, Manifest Destiny urged Americans to come settle the new lands out West. This created a land use conflict which would help sow the seeds of the Civil War.

In 1858, South Carolina Congressman James H. Hammond gave an impassioned speech on the Senate floor. In it he extolled the superior virtues of the South's economy before issuing barely-veiled threats about hampering the business of the South: "You dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is king. Until lately the Bank of England was king, but she .. was utterly vanquished. The last power has been conquered. Who can doubt that has looked at recent events, that cotton is supreme?" (Hammond)

The Cotton Kingdom, as it came to be known, was indeed a force to be reckoned with: In 1793, Eli Whitney's cotton gin made the labor-intensive work of separating seed from cotton a thing of the past, making possible the growing of cotton on a previously unimaginable scale and helping to revitalize and "revolutionize American slavery" (Foner, 2009). In the next 37 years, the cotton yield had increased from 5 million to nearly 170 million lbs. The Kingdom supplied three fourths of the world's cotton supplies. They had an international market, lots of product, and, they felt, "the whole world will come to us to trade" (Hammond).

But the Kingdom was not invulnerable as its proponents liked to think. Their best customer, Great Britain, already had a surplus from the Southern states' bumper crops of the late 1850s and 1860, and quickly stocked up on more before the Civil War began. Too, cotton was a heavy feeder of vital nitrogen and nutrients, depleting the soil to eventual sterility. Though methods such as amendments or crop rotation would have slowed or prevented the damage, there was no point in wasting the labor to do so. As one observer, Frederick Law Olmsted, noted, "with negroes at fourteen hundred dollars a head, and fresh land in Texas at half a dollar an acre, nothing of this sort can be thought of” (Olmsted).

Sympathetic Northerners like Olmsted and William H. Seward came South to experience for themselves the realities of life in the slave states. Both ended by concluding that the Southern way of life was crumbling, decadent and destructive: the culture of slavery actually seemed to impair economic development. Seward, visiting Virginia for the first time, wrote of "an exhausted soil, old and decaying towns, wretchedly-neglected roads, and .. absence of enterprise and improvement … Such has been the effect of slavery" (Foner, 1995). Olmsted and Sewell wrote vivid accounts of these travels which stirred the passions of their Northern readers, swaying many to the abolitionist cause.

The abolitionist movement itself was nothing if not contentious. Even its supporters came from different camps. The evangelicals believed that slavery was an abomination which promoted sinful behavior. Other abolitionists, less bothered morally, shrank from the violent, partisan society they felt the Cotton Kingdom fomented. Still others who were antislavery weren't abolitionists at all; they just wanted to preserve the new West's new, fertile farmland for white men.

In the early 1830s, a coalition of religious faiths—including radical Quakers such as Lucretia Mott, Baptist leader William Lloyd Garrison, and revivalist Elizur Wright Jr.—came to believe that slavery was morally wrong. It was, they felt, the most decadent, corruptive and God-defying sin a man could commit, encompassing among other things, impiety (denying Negroes the word of God) and wantonness ( owners consorting with their female slaves). They advocated a campaign of gentle persuasion of slave-owners and their supporters, believing that they by doing so could effect an abrupt cessation of slavery: "immediate abolitionism."

Wendell Phillips, on the other hand, only joined the cause in 1837, after the slaying of abolitionist newspaperman Elijah Lovejoy at the hands of an angry mob which wanted to burn his printing press. Phillips feared that the pro-slavery movement had turned into not just into a platform for white superiority. It had become a vehicle for tyranny. Later he related that he suddenly became "conscious that I was in the presence of a power whose motto was victory over death" (Stewart). Tyranny—slavery, that was—bred violence, he felt. Over time he honed his impressive oratory skills for the cause, speaking extensively, keeping audiences enthralled for hours. He became widely renown from the mid-l840s onward as an eloquent, if radical, speaker. Still, Phillips was less bothered by slavery itself as appalled at what slavery had done to white society.

Plenty of other Northerners cared less about abolition than about preventing the spread of slavery. The "free soil" minded wanted the rich, fertile lands out West for themselves, not for the pleasure of cotton planters. Racial equality was, at best a non-issue, and at worst an impossibility. Even as late as 1848, Martin Van Buren, the presumptive Free Soil presidential nominee, went out of his way to assure voters that he was an opponent of abolition (Stewart). Everyone wanted to expand West. Far from wanting to eliminate slavery, most people at that time just wanted to settle the issue: will the states would go to white freemen or negro slaves?

Indeed, "it seems safe to say that had this question been eliminated or settled amicably, there would have been no secession and no Civil War" (Ramsdell). It was all about the dream of land, expansion: the lure and the nationalistic promise of Manifest Destiny.

What was Manifest Destiny? In a word, expansionism. America was a young country, bustling with progress, bursting with possibility. Enthusiasm—and resources—were boundless. The United States was poised to become a force to be reckoned with. As writer John L. O'Sullivan noted, when he coined the popularized the phrase Manifest Destiny, "We are the nation of human progress" (O'Sullivan). The duty of Americans was to fulfill this grand destiny (and, by the way, clear out those pesky Brits, Native Americans and Mexicans).

Migration became a noble cause, a metaphor for self-determination and transformation. A man could create a brand new life out West as a farmer or craftsman. The new trend of individualism and the concept of "self' were coming to define the American spirit, equating them with freedom. It was said at the time that "the Goddess of Liberty" is not "governed by geographical limits." (Foner, 2009). This appealed to the legions of (white) immigrants who were seeking the chance for a better, or new, life. The fever of expansionism had taken hold.

Part and parcel of the Manifest Destiny mindset was the tenet that Nature was an enemy to be conquered. Said one commentator, "if the land could be subdued, it became an asset and provide great opportunity" (Richmond). Andrew Jackson himself had vowed, upon being elected president in 1828, to expand the nation's borders: "What good man would prefer a country covered with forest and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive republic, studded with cities, towns and prosperous farms and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization and religion?"

The Cotton Kingdom was prevented from expanding its empire westward, partly due to the very conditions and institutions it had created, and in part by the efforts of abolitionists. The virgin lands out West would be farmed by legions of families heeding the call of Manifest Destiny. Some of them, in turn, would deplete the soil with nutrient-hungry crops—in what became the Dust Bowl—and move further West.

The causes of America's Civil War were many. Still, these conflicts played a crucial part, as in fact they still do in civil wars around the globe. They are epitomized by industrial farming practices and the fight for natural resources, agricultural servitude, and cries of Empire. Perhaps the tale of the South's Cotton Kingdom will act as a lesson for the future.

Works Cited

Foner, Eric. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Print.

Foner, Eric. Give Me Liberty! an American History. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009. Print.

Hammond, James Henry. "Speech of Hon. James H. Hammond, of South Carolina, On the Admission of Kansas, Under the Lecompton Constitution: Delivered in the Senate of the United States, March 4, 1858." Northern Visions of Race, Region & Reform. American Antiquarian Society, 2006. Web. Accessed 2 February, 2012.

Olmsted, Frederick Law and Arthur Meier Schlesinger. The Cotton Kingdom: a Traveller's

Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States. New York: Da Capo Press, 1996. Print.

O'Sullivan, John L. "The Great Nation of Futurity." The United States Democratic Review 6.23 (1839): 426-430. Print.

Ramsdell, Charles W. "The Natural Limits of Slavery Expansion." The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 33.2 (1929): 91-111. Print.

Richmond, Henry R. "From Sea to Shining Sea: Manifest Destiny and the National Land Use Dilemma." Pace Law Review 13.2 (1993): 327-350. Print.

Stewart, James Brewer. Abolitionist Politics and the Coming of the Civil War. Cambridge: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008. Print.

© Shaii Stone 2012