what factors account for the tremendous growth in cotton cultivation from 1790 to 1860?

Learning Objectives

By the cease of this section, you will be able to:

• Explicate the labor-intensive processes of cotton product
• Describe the importance of cotton to the Atlantic and American antebellum economic system

In the antebellum era—that is, in the years before the Civil State of war—American planters in the South continued to grow Chesapeake tobacco and Carolina rice as they had in the colonial era. Cotton wool, nonetheless, emerged equally the antebellum South's major commercial crop, eclipsing tobacco, rice, and sugar in economical importance. By 1860, the region was producing two-thirds of the world'due south cotton fiber. In 1793, Eli Whitney revolutionized the production of cotton when he invented the cotton gin, a device that separated the seeds from raw cotton. Suddenly, a process that was extraordinarily labor-intensive when done by hand could exist completed speedily and easily. American plantation owners, who were searching for a successful staple crop to compete on the world market, establish information technology in cotton.

Every bit a commodity, cotton had the advantage of being hands stored and transported. A demand for it already existed in the industrial textile mills in Great britain, and in time, a steady stream of slave-grown American cotton would also supply northern textile mills. Southern cotton wool, picked and processed by American slaves, helped fuel the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution in both the Usa and Bang-up Uk.

KING COTTON

Virtually no cotton was grown in the United States in 1787, the year the federal constitution was written. However, following the War of 1812, a huge increase in product resulted in the and so-called cotton boom, and by midcentury, cotton became the key cash crop (a crop grown to sell rather than for the farmer's sole use) of the southern economy and the most important American commodity. Past 1850, of the 3.2 1000000 slaves in the country's 15 slave states, 1.8 million were producing cotton wool; by 1860, slave labor was producing over ii billion pounds of cotton per year. Indeed, American cotton shortly made up two-thirds of the global supply, and production connected to soar. By the time of the Civil War, Due south Carolina politico James Hammond confidently proclaimed that the Due north could never threaten the South because "cotton fiber is king."

The crop grown in the Southward was a hybrid: Gossypium barbadense, known as Petit Gulf cotton, a mix of Mexican, Georgia, and Siamese strains. Petit Gulf cotton grew extremely well in different soils and climates. It dominated cotton product in the Mississippi River Valley—home of the new slave states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Missouri—likewise equally in other states like Texas. Whenever new slave states entered the Spousal relationship, white slaveholders sent armies of slaves to clear the land in order to grow and selection the lucrative crop. The phrase "to be sold down the river," used by Harriet Beecher Stowe in her 1852 novel Uncle Tom'south Cabin, refers to this forced migration from the upper southern states to the Deep South, lower on the Mississippi, to grow cotton.

The slaves who built this cotton kingdom with their labor started by clearing the land. Although the Jeffersonian vision of the settlement of new U.S. territories entailed white yeoman farmers single-handedly carving out pocket-size independent farms, the reality proved quite different. Entire onetime-growth forests and cypress swamps fell to the axe every bit slaves labored to strip the vegetation to make mode for cotton. With the country cleared, slaves readied the earth by plowing and planting. To aggressive white planters, the extent of new land available for cotton production seemed almost limitless, and many planters but leapfrogged from one area to the adjacent, abandoning their fields every 10 to xv years after the soil became exhausted. Theirs was a world of mobility and restlessness, a constant search for the next surface area to grow the valuable crop. Slaves composed the vanguard of this American expansion to the Westward.

Cotton planting took place in March and April, when slaves planted seeds in rows around iii to five feet apart. Over the next several months, from Apr to August, they advisedly tended the plants. Weeding the cotton rows took pregnant energy and time. In August, afterwards the cotton fiber plants had flowered and the flowers had begun to give way to cotton bolls (the seed-bearing capsule that contains the cotton fiber), all the plantation'southward slaves—men, women, and children—worked together to option the crop. On each day of cotton picking, slaves went to the fields with sacks, which they would fill as many times every bit they could. The try was laborious, and a white "driver" employed the lash to brand slaves piece of work as chop-chop every bit possible.

In the belatedly nineteenth century, J. N. Wilson captured this epitome of harvest time at a southern plantation. While the workers in this photograph are not slave laborers, the procedure of cotton fiber harvesting shown here had changed fiddling from antebellum times.

Cotton fiber planters projected the amount of cotton they could harvest based on the number of slaves nether their control. In general, planters expected a practiced "manus," or slave, to piece of work ten acres of land and choice two hundred pounds of cotton a day. An overseer or master measured each individual slave'south daily yield. Great pressure existed to meet the expected daily amount, and some masters whipped slaves who picked less than expected.

Cotton picking occurred as many as seven times a season as the plant grew and continued to produce bolls through the fall and early on winter. During the picking flavor, slaves worked from sunrise to sunset with a ten-minute suspension at lunch; many slaveholders tended to requite them niggling to eat, since spending on food would cutting into their profits. Other slaveholders knew that feeding slaves could increase productivity and therefore provided what they thought would help ensure a profitable ingather. The slaves' day didn't end after they picked the cotton fiber; once they had brought it to the gin business firm to be weighed, they then had to care for the animals and perform other chores. Indeed, slaves frequently maintained their own gardens and livestock, which they tended after working the cotton fields, in order to supplement their supply of food.

Sometimes the cotton was stale before it was ginned (put through the process of separating the seeds from the cotton fiber cobweb). The cotton gin allowed a slave to remove the seeds from fifty pounds of cotton a day, compared to one pound if washed past hand. After the seeds had been removed, the cotton fiber was pressed into bales. These bales, weighing nigh four hundred to 5 hundred pounds, were wrapped in burlap cloth and sent downwards the Mississippi River.

Visit the Net Archive to scout a 1937 WPA flick showing cotton wool bales being loaded onto a steamboat.

As the cotton industry boomed in the South, the Mississippi River quickly became the essential h2o highway in the U.s.. Steamboats, a crucial part of the transportation revolution thanks to their enormous freight-conveying capacity and ability to navigate shallow waterways, became a defining component of the cotton fiber kingdom. Steamboats also illustrated the class and social distinctions of the antebellum age. While the decks carried precious cargo, ornate rooms graced the interior. In these spaces, whites socialized in the ship'due south saloons and dining halls while black slaves served them.

As in this depiction of the saloon of the Mississippi River steamboat Princess, elegant and luxurious rooms oft occupied the interiors of antebellum steamships, whose decks were filled with cargo.

Investors poured huge sums into steamships. In 1817, just seventeen plied the waters of western rivers, merely by 1837, there were over seven hundred steamships in operation. Major new ports adult at St. Louis, Missouri; Memphis, Tennessee; and other locations. Past 1860, some thirty-five hundred vessels were steaming in and out of New Orleans, carrying an annual cargo made upward primarily of cotton fiber that amounted to $220 one thousand thousand worth of goods (approximately $6.5 billion in 2014 dollars).

New Orleans had been function of the French empire before the Usa purchased it, along with the rest of the Louisiana Territory, in 1803. In the first one-half of the nineteenth century, information technology rose in prominence and importance largely because of the cotton fiber boom, steam-powered river traffic, and its strategic position virtually the mouth of the Mississippi River. Steamboats moved downward the river transporting cotton grown on plantations along the river and throughout the South to the port at New Orleans. From there, the bulk of American cotton fiber went to Liverpool, England, where it was sold to British manufacturers who ran the cotton fiber mills in Manchester and elsewhere. This lucrative international trade brought new wealth and new residents to the city. By 1840, New Orleans alone had 12 percent of the nation's total cyberbanking capital, and visitors frequently commented on the not bad cultural diverseness of the metropolis. In 1835, Joseph Holt Ingraham wrote: "Truly does New-Orleans correspond every other city and nation upon earth. I know of none where is congregated so bully a variety of the human species." Slaves, cotton, and the steamship transformed the city from a relatively isolated corner of North America in the eighteenth century to a thriving metropolis that rivaled New York in importance.

This print of The Levee – New Orleans (1884) shows the humming port of New Orleans with bales of cotton fiber waiting to be shipped. The sheer volume of cotton wool indicates its economic importance throughout the century.

THE DOMESTIC SLAVE Trade

The South'south dependence on cotton fiber was matched by its dependence on slaves to harvest the cotton fiber. Despite the rhetoric of the Revolution that "all men are created equal," slavery non only endured in the American republic but formed the very foundation of the country's economic success. Cotton wool and slavery occupied a central—and intertwined—identify in the nineteenth-century economic system.

In 1807, the U.S. Congress abolished the strange slave trade, a ban that went into outcome on January one, 1808. After this date, importing slaves from Africa became illegal in the U.s.a.. While smuggling continued to occur, the end of the international slave trade meant that domestic slaves were in very loftier need. Fortunately for Americans whose wealth depended upon the exploitation of slave labor, a autumn in the toll of tobacco had caused landowners in the Upper S to reduce their product of this crop and employ more of their land to abound wheat, which was far more profitable. While tobacco was a labor-intensive crop that required many people to cultivate it, wheat was not. Former tobacco farmers in the older states of Virginia and Maryland establish themselves with "surplus" slaves whom they were obligated to feed, clothe, and shelter. Some slaveholders responded to this situation past freeing slaves; far more decided to sell their backlog bondsmen. Virginia and Maryland therefore took the pb in the domestic slave trade, the trading of slaves inside the borders of the United States.

The domestic slave trade offered many economic opportunities for white men. Those who sold their slaves could realize great profits, equally could the slave brokers who served as middlemen betwixt sellers and buyers. Other white men could benefit from the trade as owners of warehouses and pens in which slaves were held, or as suppliers of habiliment and nutrient for slaves on the move. Between 1790 and 1859, slaveholders in Virginia sold more than half a million slaves. In the early part of this period, many of these slaves were sold to people living in Kentucky, Tennessee, and North and South Carolina. By the 1820s, however, people in Kentucky and the Carolinas had begun to sell many of their slaves too. Maryland slave dealers sold at least 185,000 slaves. Kentucky slaveholders sold some seventy-1 m individuals. Most of the slave traders carried these slaves farther s to Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. New Orleans, the hub of commerce, boasted the largest slave market in the United States and grew to become the nation'southward fourth-largest city as a result. Natchez, Mississippi, had the second-largest market. In Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, and elsewhere in the Southward, slave auctions happened every day.

All told, the motility of slaves in the South fabricated up one of the largest forced internal migrations in the United States. In each of the decades between 1820 and 1860, about 200,000 people were sold and relocated. The 1800 census recorded over one meg African Americans, of which nearly 900,000 were slaves. By 1860, the total number of African Americans increased to iv.four one thousand thousand, and of that number, 3.95 million were held in chains. For many slaves, the domestic slave trade incited the terror of being sold abroad from family and friends.

Solomon Northup Remembers the New Orleans Slave Market place

Solomon Northup was a free black man living in Saratoga, New York, when he was kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1841. He later escaped and wrote a book about his experiences: Twelve Years a Slave. Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington Metropolis in 1841 and Rescued in 1853 (the basis of a 2013 University Award–winning film). This excerpt derives from Northup's description of being sold in New Orleans, along with boyfriend slave Eliza and her children Randall and Emily.

One quondam gentleman, who said he wanted a coachman, appeared to take a fancy to me. . . .

The same human being also purchased Randall. The little beau was made to jump, and come across the floor, and perform many other feats, exhibiting his activity and status. All the time the trade was going on, Eliza was crying aloud, and wringing her hands. She besought the human being not to buy him, unless he also bought her self and Emily. . . . Freeman turned round to her, savagely, with his whip in his uplifted hand, ordering her to finish her noise, or he would flog her. He would not accept such work—such snivelling; and unless she ceased that minute, he would take her to the 1000 and give her a hundred lashes. . . . Eliza shrunk before him, and tried to wipe away her tears, simply it was all in vain. She wanted to be with her children, she said, the footling fourth dimension she had to live. All the frowns and threats of Freeman, could non wholly silence the afflicted female parent.

What does Northup's narrative tell you near the experience of being a slave? How does he narrate Freeman, the slave trader? How does he narrate Eliza?

THE SOUTH IN THE AMERICAN AND Earth MARKETS

The offset one-half of the nineteenth century saw a market revolution in the United states of america, i in which industrialization brought changes to both the product and the consumption of goods. Some southerners of the time believed that their region's reliance on a unmarried cash crop and its use of slaves to produce it gave the Due south economic independence and made it immune from the effects of these changes, but this was far from the truth. Indeed, the production of cotton brought the S more firmly into the larger American and Atlantic markets. Northern mills depended on the S for supplies of raw cotton that was then converted into textiles. But this domestic cotton market paled in comparison to the Atlantic market. Near 75 percent of the cotton fiber produced in the United States was eventually exported abroad. Exporting at such loftier volumes made the U.s.a. the undisputed world leader in cotton product. Between the years 1820 and 1860, approximately 80 percent of the global cotton supply was produced in the United States. Nearly all the exported cotton was shipped to Great Britain, fueling its burgeoning material industry and making the powerful British Empire increasingly dependent on American cotton and southern slavery.

The power of cotton wool on the world market may have brought wealth to the S, just information technology as well increased its economical dependence on other countries and other parts of the United States. Much of the corn and pork that slaves consumed came from farms in the W. Some of the inexpensive clothing, called "slops," and shoes worn by slaves were manufactured in the North. The Northward also supplied the furnishings found in the homes of both wealthy planters and members of the middle grade. Many of the trappings of domestic life, such as carpets, lamps, dinnerware, upholstered furniture, books, and musical instruments—all the accoutrements of comfortable living for southern whites—were made in either the N or Europe. Southern planters besides borrowed coin from banks in northern cities, and in the southern summers, took advantage of the developments in transportation to travel to resorts at Saratoga, New York; Litchfield, Connecticut; and Newport, Rhode Island.

Section Summary

In the years before the Civil State of war, the South produced the bulk of the globe's supply of cotton fiber. The Mississippi River Valley slave states became the epicenter of cotton product, an area of frantic economic activeness where the landscape inverse dramatically as state was transformed from pinewoods and swamps into cotton fields. Cotton wool'due south profitability relied on the institution of slavery, which generated the production that fueled cotton mill profits in the Northward. When the international slave trade was outlawed in 1808, the domestic slave trade exploded, providing economic opportunities for whites involved in many aspects of the trade and increasing the possibility of slaves' dislocation and separation from kin and friends. Although the larger American and Atlantic markets relied on southern cotton in this era, the South depended on these other markets for food, manufactured goods, and loans. Thus, the market place revolution transformed the Due south just equally it had other regions.

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Review Question

1. Why did some southerners believe their region was immune to the effects of the market revolution? Why was this thinking misguided?

Answer to Review Question

1. Some southerners believed that their region's monopoly over the lucrative cotton crop—on which both the larger American and Atlantic markets depended—and their possession of a slave labor force immune the South to remain contained from the market revolution. Still, the very cotton that provided the S with such economical authority too increased its reliance on the larger U.Due south. and globe markets, which supplied—among other things—the food and clothes slaves needed, the furniture and other manufactured goods that defined the southern standard of comfortable living, and the banks from which southerners borrowed needed funds.

Glossary

antebelluma term pregnant "before the war" and used to describe the decades before the American Civil War began in 1861

cash ingathera ingather grown to be sold for profit instead of consumption by the farmer'southward family

cotton blastthe upswing in American cotton production during the nineteenth century

cotton gina device, patented past Eli Whitney in 1794, that separated the seeds from raw cotton apace and easily

domestic slave tradethe trading of slaves within the borders of the United States

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Source: https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-ushistory1os2xmaster/chapter/the-economics-of-cotton/

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