Sunday, June 25, 2006
The historical significance of cotton
While I travel through China I am reading Paul Johnson's wonderful history of the United States, A History of the American People. In the middle of it there is a short discussion of the significance of cotton and its relationship to the American slavery system that captured the economic dynamic better than any other I had ever read. Indeed, I will confess that while I knew that the cotton gin reinvigorated slavery in the American South, I never really understood why until now.
Religion would have swept away slavery in America without difficulty early in the 19th century but for one thing: cotton. It was this little, two-syllable word which turned American slave-holding into a mighty political force and so made the Civil War inevitable. And cotton, in terms of humanity and its needs, was an unmitigated good. Thus do the workings of mysterious providence balance good and evil. Until the end of the 18th century, the human race had always been unsuitably clothed in garments which were difficult to wash and therefore filthy. Cotton offered an escape from this misery, worn next to the skin in cold countries, as a complete garment in hot zones. The trouble with cotton was its expense. Until the industrialization of the cotton industry, to produce a pound of cotton thread took twelve to fourteen man-days, as against six for silk, two to five for linen, and one to two for wool. With fine cotton muslin, the most sought after, the value-added multiple from raw material to finished product was as high as 900. This acted as a spur to mechanical invention. The arrival of the Arkwright spinning-machine and the Hargreaves jenny in the England of the 1770s meant that, whereas in 1765 half a million pound of cotton had been spun in England, all of it by hand, by 1784 the total was 12 million, all by machine. Next year the big Boulton & Watt steam engines were introduced to power the cotton-spinning machines. This was the Big Bang of the first Industrial Revolution. By 1812 the cost of cotton yard had fallen by 90 percent. Then came a second wave of mechanical innovation. By the early 1860s the price of cotton cloth, in terms of gold bullion, was less than 1 percent of what it had been in 1784, when the industry was already mechanized. There is no previous instance in world history of the price of a produce in potentially universal demand coming down so fast. As a result, hundreds of millions of people, all over the world, were able to dress comfortably and cleanly at last.
But there was a price to be paid, and the black slaves paid it. The new British cotton industry was ravenous for raw cotton. As the demand grew, the American South first began to grow cotton for export in the 1780s. The first American cotton bale arrived in Liverpool in 1784. Then, abruptly, at the turn of the century, American exports were transformed by the widespread introduction of the cottin gin. This was the invention of Eli Whitney (1765-1825). HIs was a case, common at this time, of natural mechanical genius. He came from a poor farm in Massachusetts and discovered his talent by working on primitive agricultural machinery. Then he worked his way through Yale as an engineer. In 1793, while on holiday at Mulberry Grove, Savannah, the plantation of Mrs. Nathaniel Green, he became fascinated by the supposedly intractible problem of separating the cotton lint from the seeds -- the factor which made raw cotton costly to process. Watching a cat claw a chicken and end up with clawfuls of mere feathers, he produced a solid wooden cylinder with headless nails and a grid to keep out the seeds, while the lint was pulled through by spikes, a revolving brush cleaning them. The supreme virtue of this simple but brilliant idea was that the machine was so cheap to make and easy to operate. A slave on a plantation, using a gin, could produce 50 pounds of cotton a day instead of one. Whitney patented his invention in 1794 but it was instantly pirated and brought him in eventually no more than $100,000 -- not much for one of history's greatest gadgets. But by 1800-10 his gins had made the United States the chief supplier of cotton to the British manufacturing industry's rapidly rising demand. In 1810 Britain was consuming 79 million pounds of raw cotton, of which 48 percent came from the American South. Twenty years later, imports were 248 million, 70 percent coming from the South. By 1860 the total was over 1,000 million pounds, 92 percent from Southern plantations. During the same period, the cost (in Liverpool landing prices) fell from 45 cents a pound to as low as 28 cents.
This soaring market vastly increased the "requirement" for slaves in the South, so by 1860 they represented a staggering proportion of the invested capital in the southern states.
That is why [slavery] proved so difficult to eradicate. The value of the slaves themselves formed up to 35 perecent of the entire capital of the South. By mid-century their value was over $2 billion in gold; that was one reason compensation was ruled out -- it would have amounted to at least ten times the entire federal budget.
Whitney's contributions, of course, went way beyond the cotton gin. His "American system" of production, which pioneered the use of interchangeable identical parts, transformed the industrial economy of the American North. As Johnson observes,
So if Whitney's cotton gin enabled the slave-system to survive and thrive, his 'American System' also gave the North the industrial muscle to crush the defenders of slavery in due course.
We will now returned to regular blogging.
3 Comments:
By 
Cardinalpark, at
Sun Jun 25, 06:07:00 PM:
Now if only we had Whitney to find a good alternative to oil...
By 
, at
Mon Jun 26, 11:43:00 AM:
And here all this time I thought the cotton gin, like the fuzzy navel, was some kind of weird-sounding drink.
By , at
Mon Jun 26, 04:27:00 PM:
I can easily understand that the cotton gin increased the productivity of the entire cotton value chain by sharply reducing the cost of removing seed.
That clearly would increase demand for cotton-related labor, all along the value chain.
That labor did not need to be slave labor, however. It could have been free. After all, severely impoverished Irishmen were arriving in northern ports in the 1840s and, according to Thomas Sowell et al., had lower standards of living than even Southern slaves.
Why would the cotton industry have been any more profitable with slave labor than with free/white labor? What social or legal obstacles obstacles could have prevented employment of memebers of the northern urban working class?
For Paul Johnson and Robert Fogel to be correct, there needs to be some additional explanation as to why it was slave labor and not free labor that made the difference in the ante-bellum South.
