King Cotton

Biography

"King Cotton" is a slogan that summarized the strategy used before the American Civil War (of 1861–1865) by secessionists in the southern states to claim the feasibility of secession and to prove there was no need to fear a war against the federal government. 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. By 1861, many of the most powerful governments in the world 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. The emancipation of slaves in the West Indies and the general abolition of slavery was economically costly for Britain, and this was one of the reasons why southern secessionists believed that they had leverage to influence trading partners to provide diplomatic support and possibly intervention. The slogan, widely adopted among planters in 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, though four of these states would also issue declarations of secession by that June. To demonstrate the alleged power of King Cotton, in early 1861, Southern cotton planters spontaneously refused to ship out their cotton. In addition to holding back the export of cotton, in 1862, the Confederate Congress authorized the burning of cotton in circumstances where there was a danger of Union forces gaining territory. By the summer of 1861, the US Navy blockaded every major port in the South and shut down over 95% of all trade. The Brit

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