The Cotton Bourgeoisie

Neither historical writing nor popular memory has been kind to the Southern planter elite, and rightfully so: slave-owning white supremacists are not a sympathetic breed. Arch-reactionaries they may be, but too many postbellum representations of this class have teleologically highlighted the supposedly parochial backwardness and stupidity of these historical losers. But it would be a gross error to think this was always the case, as they were one of the most powerful segments of antebellum American society, and the salesmen (“producers” was their euphemism of choice) of the nineteenth century’s most prized raw material, cotton, the fuel of the industrial revolution. Brian Schoen’s The Fragile Fabric of Union demonstrates the centrality of cotton to the union and disunion of the United States, and takes seriously the modern, classically liberal economic vision of the Southern plantation bourgeoisie.

Persuasively downplaying the accepted wisdom of irrational romanticism as the chief factor in Southern politics, Schoen argues that the Southern planter class was drawn into the union with the North, and later out of it, due to their political-economic calculations based on the cotton trade. Initially, federal union made sense due to the North’s ability to manufacture the relatively meager cotton production of the southern states. By the 1820s, regional interests strongly diverged, as revealed in twelve years of tariff debates, which –unlike other historians – Schoen views as central to the development and articulation of sectionalism. Contending and incompatible visions of the national economy emerged in these debates: Northern manufacturers sought a protective tariff that Southern cotton planters enthusiastically opposed by invoking the “free trade” theories of Adam Smith. These rival economic interests and ideologies continued to clash into the 1850s, when secession seemed the logical response to a federal government increasingly hostile to planters’ material interests. In perhaps the key innovation of the book, Schoen emphasizes the impact of favorable conditions in the international cotton market, in which the US “Cotton South” was the vital source of raw materials for the dominant British textile manufacturers. This conception of their “global” importance greatly abetted the decision to secede. So great was their confidence that a Confederate politician remarked that they possessed a “firm and universal conviction that Great Britain, France and Russia will acknowledge us at once in the family of nations” (264). King Cotton was to deliver prosperity, protection, and recognition to the Confederate States of America, and for a time this was a realistic idea. In the end, the planter class is shown to be rational actors integrated in the global capitalist market – a far cry from the stereotype of backwater agrarian patriarchs.

Schoen’s book is strong due to its powerful foregrounding of the role of cotton in the history of the United States. An alternate history of the US without cotton would likely be unrecognizable to us. However, Schoen’s work is less convincing in its pretention to reveal the “Global Origins of the Civil War,” as promised in the subtitle. The British manufacturing interests and the American commercial do not make up the globe; Schoen only seriously investigates the role of Anglo-American trade and diplomacy in the making of the civil war. Passing references are made to Southern overtures to the French, however these are brief and Schoen utilizes no French sources. Spanish sources are also ignored despite the significance he ascribes to the Mexican War in exacerbating sectional conflict. Furthermore, Schoen’s emphasis on diplomatic sources, particularly the favorable attitudes of British diplomats toward Southern secession, limits this study’s international outlook to Anglo-American diplomatic relations. This falls somewhat short of Thomas Bender’s call for transnational historical work that “understand[s] every dimension of American life as entangled in other histories. Other histories are implicated in American history, and the United States is implicated in other histories” (6). While the importance of the British export market cannot be understated in Schoen’s argument, little substantial knowledge of domestic British developments is betrayed in the text.

Overall, Schoen’s work is highly recommended due to its clear-sighted focus on the power of material interests to shape history, as well as its ability to balance structural forces with individual human agency.