The Tragedy of King Cotton: The Story of America Series [Ep. 25]

And we return to our American Stories. Up next, another installment of our series, ‘About Us, The Story of America Series,’ with Hillsdale College professor and author of ‘Land of Hope,’ Bill McLay. The North and South have always been different. Bill tells the story of how that divide, how those differences came to be. Let’s get into the story. Take it away, Bill.

The South is different. We all know that. But at what point in American history did the South become the South? Well, there are definitely certain factors that we have to consider. The most important of these, probably, is its climate. The Southern climate is warm, humid, subtropical in places, and because of the climate, the South has a nearly year-round growing season, a perfect place for the cultivation of certain kinds of crops, rice, sugar, tobacco, and one crop more than any other crop, Cotton, drove the economy of the South. ‘King Cotton,’ as it was known, accounted for two-thirds of all American exports. All American exports—two-thirds! The South was extremely wealthy. It was the wealthiest region in the country, but that wealth was not evenly distributed. It was highly concentrated in those planters for whose benefit the wealth was generated, but that wealth was entirely dependent on cotton, on cotton being king, as James Henry Hammond said, and on the price of cotton at any given moment. This crop, Cotton, had some unique attitudes. You needed massive tracts of land, a massive labor force, and a cheap labor force. Because a massive labor force couldn’t be too expensive, you expected to make money. The South’s plantation system and the labor system of slavery channel slavery. These things were uniquely equipped to get the job done and would ultimately drive the uniqueness and distinctiveness of Southern life. It should be noted, too, that the South was more insular than its northern counterpart, more withdrawn, more self-contained, and much less densely populated, as befits its agricultural character. This was something that Southerners adopted as part of their identity: the rural, non-urban character.
Of Southern life.
The South was also acutely aware that the massive immigration flows from Germany and Ireland in the 1840s were almost all occurring in the North, so the South was gradually going to find less and less representation, at least in the lower House of Congress—the House of Representatives—because its population wasn’t increasing, it’s the same rate as the rest of the country. And so the South becomes distinctive. Tragically, as ‘King Cotton’ continued to dominate the region’s economic life, as the fabulous wealth continued to grow, as the power of those sections of the country grew, the reliance on slavery in the South increased and increased, and along with it came a defensiveness. Slavery went from being something that was an adventitious convenience to something that was necessary, something not merely a necessary evil, but a positive good. Southerners began to defend slavery, or, is the Southerners like to call it, their ‘peculiar institution.’ The word ‘peculiar,’ it maybe has a connotation of weird. That isn’t what they meant by it. They meant it is something that is particular to us. But it was peculiar in a nation that was dedicated to the idea that all men are created equal. What’s more remarkable, perhaps, is this deepening resolved to defend the peculiar institution happened despite the fact that even at its height, only a small friend of whites were owners of slaves, and most owned very small numbers of slaves. Those farmers, they couldn’t afford the rich, low-lying fields ideal for mass-scale cotton farming, and they were not capable of funding such operations. In short, most of the white farmers were subsistence farmers. They grew enough to live from day to day, to survive, maybe have a small surplus for market. And yet somehow the large plantation owners exercised tremendous influence in the South. They set the tone for the South, and white sharecropping families hoped that they too might grow or scale their farms and yes, own slaves themselves. It was a semi-feudal type of society, in the end, dominated by a small aristocratic planter class, and with all that such a society entails, including a social order that prevails in such societies. This is an order in which the landholders are at the top. They passed the property on to subsequent generations in their family.
It’s very difficult.
For new individuals to break into that sacred circle or to rise outside of their standing. It was a vision that really stemmed from the idea of ‘the great chain of being,’ the notion that there was a linkage between all of the different orders and statuses and classes of society, that they were bound together as one in a hierarchy, in an order that was not one of equality, but was one of mutual dependence, in which an aristocratic class at the top lorded it over those beneath it and gained most of the wealth and almost all of the power. This vision of society, this notion of ‘the great chain of being,’ was in direct contradiction to the foundational ideals of the American Republic, the view that all men are created equal under God. They have the capacity to govern themselves. This is a kind of society that didn’t comport well with the notion of monarchy, with the notion of an aristocratically dominant class. Instead, it was the society that looked to the free individual and free enterprise, to the notion that no one was condemned to live out their lives in the condition of their birth, to the things their father did, live on the land their father toiled on. But that, it said, all Americans had the ability to improve their lives and rise in the world and pass on to their families a level of wealth and stability that they had not been able to enjoy themselves as young people. There’s nothing more American than that, and the Southern vision was in conflict with that. And when the culture of society is different, when it diverges from the culture of the whole, that makes political unity and political compromise very, very difficult, nearly impossible. And yet Southerners clung to this institution. They fought a war to protect it, and, in the end, brought the South into what would turn out to be its ruin. The sheer hubris and arrogance of the planner class, and the planner class its own world blindness when it came to slavery, the dehumanizing effects of slavery would set this out on a moral coalition course with the founding ideals of America itself. Mark Twain used to half-jokingly and half-seriously say that the South went to stray by becoming addicted to the feudal tales of Sir Walter Scott. ‘Ivanhoe’ was like a Bible. So the others had brought into a kind of myth, a myth of what feudal life was like, and that they could inhabit that same sort of universe imaginatively but also in reality. A great, great tragedy.

Indeed, and you’ve been listening to Professor Bill McLay tell the story, the tragedy of the South, and how the Civil War, well, in the end, was almost inevitable. When we come back, more of the story, the tragedy of the South, here on our American Stories. And we returned to our American Stories and the story of the tragedy of the South and the tragedy of slavery. When we last left off, Doctor Bill McLay told us about how the South had fashioned itself in the style of a feudal society and became beholden to the price of cotton rather than the country’s founding principles. Mark Twain would say that the South went to stray when they took the tales of ‘Ivanhoe’ to be gospel.
Let’s return to the story now.
Whether this was a fanciful statement on Twain’s part or not, it’s hard to say, but he put his finger on something important: that the South was diverging culturally from the North. The tragic reality was that slavery was deeply woven to the society and cultural life of the South, so rooted, so firmly planted, socially, culturally, psychologically, in addition to economically so planted, it was hard to see any point that slavery could plausibly be abolished. It had come to define the region in ways that even Southerners themselves could never have predicted. And isn’t that the nature of all tragedy? It’s also important here to talk about slavery in specific details. It’s a life of tragedy and despair, the life of the slave. Even an institution like marriage itself was always in peril because a slave owner could sell a husband and wife down the river, so to speak, to another slaveholder anytime it suited his bank account, and thus destroy a family in a single, unaccountable transaction.
Terrifying.
It’s a hard, cruel, cold fact that slavery has been ubiquitous throughout human history. Those societies that have forbidden it are very few and far between in the vast sweep of the history of the world. It also, slavery, had been practiced in all of the colonies during the Colonial Period, all of the colonies, not just South Carolina and Virginia. It’s surprising how many of the founders, even some of those from the North, like Benjamin Franklin, had slaves. It was in the Deep South, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, where you’d find the worst practices, the most strict, the most disciplinary practices. Although you also found, and this is less paradoxical than they seemed, the most rich expressions of an African American cultural sensibility. Because these were like slave cities, they could share the cultural vestiges of their African past, and many of these slaves were attracted eventually to an African Christian sort of melding. The attraction to Christianity was very powerful. They saw, without having to be coaxed into it, that the stories of the Bible spoke to them. They could see their condition and their hopes, and their miseries and their longings in the stories. For example, the Israelites enslaved in Egypt and making their Exodus to the Promised Land. That was a metaphor. They too yearned for freedom. They yearned for a Promised Land. In this case, the Promised Land would be Canada, because even if they made it to the North, there was a Fugitive Slave Law. But they also saw their condition, their hopes, in the person of Jesus. Jesus was, in a worldly way, powerless, humble, bore the pains, bore the stripes of whipping. He bore these things and yet triumphed over them. So, the example of Christ gave the slaves great hope, and therefore they bounded to their hearts. What Christianity inspired was what it had inspired for centuries before, the notion that the soul can be free even when the body is bound. They needed this because the forces against them were monumental. It was a beacon of hope to them, out of which sprang some of the most memorable songs in our tradition, what we call spirituals, sorrow songs, which gives you a sense of what they were like.
There were cries of the.
Heart, moans of aching, wounded hearts. There are also songs of great joy, of exuberance, of ecstatic happiness, songs about the possibility of deliverance from their woe, deliverance from these lives of bondage, a song like ‘Go Down Moses.’ Harriet Tubman would use ‘Go Down Moses’ as a signal clarion called the slaves who were thinking about fleeing their bondage. It was like a code. This is not in any way to diminish the horror and suffering that the slaves endured in their life of enslavement. It’s to remind the world of the heroism and resilience the enslaved peoples showed, their ability, partly with the help of their religion, to guard their inner lives and their hearts and souls, even under what were deplorable conditions and what to most people would seem sheer hopelessness, a condition that they had no prospect of overcoming. And there was some resistance, too, in more practical ways by slaves, but as for escape, the chances were next to nil, very few, very far between, and those who didn’t run that risk risk losing their lives. It, of course, didn’t stop them from trying. The sheer courage and ingenuity of the Underground Railroad that would save the lives of many former slaves, and there were few slave rebellions; and one, Nat Turner’s Rebellion, in Virginia in 1831, was the worst and bloodiest in American history and would have grave consequences. Turner was a black overseer, which is a somewhat more elevated rank in the plantation, and a religious zealot who was driven by prophetic visions. Turner was the leader who led what he thought was in a mission ordained by God. Along with seventy armed slaves and pre blacks, he attempted to kill as many white slave-owning neighbors of his as his small army could kill, starting with Turner’s master and wife. Within a day, the crew had murdered and butchered some sixty white people, only to be subdued by a white militia, and the state would go on to execute fifty-six of Turner’s men and eventually Turner himself. The Nat Turner Rebellion changed the climate profoundly in this South, not the physical climate, the cultural climate. A divide had been crossed. This rebellion happened at a time when the abolition movement in the North was just beginning to gather steam. William Lloyd Garrison’s publication, ‘The Liberator,’ had been published in 1831. It featured an appeal to white Christians to put an end to slavery immediately and once and for all. It resonated in the North, but also resonated in the South, where Christianity was the dominant religion of the day, too, and the residence was a fearful one in the Southern precincts.

And you’ve been listening to Professor Bill McLay, who teaches history at Hillsdale College. All of our history stories here and our American Stories are brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale College. And we were learning here that slavery came to define the South in ways even Southerners themselves could not predict. They were as much bound by slavery as the slaves themselves. When we come back, more of the story of the South: the tragedy of the South, the tragedy of slavery, the original sin of our country. Here on our American Stories. And we returned to our American Stories and the final portion of our story on ‘The Tragedy of the South’ with Professor Bill McLay as part of our ‘Story of America’ series. This is the twenty-fifth installment. When we last left off, Bill was telling us about what exactly a life of slavery was like and about a failed rebellion led by Nat Turner that would have drastic effects for years to come.
Let’s return to the story.
In, of all places, of Virginia, General Assembly. In the 1831–32 session, there were serious debates about the future of the South’s ‘peculiar institution.’ It may have been the South’s only real open debate about slavery and its future. Virginia was in many ways the capital state of the South and would go on to be the capital of the Confederacy, and at the time of secession, a lot hinged on whether or not Virginia would succeed, so Virginia has a leadership role. At this time, there was a debate in the General Assembly about slavery. There were some who actually called for straight-up abolition and emancipation. Shockingly, no one argued for slavery as a permanent, enduring institution with no end in sight. Perpetual slavery; al saw slavery at some point ending, and there was no defense to the institution on moral grounds, either. Indeed, a proposition called ‘Slavery an Evil.’ After much debate, a plan for gradual emancipation was voted down by account of seventy-three to fifty-eight, which is really surprisingly close when you think about it—a plan for ending the institution, seventy-three to fifty-eight—but it was a negative vote in terms of abolition, and that vote would, in the end, doom any prospect of slavery coming to any kind of peaceable or orderly end. That same Assembly would go on to make it illegal to educate slaves or to hold any kind of religious services without a white man presence. Other Southern states followed suit. The ‘peculiar institution’ just plunged forward, more closed than ever and just as brutal as a. Some attributed the hardening of the laws and the growing restrictions and control on slaves to the Nat Turner Rebellion. That revolt had forever discredited the myth that there was a harmony between slaves and their masters, a myth that only the slave owners themselves could conjure and believe in, and needed to believe in. Indeed, if anything, the rise of an unapologetically pro-slavery narrative was the response at this time, not a weakening of commitment to slavery, but an intensifying of that commitment. Some even went so far as to call the slave society and improvement over what they called the ‘wage slavery’ of the North, places where rapacious and greedy capitalists exploited their workers and treated them even worse than any plantation owner could imagine. George Fitzhugh, an influential pro-slavery writer from Virginia, was a fierce proponent of this view. Here’s just a few of his words from a tract he called ‘Sociology for the South, or The Failure of Free Society.’ The chief and far most important inquiry is: how does slavery affect the condition of the slave? One of the wildest sects of communists in France proposes not only to hold all property in common, but to divide the not according to each man’s input in labor, but according to each man’s wants. Now, this is precisely the system of domestic slavery. With us. We provide for each slave in old age and in infancy, in sickness and in health, not according to his labor, but according to his wants. The master’s wants are costlier and more refined, and he therefore gets a larger share of the profits. A Southern farm