Cotton and Race in the Making of America: The Human Costs of Economic Power » (New Edition)

Since the earliest days of colonial America, the relationship between cotton and the African-American experience has been central to the history of the republic. America's most serious social tragedy, slavery and its legacy, spread only where cotton could be grown. Both before and after the Civil War, blacks were assigned to the cotton fields while a pervasive racial animosity and fear of a black migratory invasion caused white Northerners to contain blacks in the South.

Publishers Weekly

Two themes, one explicit, one implicit, compete in this exploration of the link between the development of American capitalism and the devastation of the African-American community. The price of cotton as the “determinant of America's destiny, influencing and even overcoming individual will and ethical behavior” is the fully explicit one. In treating it, Dattel (The Sun Never Rose), formerly a managing director at Salomon Brothers and Morgan Stanley, offers an economic history of cotton. The book's chronological path absorbs the creation of the Confederacy, the waging of the Civil War, Reconstruction, the rise of the Klan, the development of sharecropping, the displacement of black labor by machine and the falling price of cotton. The secondary and competing theme is Northern complicity in the slave trade, the cotton economy, segregation, racism and the development of the “black underclass in the North and South, with its destructive behavioral characteristics.” The economic slant leads to interesting tables and statistics concerning fluctuations in the price of cotton, but for serious readers, the usefulness of Dattel's work is diminished by his heavy reliance on secondary sources and casual documentation. (Oct.)

Contents

Preface....................ix
Acknowledgments....................xiii
1 The Silent Issue at the Constitutional Convention....................5
2 Birth of an Obsession....................27
3 Land Expansion and White Migration to the Old Southwest....................39
4 The Movement of Slaves to the Cotton States....................50
5 The Business of Cotton....................61
6 The Roots of War....................85
7 Being Free and Black in the North....................107
8 The Colonial North....................111
9 Race Moves West....................134
10 Tocqueville on Slavery, Race, and Money in America....................154
11 Cultivating a Crop, Cultivating a Strategy....................163
12 Great Britain and the Civil War....................177
13 Cotton and Confederate Finance....................184
14 Procuring Arms....................193
15 Cotton Trading in the United States....................201
16 Cotton and the Freedmen....................209
17 New Era, Old Problems....................221
18 Ruling the Freedmen in the Cotton Fields....................243
19 Reconstruction Meets Reality....................253
20 The Black Hand on the Cotton Boll....................266
21 From Cotton Field to Urban Ghetto: The Chicago Experience....................283
22 King Cotton Expands....................293
23 The Controlling Laws of Cotton Finance....................302
24 The Delta Plantation: Labor and Land....................313
25 The Planter Experience in the Twentieth Century....................348
26 TheLong-Awaited Mechanical Cotton Picker....................352
27 The Abdication of King Cotton....................358
Appendix....................367
Notes....................373
Index....................399