Transcript Althea and Julia Dx

Emancipation and Empire
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF THE
WORLDWIDE WEB OF COTTON
PRODUCTION IN THE AGE OF THE
AMERICAN CIVIL WAR
America’s Civil War was fought over as number of different issues, including
individual states’ rights, the power of the federal government, and most
importantly: slavery. At the close of the war, the Union emerged victorious and the
storied institution of slavery fell. As a result of slavery’s demise in the United States,
the worldwide cotton industry lost one of its major pillars and sources of labor.
There was immediately a massive scramble that ensued to try to find new land and
new laborers to grow the supply of cotton that the world’s population needed.
Throughout the rest of the nineteenth century, new pillars of the cotton industry
had to be established and solidified over time.
A major change that took place in the cotton industry was its newfound desire
to reach out to different countries, eagerly looking for new cultivators to
replace the warring Americans. Before war broke out in 1861, most of the
global supply of cotton was produced by slaves in the United States. Then, it
was sent to British industrial towns to be woven into cloth and spun into
thread. However, a drastic change took place in the years after the Civil War.
Now, more of the globe was involved in the empire of cotton, with countries
like Egypt, India, Brazil, and Russia, beginning to form their own systems of
cotton production. The geographic spread of cotton production throughout
the world was the first important pillar of cotton's postwar empire.
The cotton empire had to utilize completely new sources of labor to produce
the necessary supply of cotton for the world. Even though slavery was no
longer involved in the cotton industry, a new, incredibly similar social
structure came to replace it. The new systems that were created relied heavily
on cultivators, who worked for wages on rented land. They were often deeply
immersed in debt, living in poverty, and politically marginalized. Local
moneylenders ran their own operations with many of these cultivators, taking
advantage of their low social standing and limited knowledge of business. The
new system pushed more people in agriculture and the effects were felt in
each of the countries that now supplied cotton.
Another way that the cotton industry had changed was through more
government interference within it. Despite the lack of attention given to it in
America, cotton production expanded after 1865. Poverty, overproduction, and
resulting low prices contributed to the South's poor economy. The
government’s solution to this problem was to interfere with the new system
and market. President Franklin Roosevelt created the Agricultural Adjustment
Administration, which drafted incentives for farmers who decreased
production of cotton, in hopes of raising its value. Landholders decreased their
acreage by up to 50%, but it was no help to the struggling economy.
Sharecroppers and tenants, the most impoverished in the new cotton
production system, were still living in poor conditions. The system of share
cropping grew to be a success, but the sharecroppers themselves were in a
situation akin to slavery. Largely due to the government's actions, the United
States became even more of a respected and successful cotton supplier, and
continues to be successful today.
Even though cotton became a force behind the United States’ economic
growth after the Civil War, the industry was one of the most important
in the world before the war too. The country had always been a large
consumer of manufactured British cotton, but there was a massive
increase in cotton production during the 1790s. The massive increase in
the production of cotton in the country was a accumulation of the
increasing British demand for raw cotton and the invention of the cotton
gin. Soon, the United States accounted for 77 percent of Britain’s cotton,
90 percent of France’s cotton, and 92 percent of Russia’s cotton.
One of the most important pieces of the United States’ success in the
cotton industry was the usage of slavery as its main source of labor.
Nearly four million slaves were involved in the cultivation of raw cotton
in the country’s fields and, due to the industry’s contribution to the
world’s economy, they were the most important asset in global cotton
production. Cotton provided huge profits to the owners of large
plantations, making them some of the wealthiest men in the country
prior to the Civil War and cementing their stance as firm supporters of
slavery.
The antebellum era of the cotton industry came to a screeching halt
when the South seceded from the United States in 1860. The South was
completely dependent on its revenue from cotton production, just as
cotton production was completely dependent on slavery. The increase in
potential threats to slavery, such as the rising number of free states in
the country, the election of Abraham Lincoln, and the impending shift
of power in Washington, resulted in the South’s decision to leave the
Union. Then, in 1861, the attack on Fort Sumter signaled the beginning
of the war between the Union and the Confederacy that would become
the bloodiest in American history.
While war was waged within the United States, other countries had to
adjust to a new cotton shortage, which was created by the temporary
departure of the biggest cotton supplier in the world. It caused the
Lancashire Cotton Famine, a depression in the textile industry that
negatively affected a number of manufacturing towns in England. Many
people were forced to wait in lines for food and coal tickets every single
day, like this picture depicts, and riots were common occurrences. The
Confederacy hoped that the lack of cotton would inspire foreign
involvement for their cause, and blocked trade with the world. By the
time they realized that this policy was going to fail, the Union had set up
a blockade that prohibited trade even more. Choosing not to join the
fight, foreign countries were faced with an important decision on where
to turn for their cotton.
British bureaucrats eventually made the decision to supply themselves
with raw cotton and saw India as a place to begin growing cotton for
world exportation. Soon, manufacturers provided cottonseed and cotton
gins for potential Indian growers, while starting to discuss plans for new
infrastructure plans. However, the most important advancement was a
law that allowed cultivators to devote their effort and land entirely to
cotton, since they would get an advance on food grains. It allowed India
to become the center of the explosive growth all around the world,
going from contributing 16 percent of Britain’s cotton to contributing 75
percent just two years later.
Egypt soon became a notable cotton provider, as it underwent a
transformation that was similar to India’s. Political figures, like Viceroy
Sa’id Pasha led the charge to transform land previously devoted to
producing food to land devoted to the cultivation of cotton. Egypt
became modernized through its exposure on world markets, creating
new cotton gins and new railroads. The changes were staggering, as 40
percent of farmland was used to grow cotton and Egypt exported cotton
at five times the rate that it had before the Civil War.
Other places with a significant impact on the growth and manufacturing
of cotton were West Africa and Brazil. West Africa had the labor base
required to succeed in the cotton business, but did not have the
economic means to produce and export the product globally. On the
other hand, Brazil's cotton exports grew exponentially in the years after
the Civil War, rising from an average of 26.9 million pounds of cotton in
the three decades before the war to 66.7 pounds annually after the
war. Brazil was relied on for quality cotton grown without slave labor, a
necessity for a world gaining independence from the moral wrongs of
slavery.
After the end of the Civil War in 1865, the economy of the the
South was in shambles. The once thriving cotton market had been
destroyed, by the freeing of the slave workers and the introduction
of foreign countries into the market the United States South had
previously dominated. The money lost by the war and the lost jobs
of many of the men devastated southern leaders, and it was
decided a new system for growing cotton needed to be developed
to place the Southern United States back on the cotton map.
A new system of cotton growth evolved after the former Confederate
states adjusted to rejoining the Union. The new system, called
sharecropping, relied on cultivators to grow the cotton, while living
on the piece of land. Merchants and landowners made them pay rent
to live on the property, and sharecroppers made the money for the
rent by meeting a quota for each harvest. This new system was
flawed, and sharecroppers were mistreated by landowners and soon
fell into a vicious cycle of debt they could not escape.
Before the Civil War and its effects on the cotton industry, the
government's only true role in the growth of cotton was to enforce slavery
as a way of extracting labor. However, after the war the government has a
large part in the growth of cotton, similar to plantation owners before the
war. Government worked to make cotton more valuable, to increase
productivity, and created incentives to motivate sharecroppers to bring in
a good harvest.
The United States regained their hold over the cotton market extremely
quickly, and by 1870 were exporting however much, surpassing competition
in foreign countries such as India or Egypt. Today, cotton is the United
States' number one value added export, and annual business revenue
stimulated by cotton exceeds $120 billion. Advances in technology, and an
only increasing need for cotton have made it possible to cultivate and sell
cotton globally on a scale that would have been impossibly in 1800s. The
system of sharecropping was an important step needed to get to the
booming cotton market of today.
Pictography:
Albaz, Alsayed. “Egyptians Picking Cotton.” 2009. Egypt Independent. http://www.egyptindependent.com/node/7004
Carver, Eleazer. “The Celebrated ‘E. Carver’ Cotton Gin”. 1877. TreasureNet. http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/today-sfinds/168046-cotton-gin-nameplate.html
“Cotton Fields”. Gunturu NRI. http://gunturunri.org/?page_id=9
“Georgia Slaves Picking Cotton”. 1839. National Achieves. http://www.nationalparkstraveler.com/2012/04/commemoratingcivil-war-learning-experience9825
“Houses of Parliament”. Eyedea. http://www.eyedea.org.uk/
Lange, Dorothea. “African-American Sharecropper House with Child on Steps”. 1939. Fine Art America.
http://fineartamerica.com/featured/african-american-sharecropper-house-everett.html
“Line for Food and Coal Tickets at a District Provident Society Office”. 1862. LIFE Photo Archieve.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cotton_famine_life_magazine_manchester.jpeg
Miracle, Marvin. “Woman Picking Cotton”. Africa Focus Collection, University of Wisconsin .
http://uwdc.library.wisc.edu/collections/AfricaFocus
O'Sullivan, Timothy H. “Gettysburg, Pa. Bodies of Federal soldiers, killed on July 1, near the McPherson woods”. 1863.
http://www.sonofthesouth.net/leefoundation/gettysburg/dead-civil-war-soldiers.htm
“Sunil Eximp Corporation Raw Cotton”. 1982. Sunil Eximp Corporation. http://www.indiamart.com/sunileximpcorp/
“Union vs. Confederacy”. HistorySpaces. http://historyspaces.blogspot.com/2012_03_01_archive.html