"King Cotton"

"King Cotton" was an expression much used by southern authors and orators before the Civil War. The idea appeared first as the title of a book, Cotton Is King, by David Christy in 1855. In a speech in the U.S. Senate on 4 March 1858, James H. Hammond declared, "You dare not make war upon cotton! No power on earth dares make war upon it. Cotton is king." The phrase expressed the southern belief that COTTON was so essential that those who controlled it might dictate the economic and political policies of the United States and of the world. Southern confidence in cotton's economic power contributed to the decision to establish the Confederacy in 1861. During the Civil War, however, northern industry proved far more decisive than southern agriculture in the war's outcome.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

"KING COTTON" Faust, Drew Gilpin. James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982.

Wright, Gavin. The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century. New York: W.W. Norton, 1978.

Hallie Farmer/T. G.

See also Commodity Exchanges; Cotton Gin; Inflation in the Confederacy; Lower South; Mason-Dixon Line.