Cotton is King--- and I laugh!!

[elektratig]

I think we are being a little too harsh here. In retrospect, it's easy to see that cotton was a commodity, the price of which depended on supply and demand; that increasing supply required increasing demand to keep the price up; and that any leveling off of demand, in conjunction with increasing supply, could prove catastrophic. Perhaps, also, southerners should have been more wary, given previous collapses of the price of cotton following the Panics of 1819 and 1837 (although those were, as I understand it, the results of contractions of credit rather than decrease in demand).

On the other hand, every once in a while, there is a commodity that the world clamors for, and it's understandable that the producers of the raw material view themselves as indispensable. How about the oil producing countries today? Are they foolish to proclaim that "Oil Is King"?

[whitworth]

That was one of the great foreign policy mistakes of the Confederate government. That Cotton would bring military assistance from England and France.

By 1861, after great importation of cotton from the South, England had a great surplus of fabric. Cotton wasn't for that time, very important.

******

"Every autumn brought bumper crops of wheat and corn, and since England and Europe suffered a series of poor harvests, they turned to the United States, whence over 40 million bushels of wheat and flour were exported in 1862, as compared with less than 100,000 in 1859.
..."Old King Cotton's dead and buried, brave young Corn is King," went the refrain of a popular song.

p669 The Oxford History of the American People. Samuel Eliot Morison. 1965.

[cw1865]

Its the only trump card they had so I guess they had to play it. It does eventually cause the unemployment in the textile mills in England. So, the shortage DOES cause the effect anticipated, but does not produce the desired result (intervention). The textile workers go so far as to send a letter of support to the Union....

[OpnDownfall]

Those who proclaimed (and actually believed) that 'Cotton is King!' before and during the war, were blind to the actual cause of the war, in the first place.
The lowly mill workers (If Not the Mill Owners) in England were keenly aware of their stake in a war against slavery, even one in a land far, far away, at the time.



P.S. This blindness has been inhereted by many unto this very day; If they actually believed the statement to be true.