LetUsHavePeace
Volunteer
- Joined
- Dec 1, 2018
The importance of cotton to the United States economy in 1861 made it the King of exports. As John Calhoun noted in 1827, Americans were the dominant producers of the material not only because of the size of our annual crop production but also because of our efficiency in growing, ginning and shipping the fiber. But, one has to ask why the secessionists would choose the spring of 1861 as the time to impose an embargo on the buyers of America's cotton? In Britain, the #1 importer of American cotton, the textile producers had an overstock of both raw and "manufactured" cotton. Robert Arnold, who would be described today as the leading industry analyst, estimated that British textile makers began the year with 300 million pounds of unsold textiles - a 90 days supply for their market. Normally, producers would go into April with a raw material inventory of 400,000 bales; according to Arnold, they had 955,000 bales in inventory in 1861. By June that backlog increased to 1.1 million. It would be another year before the market in Britain would see any increase in the price of cotton because of the "shortage".
Bringing the