Cotton and Race in the Making of America: The Human Costs of Economic Power

Cotton and Race in the Making of America: The Human Costs of Economic Power. By Gene Dattel. Chicago: Ivan R Dee, 2009. xiv + 416 pp. Illustrations, appendix, bibliography, notes, index. Cloth, $28.95. ISBN: 978-1-56663-747-3.

Reviewed by Barbara Hahn

Some students prefer to hear a version of American history in which slavery mattered little. The peculiar institution entangled only southern states in its toils, according to this view, and then only large plantersthe majority of southerners owned no slaves. From this perspective, the Civil War concerned states' rights versus federal power, taxes and tariffs, not slavery. To this popular opinion, Gene Dattel offers a corrective. Cotton and Race demonstrates clearly and coherently the importance of slavery and commodity agriculture to the economic history of the United States. His story spans the long nineteenth century and beyond, beginning with the compromises of the Constitution in the 1780s and ending only when the mechanical cotton picker replaced labor on the land in the 1950s. Though little here is new- neither research nor conclusions- the book provides a satisfying overview of the scholarly literature and its findings. A former investment banker, Dattel's perspective on the economic development of the nation resonates for any audience.

Short chapters and a punchy style contribute to the book's ease of use. Beginning with the Constitutional Convention, Dattel turns to analyzing the engine of American economic growth, the cotton-slavery mechanism that provided capital for the young nation while it pushed population and cultivation west. A section on the North called "For Whites Only" illustrates, state-by-state, the racist beliefs and laws of free-soil Yankees. So strong was white antipathy it even undergirded abolitionism, which aimed to destroy slavery in part to quell incentives for runaways to come North. In demonstrating the importance of slavery outside the South, Dattel picks the excellent example of New York City, which first rose to commercial power in the nineteenth century as a result of cotton exports. Its concentration of trade and regularization of commerce made the port city one node of a triangle trade with Britain. Likewise, New Yorkers financed the slave trade. Fitting out slave ships was centered in the city. For those students who view New York as the epitome of the North, this will prove an eye-opening description, and one with significant support in the historical record.

If the North had slaves, it lacked the crop that made slavery profitable: cotton, which provided the Confederacy with "credibility for the government, arms for the military, a basis for tax revenue, and a diplomatic strategy" (p. 163). Indeed, Dattel's treatment of the Civil War covers principally these non-textile uses of the fiber. He focuses considerably more energy on depicting cotton's role in arms procurement and diplomatic recognition than on battles and generals. The author therefore provides a view of the Confederate States of America as a young nation fighting for its independence rather than as a belligerent interruption of the national narrative. Dattel thus concentrates on the illconceived Confederate policy of cotton embargo that so severely miscalculated both world stores of cotton and British desire for this product. The emphasis on cotton allows Dattel to extend his economic analysis to the conflict as well as its causes, and provides him with a transition to the postbellum shift to cotton production by "free" labor.

Two more sections examine the postwar world: cotton and race between the Civil War and New Deal, and then again at mid-century, as machine stripping took over much of the work of the harvest. Dattel views postbellum sharecropping and tenancy systems as a variant of slavery, enforced this time by the federal government. Freedpeople's role in shaping these arrangements slips away from this story, as "white Southerners often took the initiative in recommending rules" (p. 247). The turn-of-the-century story becomes somewhat muddled: the Exodusters who migrated to Kansas, the rise of lynching and the Klan as a means of social control, and Teddy Roosevelt's racism blend into the Great Migration after World War I. From here, race riots vie with export markets and agricultural finance to carry the story forward to the New Deal and then to the mechanization of the cotton harvest. While these postbellum chapters could use a stronger organizational spine, they are effective for the popular and undergraduate audience intended, and maintain the tone of economic rationalism mixed with restrained fury that proves so effective through the whole text.

Indeed, it is the author's tone that makes this book useful, as well as the organization of material. Students with considerable cliometric skills might find the narrative cloying, and business historians will encounter few surprises or new insights. For the average student in a general U.S. history survey, however, or an upper-level class in southern or business history, Dattel hits the nail on the head. The book sometimes seems needlessly narrow, as when the rush of events from Reconstruction into the twentieth century elides the complex array of causes for segregation and disfranchisement. Instead, Dattel asserts that "for white Americans, all roads for blacks led back to cotton" (p. 212). Yet the book is eminently useful for an audience who may, from time to time, need reminding of the historical roots of the nation's wealth.

[Author Affiliation]

Barbara Hahn is assistant professor at Texas Tech University. She is completing a manuscript on the interactions between the U.S. tobacco industry and tobacco agriculture between 1617 and 1937, and beginning work on a history-of-technology treatment of the Industrial Revolution.