Cotton Kingdom refers to the cotton-producing region of the southern United States up until the Civil War. As white settlers from Virginia and the Carolinas forced the original Native American inhabitants farther and farther west, they moved in and established plantations. The section remained indeliblytied to and controlled by plantation agriculture. From the Atlantic coast to Texas, tobacco, rice, and sugar were staple crops from 1800 to the 1860s. It was cotton production, however, that controlled life in the region.
The predominant feature of the Cotton Kingdom was the employment of slave labor. The societal structure of the area in the antebellum era was built around slavery. The vast majority of the population of the southern United States at this time, slaves, freedmen, and farmers without slaves, were ruled by a disproportionate minority of less than 2,000 large landowners (those who owned more than one hundred slaves).
Because of the isolation and self-containment of the plantation system, coupled with a small population with limited resources, social services were practically nonexistent. This meant that social life, community services, education, and government rested in the hands of the large landholders. The only other outlet for community life was the church.
The notion of mass production of cotton in the South, and slavery with it, was dying out prior to the turn of the nineteenth century due to slow and unprofitable methods employed by the farmers. In 1793 that changed with the invention of Eli Whitney's cotton gin. The gin made mass cotton production in the South feasible and helped to institutionalize slavery in the region. The Louisiana Purchase and the annexation of Texas as a slave state helped to expand the Cotton Kingdom. Politically, cotton became the foundation of southern control of the Democratic Party.
The period from the mid-1830s to the election of 1860 saw the rise of a strong U.S. federal government, disunion with international importers of cotton, and increased support of abolition. The Civil War brought victory for abolition and utter destruction of the land in the region.
With the end of the Civil War on 9 April 1865, cotton was no longer the backbone of southern politics, but it remained the largest crop and source of income. Both prosperity and population dropped after the Civil War and continued to decline until an upsurge in the 1960s. Since then, the southern United States has replaced cotton with industry.
Bibliography
Branford, Robert E. Cotton Kingdom of the New South. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967.
Dodd, William E. The Cotton Kingdom. Washington, D.C.: Ross and Perry, 2002. The original edition was published in 1926.
—Michael K. Law
Encyclopedia of American History Copyright © 2006 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
