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11.9: Reference Material

  • Page ID
    9955
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    This chapter was edited by Andrew Wegmann, with content contributions by Ian Beamish, Amanda Bellows, Marjorie Brown, Matthew Byron, Steffi Cerato, Kristin Condotta, Mari Crabtree, Jeff Fortney, Robert Gudmestad, John Marks, Maria Montalvo, James Anthony Owen, Katherine Rohrer, Marie Stango, James Wellborn, Ben Wright, and Ashley Young.

    Recommended citation: Ian Beamish et al., “The Cotton Revolution,” Andrew Wegmann, ed., in The American Yawp, eds. Joseph Locke and Ben Wright (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).

    Recommended Reading

    • Baptist, Edward E. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 2014.
    • Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. New York: Knopf, 2014.
    • Blassingame, John W. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
    • Camp, Stephanie M. H. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
    • Dunaway, Wilma A. The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
    • Einhorn, Robin. American Taxation, American Slavery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
    • English, Beth. A Common Thread: Labor, Politics, and Capital Mobility in the Textile Industry. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006.
    • Ford, Lacy K. Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
    • Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Vintage Books, 1974.
    • Hahn, Barbara. Making Tobacco Bright: Creating an American Commodity, 1617–1937. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011.
    • Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo. Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.
    • Johnson, Walter. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2013.
    • Jones, Jacqueline. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present. New York: Basic Books, 2010.
    • Kolchin, Peter. American Slavery: 1619–1877. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.
    • Lakwete, Angela. Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.
    • Marler, Scott P. The Merchants’ Capital: New Orleans and the Political Economy of the Nineteenth-Century South. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
    • McDonald, Robin, and Valerie Pope Burnes. Visions of the Black Belt: A Cultural Survey of the Heart of Alabama. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2015.
    • McInnis, Maurie D. Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
    • Penningroth, Dylan C. The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
    • Rothman, Joshua D. Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012.
    • Sommerville, Diane Miller. Rape and Race in the Nineteenth-Century South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
    • Tise, Larry E. Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701–1840. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987.
    • Tyler-McGraw, Marie. At the Falls: Richmond, Virginia, and Its People. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.
    • West, Emily. Chains of Love: Slave Couples in Antebellum South Carolina. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004.
    • White, Deborah Gray. Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South. Norton, 1999.
    • Wood, Betty. The Origins of American Slavery: Freedom and Bondage in the English Colonies. New York: Hill and Wang, 1997.

    Notes

    1. See Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014), 103; and Angela Lakwete, Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 148–151.
    2. Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2013), 151–152; John Solomon Otto, The Southern Frontiers, 1607–1860: The Agricultural Evolution of the Colonial and Antebellum South (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1989), 94–96.
    3. Joshua D. Rothman, Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 6–7; David J. Libby, Slavery and Frontier Mississippi, 1720–1835 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 30–36; Scott Reynolds Nelson, A Nation of Deadbeats: An Uncommon History of America’s Financial Disasters (New York: Knopf, 2012), 115–118.
    4. Joseph Holt Ingraham, quoted in Rothman, Flush Times and Fever Dreams, 5.
    5. W. H. Sparks, Memories of Fifty Years (Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen and Haffelfinger, 1870), 364.
    6. Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 102–103.
    7. For more cotton statistics, see Rothman, Flush Times and Fever Dreams, 3–5, 96–103; Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 254–260; Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 102–104; Avery Plaw, “Slavery,” in Cynthia Clark, ed., The American Economy: A Historical Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 2011), 108–109, 787–798; William J. Phalen, The Consequences of Cotton in Antebellum America (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014), 110–114; and Gene Dattel, Cotton and Race in the Making of America: The Human Costs of Economic Power (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), 370–371.
    8. For a valuable and approachable rundown of American slavery statistics, see Jenny Bourne, “Slavery in the United States,” https://eh.net/encyclopedia/slavery-in-the-united-states/, accessed May 7, 2018. For statistics earlier than 1790, see Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975), appendix; and Peter Kolchin, American Slavery: 1619–1877 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 252–257. All slavery statistics hereafter refer to Bourne’s “Slavery in the United States” unless otherwise noted.
    9. On antebellum land prices, especially in the Cotton Belt, see Phalen, Consequences of Cotton, 157–160; Otto, The Southern Frontiers, 86–99; Beth English, A Common Thread: Labor, Politics, and Capital Mobility in the Textile Industry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 40–44; and Harold D. Woodman, King Cotton and His Retainers: Financing and Marketing the Cotton Crop of the South, 1800–1925 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990), chap. 11.
    10. See Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 171–181
    11. See Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 140–141; and John Brown, Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escapes of John Brown, a Fugitive Now in England (London: Chamerovzow, 1855), 16–17.
    12. James L. Huston, “The Pregnant Economies of the Border South, 1840-1860: Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Possibilities of Slave-Labor Expansion,” in L. Diane Barnes, Brian Schoen, and Frank Towers, eds., The Old South’s Modern Worlds: Slavery, Region, and Nation in the Age of Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 132-134.
    13. See Joseph Holt Ingraham, The Southwest, by a Yankee (New York: Harper, 1835), Vol. 2, 91, quoted in Woodman, King Cotton and His Retainers, 135. A similar quote, recorded in 1854 and attributed to Edward Russell, appears in Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 12.
    14. James Stirling, Letters from the Slaves States (London: Parker, 1857), 179–180.
    15. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. Frank Shuffelton (New York: Penguin, 1999), 145.
    16. See “Excessive Slave Population: The Remedy,” De Bow’s Review 12, no. 2 (February 1852): 184–185, also quoted in Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 13.
    17. See Anonymous, “Cotton and Its Prospects,” American Cotton Planter 1, no. 8 (August 1853): 226, also quoted in Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 246.
    18. See Thomas Prentice Kettel, Southern Wealth and Northern Profits, as Exhibited in Statistical Facts and Official Figures (New York: Wood, 1860), 23.
    19. Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 247, 244.
    20. On the populations of southern cities, see Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South, 1820–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 325–327. The top three southern cities, in terms of population in 1820, were Baltimore (62,738), New Orleans (27,176), and Charleston (24,780)
    21. See Wade, Slavery in the Cities, 326.
    22. For American import-export statistics, see Spencer C. Tucker, ed., The Encyclopedia of the Wars of the Early American Republic, 1783–1812 (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC–Clio, 2014), 670-671; and, among others, J. Bradford De Long, “Trade Policy and America’s Standard of Living: A Historical Perspective,” in Susan M. Collins, ed., Exports, Imports, and the American Worker (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1998), 354–357.
    23. See Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 6, 73–88; Paul F. Paskoff, Troubled Waters: Steamboat Disasters, River Improvements, and American Public Policy, 1821–1860(Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2007), 13–19; and Robert H. Gudmestad, Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2011), chap. 1, 174–180.
    24. See Scott P. Marler, The Merchants’ Capital: New Orleans and the Political Economy of the Nineteenth-Century South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), part I; and Wade, Slavery in the Cities, 326–327.
    25. On the fashion of the southern middle class, see Andrew N. Wegmann, “Skin Color and Social Practice: The Problem of Race and Class Among New Orleans Creoles and Across the South, 1718–1862,” PhD diss., Louisiana State University, 2015, chap. 4; Jonathan D. Wells, The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 74–80; and John G. Deal, “Middle-Class Benevolent Societies in Antebellum Norfolk, Virginia,” in Jonathan Daniel Wells and Jennifer R. Green, eds., The Southern Middle Class in the Long Nineteenth Century (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2011), 92–95
    26. The enslaved population of the South in 1860 was 3,950,511; the free, 8,289,782. For statistics on slavery, see Bourne, “Slavery in the United States.
    27. See Stevenson, Life in Black and White, chap. 8, especially 231–238; and Emily West, Chains of Love: Slave Couples in Antebellum South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), particularly 21–33.
    28. See Stephen Crawford, “The Slave Family: A View from the Slave Narratives,” in Claudia Goldin and Hugh Rockoff, eds., Strategic Factors in Nineteenth Century American Economic History: A Volume to Honor Robert W. Fogel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 331–350.
    29. For a fascinating, visual treatment of “downriver” slave sales, see Maurie D. McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), chap. 3. More generally, see Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 144–147; and Kolchin, American Slavery, 95–98.
    30. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Boston: n.p., 1861), 85.
    31. Kevin Bales and Jody Sarich, “The Paradox of Women, Children, and Slavery,” in Benjamin N. Lawrence and Richard L. Roberts, eds., Trafficking in Slavery’s Wake: Law and the Experience of Women and Children in Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012), 241–243; Diane Miller Sommerville, Rape and Race in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 44–48; and Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 35–38.
    32. See Clarence Walker, Mongrel Nation: The America Begotten by Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 30–46; and, among others, Hannah Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 9–11, 75–82.
    33. See Melton A. McLaurin, Celia, a Slave: A True Story of Violence and Retribution in Antebellum Missouri (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), chaps. 2, 5, and 6.
    34. On divorce, see Carol Lasser and Stacey Robertson, Antebellum Women: Private, Public, Partisan (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010), 5–8; Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 200–204; and David Silkenat, Moments of Despair: Suicide, Divorce, and Debt in Civil War Era North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), chap. 4, particularly 77–88.
    35. Samuel S. Hill, Southern Churches in Crisis Revisited (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), 33.
    36. Charles Irons, The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.
    37. William Wells Brown, Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave. Written by Himself (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1969), 56.
    38. Nat Turner, The Confessions of Nat Turner, the Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Va. (Baltimore: Gray, 1831), 9–11.

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