Cotton field in the Southern Confederation.
Cotton is a staple fibre in the mallow family Malvaceae. The plant is a shrub native to tropical and subtropical regions around the world, including the Americas, Africa, Egypt and India. Cotton was independently domesticated in the Old and New Worlds, with fabric remnants dated back to the fifth millennium BCE in Peru and India.
Cotton was introduced into Europe during the Muslim conquest of Iberia and Sicily. Cotton imports into England began in the late seventeenth century by the English East India Company. After Parliament banned the import of cotton cloth in 1700, smuggling became commonplace. A more strict law was passed in 1721 banning the import of cotton cloth, but not raw cotton fibers. This led to the creation of a native British cotton weaving industry, and by 1774 the owners of the cotton mills were able to get Parliament to repeal the prohibition on selling cotton cloth.
Cotton was grown in the Southern Confederation for export to Great Britain, but the quantities were relatively low until Eli Whitney of Connecticut invented the cotton gin in 1793, which removed a bottleneck in cotton production by mechanically separating cotton fibers from seeds, increasing cotton production by fifty times.
The Southern Confederation[]
In the Southern Confederation, during the Era of Harmonious Relations of the early nineteenth century, there was a surge in cotton production, and a vast expansion of the acreage devoted to its growth. However, the increased production also resulted in increased indebtedness, investment in Negro slaves, and an expansion of the African slave trade. Plantations spread across western Virginia and North Carolina, and huge landed estates appeared in the province of Georgia. The rising wealth of the planter class created brilliant social scenes in the Southern cities of Norfolk, Charleston, Cornwallis, and New Orleans.
The slave population of the S.C. rose sharply with the rise in cotton production. In 1810, Negro slaves made up a sixth of the confederation's population. By 1836, the proportion had risen to over a quarter. Slave insurrections became commonplace, with over six hundred individual uprisings recorded during this period. The most significant slave uprising was Howard's Rebellion, which spread from Virginia to the Carolinas in 1815, affecting every major plantation in those provinces and destroying N.A. £20 million worth of property. Although Howard's Rebellion was put down, it inspired other slave uprisings such as the Levering Conspiracy of 1821, and the Insurrection of 1829 which resulted in the deaths of over 1,400 whites and 3,000 Negroes.
By the 1830s, the S.C. had become a vast armed camp, with a large army devoted to maintaining control of the slaves, and the second-largest navy in the world tasked with protecting the slave trade and assisting in the suppression of slave uprisings. The 1830s also saw reduced yields as older cotton fields in the east suffered from eroding soil, and the last of the confederation's unsettled land in western Georgia was brought under cultivation.
The Panic of 1836 brought a sharp drop in the prices of both cotton and slaves, and opponents of slavery led by Willie Lloyd of the Conservative Party took advantage of the opportunity in 1841 to pass the Lloyd Bill providing for the compensated abolition of slavery. The price of cotton remained low for the next thirty years, ending the economic and social power of the S.C.'s cotton aristocracy.
Jefferson[]
The invention of the cotton gin also resulted in a dramatic increase in the cultivation of cotton in the State of Jefferson, providing a secure economic foundation for the settlement. Cotton cultivation also resulted in a new wave of settlement from the Southern Confederation, as well as permanently establishing slavery in Jefferson. The rise of cotton cultivation divided the Jeffersonians politically, with the Continentalist Party calling for the annexation of Mexico and the expansion of slave-based cotton production there. By contrast, the Liberty Party opposed slavery, and sought to maintain Jefferson as a nation of white yeoman farmers. The Continentalists were able to put their program into effect under Andrew Jackson, who led a Jeffersonian army into Mexico in 1816 and made himself provisional president in June 1817, then engineered the merger of Jefferson and Mexico in 1819 to create the United States of Mexico.
Although the Panic of 1836 lowered the prices of cotton and slaves in Jefferson as it had in the S.C., President Miguel Huddleston of the Liberty Party was unable or unwilling to take advantage of the situation to abolish slavery in the U.S.M. Even though cotton production lost ground to gold mining, food production, and industrialization in the U.S.M., slavery was not abolished there until 1921.