Brian Schoen

Southern Wealth, Global Profits: Cotton, Economic Culture, and the Coming of the Civil War

A growing literature has discussed the transnational effects of the US Civil War on topics ranging from military history to the complicated diplomatic crises that the war created in Europe to its jarring effects on the global economy. We do well also to think about how the transnational landscape framed the way that contemporaries understood the chaotic events leading up to secession and the North’s decision to prevent it. Globally, struggles to achieve nationhood through independence or unification and the expansion of individual rights helped define the era around which citizens of the USA led themselves into war. That battle—it appeared at the time—had advanced but remained unstable in the Western Hemisphere and had lost steam in Old Europe with the failure of the 1848 revolutions.1 Few westerners thought much about what the desires or prospects of nationhood were for African or Asian peoples living under the shadow of European imperialism, though events in those continents did not escape their observation, nor should they ours.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMIES OF SECESSION

Economic analyses of American Civil War causation typically focus on longue durA©e structural arguments neglecting specific context and contemporary observers’ predictions about disunion’s effects. This article suggests secession heightened concern about government solvency and intensified a conversation about the nature of American inter- and intra-national trade, one hinging on ideas about relative dependence and positioning within the world economy. Deep South secessionists rested their claims on a cotton-centric economic worldview, trusting that their coveted commodity could finance independence and attract foreign partners. Pro-compromise northerners greatly feared that possibility. Less compromising Republican political economists countered that secession would reveal northern economic superiority and the South’s underlying weakness, eventually leading to voluntary reunion. Though competing sides envisioned peaceful pathways towards their ends, the actions of insolvent central governments—who feared that any compromise on contested forts and revenue ports would undermine the confidence of underwriters—militated against these imagined peaceful ends.