January 9, 1861 (Wednesday)

King Cotton

"Suppose the crop of the South, the past year, had been in food -- wheat, corn, beef and pork -- as in the Northern and Western States, what would have been their position in the present crisis?  Why, the foreign demand for it would have been more active than for cotton, while the ample means of support among themselves would have placed them in a position of almost entire independence of the North, and would, consequently, have made them impregnable.

But, they produce Cotton alone.  This they can neither eat nor drink, nor wear, without sending it abroad to be manufactured.  There are large stocks of cotton on hand, and consumers are in no haste to move the crop...it consequently comes only forward; not fast enough, nor in sufficient quantities, to relieve the money pressure or the general distress.  The whole South are in a state of collapse.  At the very period of all others when everybody there should be flush, and the banks running over with gold, these institutions were driven to the wall without a moment's warning.  Payments of all kinds cease, and a cry of universal distress rises from every corner of the Southern States.

"The planter has no money with which to send it to market; nor could he get the money for it.  He can't eat cotton.  To convert it into articles necessary to his use, it has to take a long circuit, and go through processes requiring months for their performance.  All this machinery of trade has been rudely smashed.  No persons will trust people acting as madly and dishonestly as those of South Carolina. 

The present crisis has thus demonstrated that a people who produce only a raw material which they cannot convert into forms in which it can be used, are in the most helpless and pitiable condition possible.  The South had become so besotted with the notion that 'Cotton is king,' and so arrogant and inflated with the idea of possessing, as they vainly thought the world would bend-the-knee before them to have their cotton. 

What a change for two short months to bring about!  The South at a single blow forever destroyed their moral power.  If there be one sentiment more deeply engraved than any other on the Anglo-Saxon mind, it is a respect and reverence for law and order.  The moral prestige of the South, consequently, is completely gone.  The crisis has shown their nakedness and poverty.  It has taught the country where its real strength lies -- in the North. 

The first breeze of the financial storm completely leveled the whole commercial fabric of the South.  King Cotton was as helpless as his subjects.  The moment they assumed to cut themselves off from the North they severed the tie upon which their very life depended.  So long as they maintained political and commercial faith, the capital of the world was before them, to assist in all their operations.  But they plumed themselves like Lucifer and like Lucifer they fell.  They command neither the respect, confidence nor sympathy of the soul in Christendom outside of their own number.  Their fall has been their own work; so must be that of their recovery."  (Impotence of King Cotton, New York Times editorial, January 9, 1861)