What do you think?
Rate this book
Cotton is King, and Pro-Slavery Arguments Comprising the Writings of Hammond, Harper, Christy, Stringfellow, Hodge, Bledsoe, and Cartrwright on This Important Subject
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.
892 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1860
19 people are currently reading
94 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
August 28, 2024
This book, which was published prior to the American Civil war, represents the arguments against abolition which stood at the time. It is probably essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the abolition debate in its entirety, though I doubt if even academics working in the field often read it all. It's densely argued, reactionary and racist to a dizzying extent. Elliott collects several pro-slavery articles under one heading, though David Christy's 'Cotton is King' is the main one. If the book tells us little about the actual conditions of America’s enslaved community at the time, it tells us everything about the processes of human debate.
Elliott begins with a lengthy introduction in which he fulminates against the recent horrors of anarchy and bloodshed in Kansas, fugitive slave mobs, the Underground Railway, John Brown's insurrection at Harper's Ferry and organisations in the North 'which organised for the express purpose of robbing the citizens of the Southern states of their property'. He takes an indignant stand (you can almost see his moustaches trembling) on the abolitionist denigration of the (in his opinion entirely benevolent) institution of slavery. The slave, he insists, is not property, though their labour is. Slaves are carefully looked after by their protective owners to whom, in return, they owe a duty of obedience and hard work. Slaves, it seems were 'happy and useful', though this encouraging assessment does not apply to the rebels of St Domingo, who were described as 'African savages'. Besides, Elliott adds huffily, slaves were not introduced in the South, but in New York. They only went South because they preferred the climate. Nothing to do with me, Guv.
It’s clear that we have here an episode of culture warfare at least as acrimonious as any we suffer today. Biblical quotations are flourished like duelling pistols, and Elliott excoriates abolitionists as fiercely as right-wingers today do the ‘educated urban elite’, condemning them in the words of Paul's epistle to Timothy, as ‘men of corrupt minds and destitute of the truth,’ For their side, the abolitionists were happy to label slave-owners ‘robbers, thieves, murderers and outlaws;’ eliciting from Elliott the accusation of ‘wresting the Scriptures from their plain and obvious meaning to compel them to teach abolitionism.’ This condemnation was cited as ‘the words of Jesus Christ’, who in fact never said a thing about slavery in his entire ministry, either for or against, though his name has been cheerfully co-opted onto all sides of the debate.
David Christy, author of 'Cotton is King', sails into the recent British abolition of slavery in the West Indies (he hates the British even more than the Africans) on grounds of hypocrisy: 'To vote for a slave-holder, or a pro-slavery man, was sinful, and could not be done without violence to conscience; while, at the same time, they made no scruples of using the products of slave labor'. Throughout the text, Africans generally are depicted as weak-minded and morally corrupt. Christy argues that since a quarter of the North's prison inmates are 'free Africans', it behoves the South to keep their slaves under lock and key to keep the crime rates down. Fair play, when people had gone to all the trouble to free them from slavery, they could at least have had the decency to stay out of jail. And after all, when people were enslaved, no-one was allowed off the plantation for long enough to commit a serious crime. In fact, Christy is fairly sure that slavery is justified simply to keep the morally degraded 'barbarous' African race under control. 'This liberty which is a blessing to us, would be a curse to them,' he explains.
According to Christy, while France's 'red republic' raged and Britain was busy sawing off the branch it was sitting on ('the overthrow of American slavery, with the consequent suspension of the motion of the spindles and looms of Europe, would bring ruin upon millions of its population'), the South was peacefully minding its own business, proud of its achievement in developing a few hundred thousand 'pagan savages' into 'millions of civilised Christians', unaware that the American people was 'demented' and that swift destruction was hurrying down upon it in the form of the abolition movement. Christy was annoyed by implications that he had vested interests in slavery. Nothing could be further from the truth, obviously. He seems pleased that, to make way for plantations, the title of the Indians to fifty-five millions of acres of land, in the slave states, was extinguished, and the tribes removed. As for the idea that racial equality was implied in the Declaration of Independence, he found it laughable: 'And, now, will any one say, that the fathers of the Revolution ever intended to declare the negro the equal of the white man, in the sense that he was entitled to an equality of political privileges under the constitution of the United States!
If there's a statue of Christy anywhere, it should come down forthwith.
'Cotton is King', whose arguments are almost entirely economic, does at least contain some useful information about the development of cotton processing technologies, which occurred after the northern states had already abolished slavery. Because the past is a different country, our reading of its texts should be as free as possible from contemporary prejudices. Which in the case of this book is a big ask. Other narratives, like that of freed slave Elizabeth Keckley tell a more nuanced story. Keckley understands that some of the apparent 'decadence' of the freed slaves was the result of generations of enforced dependency:
'Often I heard them declare that they would rather go back to slavery in the South, and be with their old masters, than to enjoy the freedom of the North. I believe they were sincere in these declarations, because dependence had become a part of their second nature, and independence brought with it the cares and vexations of poverty.'
The impetus nowadays is to think of the slave-owning plantation culture in strictly black and white -terms. Writers of the age can give us a more complete picture, and it would be wrong to accept only those images which accord with our views. As WJ Cash wrote:
In this society in which the infant son of the planter was commonly suckled by a black mammy... the relationship between the two groups was, by the second generation at least, nothing less than organic. Negro entered into white man as pro-foundly as white man entered into Negro—subtly influencing every gesture, every word, every emotion and idea, every attitude.
( The Mind of the South)
And as Elizabeth Keckly insists 'You do not know the Southern people as well as I do—how warm is the attachment between master and slave." Because the truth is rarely pure and never simple.
Elliott begins with a lengthy introduction in which he fulminates against the recent horrors of anarchy and bloodshed in Kansas, fugitive slave mobs, the Underground Railway, John Brown's insurrection at Harper's Ferry and organisations in the North 'which organised for the express purpose of robbing the citizens of the Southern states of their property'. He takes an indignant stand (you can almost see his moustaches trembling) on the abolitionist denigration of the (in his opinion entirely benevolent) institution of slavery. The slave, he insists, is not property, though their labour is. Slaves are carefully looked after by their protective owners to whom, in return, they owe a duty of obedience and hard work. Slaves, it seems were 'happy and useful', though this encouraging assessment does not apply to the rebels of St Domingo, who were described as 'African savages'. Besides, Elliott adds huffily, slaves were not introduced in the South, but in New York. They only went South because they preferred the climate. Nothing to do with me, Guv.
It’s clear that we have here an episode of culture warfare at least as acrimonious as any we suffer today. Biblical quotations are flourished like duelling pistols, and Elliott excoriates abolitionists as fiercely as right-wingers today do the ‘educated urban elite’, condemning them in the words of Paul's epistle to Timothy, as ‘men of corrupt minds and destitute of the truth,’ For their side, the abolitionists were happy to label slave-owners ‘robbers, thieves, murderers and outlaws;’ eliciting from Elliott the accusation of ‘wresting the Scriptures from their plain and obvious meaning to compel them to teach abolitionism.’ This condemnation was cited as ‘the words of Jesus Christ’, who in fact never said a thing about slavery in his entire ministry, either for or against, though his name has been cheerfully co-opted onto all sides of the debate.
David Christy, author of 'Cotton is King', sails into the recent British abolition of slavery in the West Indies (he hates the British even more than the Africans) on grounds of hypocrisy: 'To vote for a slave-holder, or a pro-slavery man, was sinful, and could not be done without violence to conscience; while, at the same time, they made no scruples of using the products of slave labor'. Throughout the text, Africans generally are depicted as weak-minded and morally corrupt. Christy argues that since a quarter of the North's prison inmates are 'free Africans', it behoves the South to keep their slaves under lock and key to keep the crime rates down. Fair play, when people had gone to all the trouble to free them from slavery, they could at least have had the decency to stay out of jail. And after all, when people were enslaved, no-one was allowed off the plantation for long enough to commit a serious crime. In fact, Christy is fairly sure that slavery is justified simply to keep the morally degraded 'barbarous' African race under control. 'This liberty which is a blessing to us, would be a curse to them,' he explains.
According to Christy, while France's 'red republic' raged and Britain was busy sawing off the branch it was sitting on ('the overthrow of American slavery, with the consequent suspension of the motion of the spindles and looms of Europe, would bring ruin upon millions of its population'), the South was peacefully minding its own business, proud of its achievement in developing a few hundred thousand 'pagan savages' into 'millions of civilised Christians', unaware that the American people was 'demented' and that swift destruction was hurrying down upon it in the form of the abolition movement. Christy was annoyed by implications that he had vested interests in slavery. Nothing could be further from the truth, obviously. He seems pleased that, to make way for plantations, the title of the Indians to fifty-five millions of acres of land, in the slave states, was extinguished, and the tribes removed. As for the idea that racial equality was implied in the Declaration of Independence, he found it laughable: 'And, now, will any one say, that the fathers of the Revolution ever intended to declare the negro the equal of the white man, in the sense that he was entitled to an equality of political privileges under the constitution of the United States!
If there's a statue of Christy anywhere, it should come down forthwith.
'Cotton is King', whose arguments are almost entirely economic, does at least contain some useful information about the development of cotton processing technologies, which occurred after the northern states had already abolished slavery. Because the past is a different country, our reading of its texts should be as free as possible from contemporary prejudices. Which in the case of this book is a big ask. Other narratives, like that of freed slave Elizabeth Keckley tell a more nuanced story. Keckley understands that some of the apparent 'decadence' of the freed slaves was the result of generations of enforced dependency:
'Often I heard them declare that they would rather go back to slavery in the South, and be with their old masters, than to enjoy the freedom of the North. I believe they were sincere in these declarations, because dependence had become a part of their second nature, and independence brought with it the cares and vexations of poverty.'
The impetus nowadays is to think of the slave-owning plantation culture in strictly black and white -terms. Writers of the age can give us a more complete picture, and it would be wrong to accept only those images which accord with our views. As WJ Cash wrote:
In this society in which the infant son of the planter was commonly suckled by a black mammy... the relationship between the two groups was, by the second generation at least, nothing less than organic. Negro entered into white man as pro-foundly as white man entered into Negro—subtly influencing every gesture, every word, every emotion and idea, every attitude.
( The Mind of the South)
And as Elizabeth Keckly insists 'You do not know the Southern people as well as I do—how warm is the attachment between master and slave." Because the truth is rarely pure and never simple.
Displaying 1 of 1 review