King Cotton Diplomacy: Foreign Relations of the Confederate States of America

by Frank Lawrence Owsley Sr., Howard Jones (Foreword)

The exhaustive, definitive study of Southern attempts to gain international support for the Confederacy by leveraging the cotton supply for European intervention during the Civil War. Using previously untapped sources from Britain and France, along with documents from the Confederacy’s state department, Frank Owsley’s King Cotton Diplomacy is the first archival-based study of Confederate diplomacy.

Genres: Civil War, American Civil War

644 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1931

About the author

Frank Lawrence Owsley was an American historian who taught at Vanderbilt University for most of his career, where he specialized in Southern history and was a member of the Southern Agrarians. He is notorious for his essay "The Irrepressible Conflict" (1930) in which he lamented the economic loss of slavery for the defeated Confederacy and of the "half savage blacks" that had been freed. He is also known for his study of Confederate diplomacy based on the idea of "King Cotton" and especially his quantitative social history of the middling "plain people" of the Old South.

Reviews

[Jerel Wilmore · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting book, if only for its place in the historiography of the American Civil War. I read this book mostly to gain an understanding of Owsley's influential views of the the efficiacy of the Union's blockage of the South during the war. Owsley's claims that the blockade was ineffective co0ntinue to be cited. I disagree with Owsley on this point and have been researching the topic.

The book is also interesting for Owsley's wide understanding of the diplomatic forces at work in this period, especially in Great Britain and France.

While some of the book's conclusions are dated, it is well worth reading for a serious student of the American Civil War.

[Mac · Rating 4 out of 5]

King Cotton Diplomacy is such a great title. It grabbed my attention when I noticed it in the footnotes of James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom. Now, some fifteen years later, I was finally able to read the actual book. Frank Lawrence Owsley, Jr. sets out to study the diplomatic history of the Confederacy, especially its relations with Britain, France, and Mexico. He digs into economic reports and government archives in addition to published materials. This is an extremely well-researched book, and I've never read anything else that covers this subject in depth. The basic argument is that the Confederates believed that they had great leverage over Britain and France because they controlled the best cotton crop in the world. The British and, to a lesser extent, French textile industries depended on the supply of raw cotton from the South. But for a variety of reasons, Confederate diplomats were never able to parlay this leverage into British or French aid, let alone official recognition, during the Civil War. For one, the last crop that went overseas before the war was so huge that the British and French industries could continue to use it for about a year before they felt a pinch. And, ironically, Confederate battlefield success made the European powers less likely to offer official recognition, because they believed the Confederacy would soon achieve independence on its own without their needing to antagonize the United States.

Owsley was clearly an excellent historian. Based on what I've read elsewhere, he was also something of a Lost Cause sympathizer and white nationalist. Fortunately, these biases rarely infect his writing in this book. However, I was rankled when he seemingly bought into Confederate propaganda that the United States was bribing hundreds of thousands of Irish and Germans to immigrate to the United States and enlist in the Union army. In other areas, such as cotton production, he was scrupulous in ferreting out facts and figures, but in this case he didn't bother. There were also one or two casual disparagements of President Lincoln that seemed out of character for the rest of the book. But I have to say, Owsley seemed to give a grudgingly complimentary portrait of Secretary of State William Seward. For every maneuver by Confederate diplomats, Seward was always there working the opposite angle.

Long story short, King Cotton Diplomacy is worth reading, as long as you proceed with a bit of caution.

[JerryDeanHalleck · Rating 3 out of 5]

What a great book this is. Informative, detailed, and well-written. Far superior to the ideological and badly written history we get today! Anyway, Owsley makes several interesting points that I never would've believed, except they are true. Namely:

1) Everyone in the Confederate elite, believed the Cotton embargo would drive England/France to recognize the Confederacy and break the Union blockade. As a result, millions of cotton bales were burned/destroyed and very little cotton was planted in 1862. But the South miscalculated, and the Cotton famine didn't start hitting England till September 1862 - too late.

2) It was a widely-held belief among the English Elite that (1) the North could never conquer the South and (2) slavery was doomed no matter who won the war. These two beliefs destroyed any reason for English intervention until the South had won a decisive victory.

3) The belief that Northern Wheat made British intervention difficult is proven false by Owsley as is the notion that the Cotton famine devastated the English economy. It seems that while the Cotton industry suffered, the rest of the English economy was doing very well indeed, and the total English unemployment stayed more or less the same.

This is a classic book on Civil war diplomacy.

[Don Heiman · Rating 5 out of 5]

King Cotton Diplomacy" by Owsley was published in 1959. The book is considered by respected military historians to be the "definitive work" on why the Confederacy was not recognized as an independent nation by England and France. Owsley details The Vatican's response to Southern diplomacy, Napoleon III's duplicity, and English strategies for coping with the cotton famine caused by the war.