Fitzhugh and Pike were at least partly right. After the Revolution, European tourists and journalists flocked to America to gawk at the operation of the new republic, and they did agree that the Southern states of the American democracy seemed like a country unto itself, although the watchers did not always mean that observation to be a compliment. The statistics the travelers amassed, or culled from the United States census reports, put a decidedly different spin on Fitzhugh’s praise of Southern agriculture. In 1850, the South possessed only one-quarter of the railroad mileage of the Republic, and less than one-fifth of the country’s manufacturing capacity. Three times as many Northerners lived in cities, while value of northern farmland was reckoned, acre for acre, at more than twice that in the South. In the North, less than 5 percent of the population was illiterate; in the South, illiteracy ran as high as 40 percent in some areas. For “the first time in the States,” wrote English correspondent William Howard Russell as his train crossed through into North Carolina in 1861, “I noticed barefooted people” and “poor broken-down shanties or loghuts” filled with “paleface… tawdry and ragged” women and “yellow, seedy-looking” men.36
And yet the impressions of difference that foreign travelers gained from their tours of the South were also likely to miss many of the subtleties of Southern money and manners. The political and social economy of the Southern states was an exceedingly complex affair, compounded by deceptively stable appearances and highly aggressive commercial enterprise. It was a rash traveler indeed who rushed in to announce that the enigma of the South was now solved.
The first appearance that shaped the initial impressions of onlookers was the dominance of cotton agriculture in the South. Single-crop agriculture was actually a habit with a long history in the Southern states, stretching back into colonial times when the South’s prosperity had relied almost entirely on tobacco grown around Chesapeake Bay and rice or indigo in the South Carolina lowlands. The soils of the South faded fast, though. Lands farmed for five years had to be left fallow for five or even ten years to regain their fertility. By the time of the Revolution, tobacco and indigo production had gone into decline, and the South faced an agricultural crisis of alarming proportions. Then, in 1793, a New England–born inventor, Eli Whitney, constructed a simple device known as the cotton gin, which was able to take raw cotton, separate the fiber of the cotton from the seeds, and produce a usable product with no more than the effort needed to turn a handle. At one stroke, cotton production became mechanically simple and economically viable.
At virtually the same moment that Whitney’s gin simplified the production process, Great Britain’s factory-based textile industry began its clamor for new, cheap sources of cotton. Demand met supply, and between the 1790s and 1850, British cotton imports from the South leapt from 12 million pounds a year to 588 million pounds; in the same period, British exports of finished cotton products rocketed from 40 million square yards to 2 billion square yards, while the costs of cotton goods fell by 1850 to 1 percent of what they had been in the 1780s. Cotton brought Britain power and prosperity, employing 1.5 million workers in the textile factories alone. Cotton, in return, brought the South economic and political power in the American republic. By 1860, Southern cotton constituted 57 percent of all American exports; compared to Northern grain farms, which exported only 5 percent of their total crop, Southern cotton plantations shipped 75 percent of their cotton abroad. 37
But cotton brought the South bane as well as blessing. The rage for cotton profits meant that the South was forever having to import manufactured goods, either from the North or else from abroad over the intolerable hurdle of federal tariffs. To buy these goods, Southern planters were compelled to mortgage their next crop to Northern manufacturers and bankers in order to buy the cotton gins and other tools they needed to plant and harvest the crop in the first place. The money that flowed from English cotton buyers back to the South generally came in the form of bills and drafts that were then forwarded to New York banks to pay Southerners’ bills to Northern merchants. This created cycles of debt for cotton growers, especially in the oldest parts of the South, and most of the debt was owed to northern bankers. “We have been good milk cows,” South Carolinian Mary Boykin Chesnut complained in 1862, “milked by the tariff, or skimmed… Cotton pays everyone who handles it, sells it, manufactures it, &c &c—rarely pays the men who make it.”38 The faster planters in the old cotton states ran to produce more cotton, the faster they piled up debts for the costs of production. By 1850, some of them were surviving on profit margins as
