180 Cotton is King (1858)

If we never acquire another foot of territory for the South, look at her. Eight hundred and fifty thousand square miles. As large as Great Britain, France, Austria, Prussia, and Spain. Is not that territory enough to make an empire that shall rule the world? With the finest soil, the most delightful climate, whose staple productions none of those great countries can grow, we have three thousand miles of continental shoreline so indented with bays and crowded with islands that when their shorelines are added, we have twelve thousand miles. Through the heart of our country runs the great Mississippi, the father of waters into whose bosom are poured thirty-six thousand miles of tributary streams. And beyond we have the desert prairie wastes to protect us in our rear. Can you hem in such a territory as that? You talk of putting up a wall of fire around eight hundred and fifty thousand square miles so situated! How absurd.

But in this territory lies the great valley of the Mississippi, now the real and soon to be the acknowledged seat of the empire of the world. The sway of that valley will be as great as ever the Nile knew in the earlier ages of mankind. We own the most of it. The most valuable part of it belongs to us now and although those who have settled above us are now opposed to us, another generation will tell a different tale. They are ours by all the laws of nature. Slave-labor will go over every foot of this great valley where it will be found profitable to use it. And some of those who may not use it are soon to be united with us by such ties as will make us one and inseparable. The iron horse will soon be clattering over the sunny plains of the South to bear the products of its upper tributaries to our Atlantic ports, as it now does through the ice-bound North. There is the great Mississippi, a bond of union made by Nature herself. She will maintain it forever.

If we take the North even when the two large States of Kansas and Minnesota shall be admitted, her territory will be one hundred thousand square miles less than ours. I do not speak of California and Oregon; there is no antagonism between the South and those countries and never will be. The population of the North is fifty per cent greater than ours. I have nothing to say in disparagement either of the soil of the North or the people of the North, who are a brave and energetic race, full of intellect. But they produce no great staple that the South does not produce while we produce two or three, and those the very greatest, that she can never produce. As to her men, I may be allowed to say they have never proved themselves to be superior to those of the South, either in the field or in the Senate.

But if there were no other reason why we should never have war, would any sane nation make war on cotton? Without firing a gun, without drawing a sword, should they make war on us we could bring the whole world to our feet. The South is perfectly competent to go on one, two, or three years without planting a seed of cotton. I believe that if she was to plant but half her cotton for three years to come, it would be an immense advantage to her. I am not so sure but that after three total years’ abstinence she would come out stronger than ever she was before, and better prepared to enter afresh upon her great career of enterprise. What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years? I will not stop to depict what every one can imagine, but this is certain: England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her, save the South. No, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is king. Until lately the Bank of England was king. But she tried to put her screws as usual, the fall before last, upon the cotton crop and was utterly vanquished. The last power has been conquered. Who can doubt that has looked at recent events, that cotton is supreme? When the abuse of credit had destroyed credit and annihilated confidence, when thousands of the strongest commercial houses in the world were coming down and hundreds of millions of dollars of supposed property evaporating in thin air, when you came to a dead lock and revolutions were threatened, what brought you up? Fortunately for you it was the commencement of the cotton season and we have poured in upon you one million six hundred thousand bales of cotton just at the crisis to save you from destruction. That cotton, but for the bursting of your speculative bubbles in the North which produced the whole of this convulsion, would have brought us $100,000,000. We have sold it for $65,000,000 and saved you. Thirty-five million dollars we, the slaveholders of the South, have put into the charity box for your magnificent financiers, your “cotton lords,” your “merchant princes.”

But sir, the greatest strength of the South arises from the harmony of her political and social institutions. This harmony gives her a frame of society the best in the world and an extent of political freedom, combined with entire security, such as no other people ever enjoyed upon the face of the earth. Society precedes government, creates it and ought to control it. It was this that brought on the American Revolution. We threw off a Government not adapted to our social system and made one for ourselves. The question is how far have we succeeded? The South so far as that is concerned is satisfied, harmonious, and prosperous.

In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. Fortunately for the South, she found a race adapted to that purpose to her hand. A race inferior to her own but eminently qualified in temper, in vigor, in docility, in capacity to stand the climate to answer all her purposes. We use them for our purpose and call them slaves. The Senator from New York said yesterday that the whole world had abolished slavery. Aye, the name, but not the thing. For the man who lives by daily labor and scarcely lives at that, and who has to put out his labor in the market and take the best he can get for it; in short, your whole class of manual laborers and “operatives” as you call them are essentially slaves. The difference between us is that our slaves are hired for life and well compensated. There is no starvation, no begging, no want to employment among our people and not too much employment either. Yours are hired by the day, not cared for, and scantily compensated which may be proved in the most painful manner, at any hour in any street in any of your large towns. Why, you meet more beggars in one day in any single street of the city of New York than you would meet in a lifetime in the whole South. We do not think that whites should be slaves either by law or necessity. Our slaves are black, of another and inferior race. The status in which we have placed them is an elevation. They are elevated from the condition in which God first created them, by being made our slaves. None of that race on the whole face of the globe can be compared with the slaves of the South. They are happy, content, unaspiring, and utterly incapable from the intellectual weakness ever to give us any trouble by their aspirations. Yours are white, of your own race. You are brothers of one blood. They are your equals in natural endowment of intellect and they feel galled by their degradation. Our slaves do not vote. We give them not political power. Yours do vote and being the majority, they are the depositaries of all your political power. If they knew the tremendous secret, that the ballot-box is stronger than “an army with banners”, and could combine, where would you be? Your society would be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property divided not as they have mistakenly attempted to initiate such proceedings by meeting in parks with arms in their hands, but by the quiet process of the ballot-box. You have been making war upon us to our very hearthstones. How would you like for us to send lecturers and agitators North to teach these people this, to aid in combining, and to lead them?

Source: Senate speech by James Henry Hammond, https://civilwarcauses.org/King%20Cotton%20speech.htm