A Vast and Fiendish Plot:. Clint Johnson

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СКАЧАТЬ the United States to selling them to Caribbean countries. In 1810, President James Madison observed: “It appears that American citizens are instrumental in carrying on a traffic in enslaved Africans, equal in violation of the laws of humanity, and in defiance of those of their own country.” Madison had no idea how New York would expand that traffic over the next fifty years.

      Chapter 3

      “A Great Distribution Point for Cotton”

      Had it not been for a free-spending Southern agricultural economy, New York City’s mercantile and shipping economy might never have taken off in the nineteenth century.

      At first, the South did not need the North. For more than 180 years since 1612 when John Rolfe of the Jamestown colony in Virginia successfully crossbred a native strain of tobacco with a strain the Spanish had developed in the Bahamas, the South’s prosperity had been linked to tobacco. Grown, dried, packed in barrels, and then shipped back across the Atlantic from Jamestown, tobacco proved wildly popular with the nicotine-addicted customers in England. More than ten tons of tobacco was shipped to England in 1619.

      At the same time Jamestown was thriving with its tobacco exports, the Dutch West India Company in New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island was still figuring out how to secure a steady supply of beaver pelts from the western frontier of their fledgling colony.

      Jamestown, which only ten years earlier had almost been starved into oblivion, was proving to be a magnificent investment, whereas the future of the Dutch colony on Manhattan was uncertain.

      While tobacco was the crop that made Virginians successful, another plant grew well in the South that had the potential to surpass tobacco in demand among all of Western civilization, not just the smokers. That was cotton, an easy-to-grow fiber that had been spun into thread, woven into cloth, and then cut and sewn into garments since biblical times. The major problem with cotton, however, was removing the seeds embedded in the fiber.

      For years English importers had bought bales of cotton from countries like Egypt, broke it up into hundreds of lots, and then delivered the lots to the homes of contract workers who picked out the seeds and then spun the fibers into thread. This “cottage industry” worked, but the huge investment in time of removing the seeds meant cotton was a fiber that only the rich could afford to have made into clothes. Then along came a Connecticut Yankee.

      On a visit to a Southern plantation in 1793, Eli Whitney noticed the slaves laboriously picking out the cotton seeds one seed at a time. He watched for a while, grabbed some cotton for himself, and then retired to a workshop. Within months he had developed what he called a cotton engine, a drum studded with metal teeth that easily removed the seeds from the cotton fibers. The work of thousands of fingers that had cleaned the picked cotton of seeds had been eliminated. Those same fingers were now free to pick the cotton from the fields.

      At the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, the American South was poised to introduce itself to the world’s economy as the largest supplier of cotton. This introduction came quickly. Cotton exports from the United States climbed dramatically with eight times the volume of cotton heading for England in 1804 compared with 1796, just three years after the invention of the cotton gin. In 1793, cotton clothes were worn by just 4 percent of the population in Europe and the United States. Over the next one hundred years, that figure jumped to 73 percent.

      Sailing directly from the four major cotton ports of Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, and New Orleans to the two major English cotton-milling ports of Manchester and Liverpool would have made the most sense for cotton growers. But that is not how the trade developed. New York may have been far from the Southern cotton fields, but early in the cotton trade in the late 1700s until the 1850s, it became the major port from which Southern cotton made its way across the Atlantic.

      All the Southern ports had water deep enough to handle most of the oceangoing ships that could have made it to England safely, but New York had some important, nonnautical advantages over any Southern ports.

      Most important of all, the city had financial infrastructure. New York’s banks had been dealing with the British textile manufacturers and their system of bills of exchange for fifty years. The city was home base to cotton brokers who visited the South to negotiate both the selling and the buying ends of a cotton transaction. These brokers ingratiated themselves with growers, convincing them there was no need for them to take care of the financial end of the business personally when their time could be better spent managing the slave labor force to grow more cotton.

      Besides banks, the city also had scores of maritime insurance companies willing to insure ships and their cargoes on the voyage across the stormy Atlantic. Finally, New York had a long history of building and outfitting ships that could ply the world’s seas carrying tons of whatever crops the South wanted to export.

      New York’s harbor also had a huge advantage over Southern ports in that it already had a long history of handling imports from Europe and a burgeoning population that wanted European imports. The Southern ports might be able to load up a large, heavy ship with cotton bales heading to England, but the South’s smaller population meant there was less demand for goods coming from Europe to fill the same ship going back to the same port. In 1860, right before the war, New Orleans, the South’s most successful port exported 107 million dollars’ worth of goods (primarily cotton) while importing only 22 million dollars’ worth of goods.

      To handle the trade imbalance, instead of sailing directly to Europe, Southern cotton was loaded in Southern ports, taken to New York, and off-loaded onto larger ships that then sailed to England or New England. The smaller ships that had delivered the cotton to New York then sailed back south loaded with whatever goods Southerners purchased from New York importers.

      While the managers of Southern ports could try to argue that it was much easier and less costly to ship cotton directly to England or New England without the time and expense of off-loading in New York, those port managers had no answer if asked which Southern banks would handle the intricate financial transactions with the final buyers of the cotton who could be six thousand miles away. In 1845, the total number of banks in seven Southern states that produced cotton was 102, with a combined capital of $64 million and loans of $65 million. Alabama had only six banks in the entire state, and Mississippi, one of the major cotton-producing states, did not have a single one.

      New York State alone had 150 banks with capital of $44 million and loans of $70 million. Most of those New York State banks were based in New York City.

      In the early nineteenth century, within a decade of the invention of Whitney’s cotton gin, as much as one quarter of the cotton reaching England came through New York’s harbor. Just twenty years into the nineteenth century, cotton accounted for up to 40 percent of the city’s exports to Europe. In 1850, the New York Herald wrote that New York would be “a great distribution point” for cotton.

      Even though shipping their cotton through New York added hundreds of sea miles and weeks of time before their product could reach their customers, Southerners put up with it. Their New York cotton brokers had convinced them the system worked.

      While the cotton growers never did a cost-benefit analysis, it was obvious to New Yorkers that the system worked very well for them. A host of intertwined New York businesses fed off the huge profits that moving the cotton through the city’s ports generated. Off-loading the cotton from ships coming from the South and then reloading it onto ships bound for Boston or England kept thousands of stevedores employed on the docks. Tracking the handling of those same bales kept clerks employed. Taking the bales to a New England or English port and then returning with agricultural equipment and luxury goods kept shipowners, their captains, and crews employed. Selling the latest Paris fashions to Southern belles kept New York City dry goods store owners СКАЧАТЬ