The Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom in the Old Southwest: Mississippi, 1770-1860. By John H. Moore. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press (1988), 323 pgs.
In antebellum Mississippi, cotton truly was king. John H. Moore purports to flesh out this axiom in a number of settings. He suggests that “by the time of the Civil War…agriculture in the Old Southwest had achieved a level of modernity that was not to be surpassed until the advent of gasoline tractors after World War I.” (xi) While occasionally thorough, Moore’s work ultimately suffers from a number of interpretive and evidential deficits, and is too narrowly focused to be of utility to a wide audience.
One confusing element is the chapter construction. While a majority are topically bounded, Moore’s first two chapters are chronological spans that stop a vital decade shy of the range indicated in his subtitle. For the years between 1770 and 1849, however, Moore adequately narrates the development of the “Cotton Kingdom” in Mississippi. The first British settlers in the region experimented with a variety of Siamese cotton seed, essentially as a last economic resort for those struggling to survive on the frontier. Immediate success with the seed, combined with the fall of Saint-Domingue’s plantations to their revolting slaves, offered the Mississippian colonists a particularly lucrative entry into the British mercantile economy. Success bred expansion, as planters reinvested profits into more land and slaves. A later switch to a variety of Mexican seed, called Rodney cotton, further propelled a booming market. This, in turn, lured more settlers to the region, and although the boom ended by 1837-1839 the borders of the most profitable section of the Cotton Kingdom had been well established. The 1840s challenged the slave-cotton system to modernize and economize to survive market fluctuations. Moore describes how planters attempted to limit expenditures outside the plantation, substituting their own products for things previously purchased from agents. An interesting but unexplored parallel might exist here between these planters and the wider mercantile system.
Moore next diverges from chronologically marked chapters to explore the Mississippian Cotton Kingdom’s various modes of modernization. He briefly describes a number of horse-drawn implements necessitated by the pursuit of economy. These implements included items like harrows, which leveled topsoil, and cultivators, a next-generation harrow which the ploughman could actually steer. Scrapers were aptly named, and scraped unwanted growth from the rows, and innovators eventually combined this technology with the turning plow to offer an even more efficient implement. Moore interestingly uses increasing numbers of draft livestock to measure the growing importance and pervasiveness of such technologies. He parallels these developments with similar advances in both the technology and use of machinery like gins and presses.
These developments all contributed to increased output, but Moore rightly points to the importance of transportation in truly making cotton the region’s king. Flatboats, rafts, and keelboats gave way to the steam-powered riverboat. Robert Fulton’s invention and its progeny greatly decreased time-to-market and proved a vastly superior means for transporting goods both up- and down-stream. As with other technologies, Moore narrates the evolution within the species, as smaller steamboats were developed specifically for shallower-draft waterways. Equally important was the railroad, which accomplished even more for the interior than the steamboat did for the lands near waterways. Moore interestingly notes that the Vicksburg and Jackson Railroad “linked the economic and political capitals of the state,” (164) and asserts that the expansion of the railroad bears primary responsibility for the dramatic expansion of the cotton kingdom in Mississippi proper. Moore also links the growth of towns to cotton, noting, although without documentary evidence of any kind, that towns sprang up around the railroads, not just the terminals. He also describes a socio-economic order in which the towns lived to serve the needs of the cotton-growing rural regions.
These assertions are far better founded than his highly questionable characterizations of the modernization of the slave-cotton labor system. Based almost exclusively on the problematic WPA Slave Narratives, Moore asserts that life for the slaves markedly improved as the Cotton Kingdom matured. He thus subscribes wholeheartedly to the suspect notion that slavery was dying a natural death prior to the Civil War, despite his prominent charting of Mississippi’s ever-increasing slave population. Whole sections of his work are similarly suspect, as these notions and sources underpin several chapters purporting to describe the social order of Cotton Kingdom Mississippi. In this specific vein, one should consult Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll and Morgan’s Slave Counterpoint, among many others, and ignore Moore’s work.
While examining the development and modernization of the Cotton Kingdom is a useful pursuit, Moore unfortunately offers little of particular original substance. For a limited number of scholars, his work may serve as a useful starting point, but its weaknesses severely inhibit a wider appeal.
Matthew A. McNiece