formerly known as kenspank
03-15-2009, 03:06 PM
Good People
In this third installment for Black Future Month, we're going to take a look at Black life, throughout the diaspora, from an economists perspective. What this means is we're going to look at the behavior and decision trends that paint a picture of our relationship with business and trade.
Below you will find reading material regarding the cotton industry in the United States. Internationally, cotton from India dominated the world stage, but US cotton was a strong competitor in several markets. Whether referred to as Negro, Black African, or slave, Blacks were involved in multiple roles in the production of this "white gold" and as we will see made many (slave and commodity traders, bankers, plantation owners, textile mill owners, wholesalers and retailers) rich in the process.
Other articles concerning Blacks, business, and trade will be found on facebook.com
Mypodcast.com is undergoing an afterhours server upgrade, so you will be able to find this week's mix at..
www.xstreamist.com/skywalker
The Cotton Economy
Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, India and the Orient provided most of the world's cotton, supplemented slightly by G. barbadense long-staple cotton produced after the 1740s in the South American colonies of Surinam (French) and Guyana (British and Dutch).
When the Revolutionary War ended a British entrepreneur William Rathbone IV started importing U.S. cotton into Liverpool. Planters eager to find something more profitable than tobacco, rice, and indigo began to experiment to fulfill British demand for more cotton.
In 1786, Bahamian G. barbadense seed was introduced into the new United States. Experimental plantings produced a crop in 1787 coastal Georgia; in Hilton Head, South Carolina; William Elliott sold his 1790 crop for ten and a half pence per pound. Prices for this desirable long-fiber cotton rose to five shillings (60 pence) per pound at Liverpool auctions by 1800. Since G. barbadense grew best on the islands off Georgia's Atlantic coast (Edisto, James, John, and Wadmalaw), it was nicknamed Sea Island cotton.
Short-staple G. hirsutum cotton could be grown in non-coastal upland areas and was nicknamed Upland cotton. The sturdy plant was already growing over a wide geographical range, but it presented a different problem. Upland cotton was so difficult to clean that the roller gin (short for engine) could not be used to clean the cotton. Instead, it took one person an entire day to tear one-two pounds of cotton from the clinging seeds. African slaves developed a type of comb to speed the process, and South Carolina inventor Hodgen Holmes experimented with a sawtooth device to clean the cotton; but there was nothing widely available that eased the bottleneck between field and factory. Unless someone could invent a machine to clean Upland cotton, it would be impossible to clean all the cotton necessary to meet British mills' demands.
No longer limited by the quantity that they could clean, planters began to plant vast amounts of Upland cotton. The yield per acre for Upland cotton in the South ranged from 100-1,500 pounds per acre, with a regional average of 530 pounds. While Sea Island cotton production remained constant at around 1.5 million pounds annually, Upland cotton production skyrocketed from around 150,000 pounds in 1793 to over 6.5 million pounds in 1795. Cotton profits also rose dramatically. By 1860, northern textile mills imported nearly 100 percent of their cotton from the South.
Government statistics from 1860 confirmed that the 12 wealthiest counties in the United States were in the South. However, cotton powered the economy of the entire country; the South purchased $30 million of mid-western food and $150 million of northern manufactured goods. Northern shipping and banking were also tied to the cotton economy. The South's "white gold" was not marketed directly to Europe; rather it was sent to New York where factors (who loaned money to planters in advance of the crop), commodities futures traders, and merchants shipped it to northeastern textile mills (which produced $100 million worth of cotton goods) or to Great Britain. Northern banks also provided loans to southern planters to purchase slaves and land. State and local governments also made money by taxing slavery through sales and inheritance taxes.
Furthermore, cotton had made the South a player in the world economy. While cotton exports totaled only $5 million (seven percent of total U.S. exports) in 1800, they rose to $30 million in 1830 (41 percent of U.S. exports) and reached $191 million in 1860 (57 percent of total U.S. exports). By 1850, cotton consumption averaged five and a half pounds per person in Great Britain and the United States, in large part because the price of cotton textiles had fallen to roughly one percent of their cost in 1784. Worldwide, southern cotton dominated two-thirds of the market. Southern cotton accounted for 70 percent of the raw material fueling Britain's industrial revolution, and British experts believed that Indian cotton could not replace it in quantity or quality. At least 16 percent of all Britons' jobs depended on textile manufacturing, while cotton fabric made up half of Britain's exports, and an estimated ten percent of Britain's wealth was tied to cotton. The cotton economy had also contributed to the creation of scores of banks in Great Britain (including Barclays) and the formation of the Stock Exchange of London in 1773.
The only thing that could limit cotton production was the need for labor; consequently, the demand for labor also skyrocketed. As early as April 23, 1795, cotton gin operators placed help-wanted ads in Augusta Georgia's Southern Sentinel & Universal Gazette to hire "negro boys and girls ten or twelve years old" to work the machinery. According to the Federal census of 1790, there were approximately 650,000 slaves in the southern states, many working on rice, tobacco, and indigo plantations. By 1850, there were 3.2 million slaves of whom 1.8 million were used to cultivate cotton.
The demand for additional slaves to put acreage into cotton production was met in part by the transatlantic slave trade and mostly by the interregional domestic slave trade. The United States imported approximately 300,000 slaves between 1778 and the end of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808 (Article I, Section 9, Clause 1, U.S. Constitution), almost as many as had been brought to the British colonies of North America from 1619-1778. In the single year of 1791, British traders carried 38,000 Africans to the United States. Most slaves were brought into the ports of Charleston and Savannah and put to work on cotton plantations. In South Carolina, the average price of slaves rose by nearly 80 percent (from $215 to $381) between the 1790s and the decade of 1800-1809.
Nonetheless, the domestic slave trade supplied planters with most of the slaves who worked on cotton plantations. As early as the 1760s, northern states were exporting slaves to the South; by the 1790s, the Mid-Atlantic States also became suppliers of slaves domestically. George Washington was aware of the rising interstate slave trade (already 22,000 sold in the 1790s in Virginia) and, in his will, stated, "I do hereby expressly forbid the Sale, or transportation out of said Commonwealth, of any Slave I may die possessed of, under any pretence whatsoever." Between 1800 and 1860, Virginians sold over 480,000 slaves to other states, primarily to cotton and sugar growing regions to the West. At least ten slave states exported more slaves than they imported; by 1860, an estimated 1.2 million enslaved persons were sold within the United States. Most domestic slaves were sold by marching them overland from market to fair to courthouse as the trader attempted to sell them. Slaves were often chained in "coffles" of 50, although some traders forced "droves" of 300 slaves to trek up to 600 miles for up to two months. Some coffles traveled on riverboats and the railroads in segregated facilities. Ocean-going vessels would carry loads of up to 150 slaves out of the coastal Chesapeake region on voyages of up to a month in duration.
In Africa, captains and slave traders would negotiate which assortment of trade goods (including iron bars, glass beads, rum, tobacco, and cotton textiles) they would exchange for slaves. Then, the slave ships would bring enslaved Africans to the United States to work on tobacco, rice, and ultimately sugar and cotton plantations. As northern mills in the United States entered the cotton textile trade, cheap American cottons found their way to the east coast of Africa, to Zanzibar. Nicknamed americani by the Africans, the textile was used to acquire ivory (then legal) by captains, such as William "Zanzibar" Smith in the mid-1830s, or to acquire slaves.
On picking cotton...
For every pound that is found short of the task, the punishment is one stroke of the bull-whip ... the "licks" are always regulated to an extreme nicety, so as only to cut the flesh and draw blood. But this quite bad enough, and my readers will readily comprehend that with the fear of this punishment ever before us at Jepsey James', it was no wonder we did our utmost to make up our daily weight of cotton in the hamper.
John Brown recalled in his narrative, "I picked so well at first, more was exacted of me, and if I flagged a minute, the whip was liberally applied to keep me up to the mark. My being driven in this way, I at last got to pick a hundred and sixty pounds a day ... ." South Carolina ex-slave John Andrew Jackson recalled, " ... each night there were two hours' whipping at the "ginning house," corroborated by Solomon Northrup, who remembered: After weighing, follow the whippings; and then the baskets are carried to the cotton house, and their contents stored away like hay, all hands being sent in to tramp it down. If the cotton is not dry, instead of taking it to the gin-house at once, it is laid upon platforms, two feet high and some three times as wide, covered with boards or plank, with narrow walks running between them.
In this third installment for Black Future Month, we're going to take a look at Black life, throughout the diaspora, from an economists perspective. What this means is we're going to look at the behavior and decision trends that paint a picture of our relationship with business and trade.
Below you will find reading material regarding the cotton industry in the United States. Internationally, cotton from India dominated the world stage, but US cotton was a strong competitor in several markets. Whether referred to as Negro, Black African, or slave, Blacks were involved in multiple roles in the production of this "white gold" and as we will see made many (slave and commodity traders, bankers, plantation owners, textile mill owners, wholesalers and retailers) rich in the process.
Other articles concerning Blacks, business, and trade will be found on facebook.com
Mypodcast.com is undergoing an afterhours server upgrade, so you will be able to find this week's mix at..
www.xstreamist.com/skywalker
The Cotton Economy
Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, India and the Orient provided most of the world's cotton, supplemented slightly by G. barbadense long-staple cotton produced after the 1740s in the South American colonies of Surinam (French) and Guyana (British and Dutch).
When the Revolutionary War ended a British entrepreneur William Rathbone IV started importing U.S. cotton into Liverpool. Planters eager to find something more profitable than tobacco, rice, and indigo began to experiment to fulfill British demand for more cotton.
In 1786, Bahamian G. barbadense seed was introduced into the new United States. Experimental plantings produced a crop in 1787 coastal Georgia; in Hilton Head, South Carolina; William Elliott sold his 1790 crop for ten and a half pence per pound. Prices for this desirable long-fiber cotton rose to five shillings (60 pence) per pound at Liverpool auctions by 1800. Since G. barbadense grew best on the islands off Georgia's Atlantic coast (Edisto, James, John, and Wadmalaw), it was nicknamed Sea Island cotton.
Short-staple G. hirsutum cotton could be grown in non-coastal upland areas and was nicknamed Upland cotton. The sturdy plant was already growing over a wide geographical range, but it presented a different problem. Upland cotton was so difficult to clean that the roller gin (short for engine) could not be used to clean the cotton. Instead, it took one person an entire day to tear one-two pounds of cotton from the clinging seeds. African slaves developed a type of comb to speed the process, and South Carolina inventor Hodgen Holmes experimented with a sawtooth device to clean the cotton; but there was nothing widely available that eased the bottleneck between field and factory. Unless someone could invent a machine to clean Upland cotton, it would be impossible to clean all the cotton necessary to meet British mills' demands.
No longer limited by the quantity that they could clean, planters began to plant vast amounts of Upland cotton. The yield per acre for Upland cotton in the South ranged from 100-1,500 pounds per acre, with a regional average of 530 pounds. While Sea Island cotton production remained constant at around 1.5 million pounds annually, Upland cotton production skyrocketed from around 150,000 pounds in 1793 to over 6.5 million pounds in 1795. Cotton profits also rose dramatically. By 1860, northern textile mills imported nearly 100 percent of their cotton from the South.
Government statistics from 1860 confirmed that the 12 wealthiest counties in the United States were in the South. However, cotton powered the economy of the entire country; the South purchased $30 million of mid-western food and $150 million of northern manufactured goods. Northern shipping and banking were also tied to the cotton economy. The South's "white gold" was not marketed directly to Europe; rather it was sent to New York where factors (who loaned money to planters in advance of the crop), commodities futures traders, and merchants shipped it to northeastern textile mills (which produced $100 million worth of cotton goods) or to Great Britain. Northern banks also provided loans to southern planters to purchase slaves and land. State and local governments also made money by taxing slavery through sales and inheritance taxes.
Furthermore, cotton had made the South a player in the world economy. While cotton exports totaled only $5 million (seven percent of total U.S. exports) in 1800, they rose to $30 million in 1830 (41 percent of U.S. exports) and reached $191 million in 1860 (57 percent of total U.S. exports). By 1850, cotton consumption averaged five and a half pounds per person in Great Britain and the United States, in large part because the price of cotton textiles had fallen to roughly one percent of their cost in 1784. Worldwide, southern cotton dominated two-thirds of the market. Southern cotton accounted for 70 percent of the raw material fueling Britain's industrial revolution, and British experts believed that Indian cotton could not replace it in quantity or quality. At least 16 percent of all Britons' jobs depended on textile manufacturing, while cotton fabric made up half of Britain's exports, and an estimated ten percent of Britain's wealth was tied to cotton. The cotton economy had also contributed to the creation of scores of banks in Great Britain (including Barclays) and the formation of the Stock Exchange of London in 1773.
The only thing that could limit cotton production was the need for labor; consequently, the demand for labor also skyrocketed. As early as April 23, 1795, cotton gin operators placed help-wanted ads in Augusta Georgia's Southern Sentinel & Universal Gazette to hire "negro boys and girls ten or twelve years old" to work the machinery. According to the Federal census of 1790, there were approximately 650,000 slaves in the southern states, many working on rice, tobacco, and indigo plantations. By 1850, there were 3.2 million slaves of whom 1.8 million were used to cultivate cotton.
The demand for additional slaves to put acreage into cotton production was met in part by the transatlantic slave trade and mostly by the interregional domestic slave trade. The United States imported approximately 300,000 slaves between 1778 and the end of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808 (Article I, Section 9, Clause 1, U.S. Constitution), almost as many as had been brought to the British colonies of North America from 1619-1778. In the single year of 1791, British traders carried 38,000 Africans to the United States. Most slaves were brought into the ports of Charleston and Savannah and put to work on cotton plantations. In South Carolina, the average price of slaves rose by nearly 80 percent (from $215 to $381) between the 1790s and the decade of 1800-1809.
Nonetheless, the domestic slave trade supplied planters with most of the slaves who worked on cotton plantations. As early as the 1760s, northern states were exporting slaves to the South; by the 1790s, the Mid-Atlantic States also became suppliers of slaves domestically. George Washington was aware of the rising interstate slave trade (already 22,000 sold in the 1790s in Virginia) and, in his will, stated, "I do hereby expressly forbid the Sale, or transportation out of said Commonwealth, of any Slave I may die possessed of, under any pretence whatsoever." Between 1800 and 1860, Virginians sold over 480,000 slaves to other states, primarily to cotton and sugar growing regions to the West. At least ten slave states exported more slaves than they imported; by 1860, an estimated 1.2 million enslaved persons were sold within the United States. Most domestic slaves were sold by marching them overland from market to fair to courthouse as the trader attempted to sell them. Slaves were often chained in "coffles" of 50, although some traders forced "droves" of 300 slaves to trek up to 600 miles for up to two months. Some coffles traveled on riverboats and the railroads in segregated facilities. Ocean-going vessels would carry loads of up to 150 slaves out of the coastal Chesapeake region on voyages of up to a month in duration.
In Africa, captains and slave traders would negotiate which assortment of trade goods (including iron bars, glass beads, rum, tobacco, and cotton textiles) they would exchange for slaves. Then, the slave ships would bring enslaved Africans to the United States to work on tobacco, rice, and ultimately sugar and cotton plantations. As northern mills in the United States entered the cotton textile trade, cheap American cottons found their way to the east coast of Africa, to Zanzibar. Nicknamed americani by the Africans, the textile was used to acquire ivory (then legal) by captains, such as William "Zanzibar" Smith in the mid-1830s, or to acquire slaves.
On picking cotton...
For every pound that is found short of the task, the punishment is one stroke of the bull-whip ... the "licks" are always regulated to an extreme nicety, so as only to cut the flesh and draw blood. But this quite bad enough, and my readers will readily comprehend that with the fear of this punishment ever before us at Jepsey James', it was no wonder we did our utmost to make up our daily weight of cotton in the hamper.
John Brown recalled in his narrative, "I picked so well at first, more was exacted of me, and if I flagged a minute, the whip was liberally applied to keep me up to the mark. My being driven in this way, I at last got to pick a hundred and sixty pounds a day ... ." South Carolina ex-slave John Andrew Jackson recalled, " ... each night there were two hours' whipping at the "ginning house," corroborated by Solomon Northrup, who remembered: After weighing, follow the whippings; and then the baskets are carried to the cotton house, and their contents stored away like hay, all hands being sent in to tramp it down. If the cotton is not dry, instead of taking it to the gin-house at once, it is laid upon platforms, two feet high and some three times as wide, covered with boards or plank, with narrow walks running between them.