Tuesday, June 27, 2017

The Cotton Kingdom












dmoelling said...

Bernard Bailyn's history of early US settlement "The Barbarous Years" gives a good feeling for the initial settlement of north and south. He follows the initial indentured servant labor force as a natural foundation for future transition to slavery. The motivations of the settler groups as treasure hunters and unprepared adventurers rather than farmers is clear as well. The large land grants by the Crown mimicked the English experience and limited small holders.

When you think of the transportation difficulties in sending goods across the Atlantic at time, only high margin goods fit the bill.

Sam L. said...

Besides malaria, there was hookworm.

Prejudice of blacks on blacks and whites on whites...has always been with us.

How did you hear of this book?

RichardJohnson said...

How did you hear of this book?

A good possibility is my comment in Boomer Pharisaism.

james said...

I've been trying to persuade our civil-war buff daughter to read it.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

@ Sam and Richard. That link goes back eventually to a First Things article that I recognised on sight, so that's probably it.

@dmoelling - my go-to book on that subject has always been Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer, which describes the four distinct waves of British migration to America: different regions of origin, different decades, different religion, different class. Fascinating stuff. You can easily see the two Southern cultures (Cavaliers 1640's, Scots-Irish 1740's) in Olmsted's book, though he does not describe them in those terms.

David Foster said...

See also the writings of Fanny Kemble, a famous British actress who married an American and lived on his plantation in Georgia. I reviewed and excerpted some of her work here:


David Foster said...

"Nothing was manufactured in the South"

There was a man named William Gregg who was a strong advocate of southern industrialization. He built and operated a large cotton mill and preached tirelessly about the benefits of industry, but was unable to get much traction among his fellow southernors.

David Foster said...

An interesting piece on William Gregg and his big textile mill and village.


Assistant Village Idiot said...

There was some cultural resistance based on prevailing views of the exercising of the will. I had always thought the phrase "to work like a nigger" referred solely to working long hours at difficult and unpleasant tasks, something like our current idiom "to work like a dog." It did mean some of that, but it also meant to work under the direction of others, which was considered shameful. This was also part of why it was hard to get boys to go to school.

RichardJohnson said...


That sounds correct. At one workplace a work colleague from Colombia told me "Trabaja como un negro," (You work like a black/negro), as a compliment to my work ethic. BTW,the work was mental, not physical.

Thus far, I have only skimmed Cotton Kingdom, or the 3 works that fed into Cotton Kingdom. AVI has unintentionally shamed me into getting going on reading cover to cover.
Similarly, Fanny Kemble has been on my bookshelf for years- unread.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

I think that's all the phrase does mean now. But I have only heard it from townies in Williamsburg forty years ago, and seen it in print a few times, so that's a small sample. I have heard a black man use it laughingly when about to start a task. All of those were about working hard, toughing it out. Nothing about being driven by another.

Texan99 said...

https://archive.org/details/walkstalksofamer00olmsuoft -- link to an archive.org online view of the book. Images of good quality; this is the site we use at Project Gutenberg to double-check the lower-res scans we normally rely on for ordinary proofing.