King Cotton

Common card · No. 351062

"King Cotton" is a slogan that summarized the strategy used before the American Civil War (of 1861–1865) by secessionists in the southern states to claim the feasibility of secession and to prove there was no need to fear a war against the federal government. The theory held that control over cotton exports would make a proposed independent Confederacy economically prosperous, would ruin the textile industry of New England, and—most importantly—would force the United Kingdom and perhaps France to support the Confederacy militarily because their industrial economies depended on Southern cotton. By 1861, many of the most powerful governments in the world had made commitments against slavery, and for this reason, the Confederacy realised that they had to use cotton as the "selling point" of their new republic and not slavery. The emancipation of slaves in the West Indies and the general abolition of slavery was economically costly for Britain, and this was one of the reasons why southern...

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