Since the earliest days of colonial America, the relationship between cotton and the African-American experience has been central to the history of the republic. America's most serious social tragedy, slavery and its legacy, spread only where cotton could be grown. Both before and after the Civil War, blacks were assigned to the cotton fields while a pervasive racial animosity and fear of a black migratory invasion caused white Northerners to contain blacks in the South. Gene Dattel's pioneering study explores the historical roots of these most central social issues. In telling detail Mr. Dattel shows why the vastly underappreciated story of cotton is a key to understanding America's rise to economic power. When cotton production exploded to satiate the nineteenth-century textile industry's enormous appetite, it became the first truly complex global business and thereby a major driving force in U.S. territorial expansion and sectional economic integration. It propelled New York City to commercial preeminence and fostered independent trade between Europe and the United States, providing export capital for the new nation to gain its financial "sea legs" in the world economy. Without slave-produced cotton, the South could never have initiated the Civil War, America's bloodiest conflict at home. Mr. Dattel's skillful historical analysis identifies the commercial forces that cotton unleashed and the pervasive nature of racial antipathy it produced. This is a story that has never been told in quite the same way before, related here with the authority of a historian with a profound knowledge of the history of international finance. With 23 black-and-white illustrations.

Part I: Slavery in the Making of the ConstitutionChapter 1: The Silent Issue at the Constitutional ConventionPart II: The Engine of American Growth, 1787-1861Chapter 2: Birth of an ObsessionChapter 3: Land Expansion and White Migration to the Old SouthwestChapter 4: The Movement of Slaves to the Cotton StatesChapter 5: The Business of CottonChapter 6: The Roots of WarPart III: The North: For Whites Only, 1800-1865Chapter 7: Being Free and Black in the NorthChapter 8: The Colonial NorthChapter 9: Race Moves WestChapter 10: Tocqueville on Slavery, Race, and Money in AmericaPart IV: King Cotton Buys a WarChapter 11: Cultivating a Crop, Cultivating a StrategyChapter 12: Great Britain and the Civil WarChapter 13: Cotton and Confederate FinanceChapter 14: Procuring ArmsChapter 15: Cotton Trading in the United StatesChapter 16: Cotton and the FreedmenPart V: The Racial Divide and Cotton Labor, 1865-1930Chapter 17: New Era, Old ProblemsChapter 18: Ruling the Freedmen in the Cotton FieldsChapter 19: Reconstruction Meets RealityChapter 20: The Black Hand on the Cotton BollChapter 21: From Cotton Field to Urban Ghetto: The Chicago ExperiencePart VI: Cotton Without Slaves, 1865-1930Chapter 22: King Cotton ExpandsChapter 23: The Controlling Laws of Cotton FinanceChapter 24: The Delta Plantation: Labor and LandChapter 25: The Planter Experience in the Twentieth CenturyChapter 26: The Long-Awaited Mechanical Cotton PickerChapter 27: The Abdication of King Cotton