Читать книгу A Vast and Fiendish Plot: - Clint Johnson - Страница 13

Had it not been for a free-spending Southern agricultural economy, New York City’s mercantile and shipping economy might never have taken off in the nineteenth century.

At first, the South did not need the North. For more than 180 years since 1612 when John Rolfe of the Jamestown colony in Virginia successfully crossbred a native strain of tobacco with a strain the Spanish had developed in the Bahamas, the South’s prosperity had been linked to tobacco. Grown, dried, packed in barrels, and then shipped back across the Atlantic from Jamestown, tobacco proved wildly popular with the nicotine-addicted customers in England. More than ten tons of tobacco was shipped to England in 1619.

At the same time Jamestown was thriving with its tobacco exports, the Dutch West India Company in New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island was still figuring out how to secure a steady supply of beaver pelts from the western frontier of their fledgling colony.

Jamestown, which only ten years earlier had almost been starved into oblivion, was proving to be a magnificent investment, whereas the future of the Dutch colony on Manhattan was uncertain.

While tobacco was the crop that made Virginians successful, another plant grew well in the South that had the potential to surpass tobacco in demand among all of Western civilization, not just the smokers. That was cotton, an easy-to-grow fiber that had been spun into thread, woven into cloth, and then cut and sewn into garments since biblical times. The major problem with cotton, however, was removing the seeds embedded in the fiber.

For years English importers had bought bales of cotton from countries like Egypt, broke it up into hundreds of lots, and then delivered the lots to the homes of contract workers who picked out the seeds and then spun the fibers into thread. This “cottage industry” worked, but the huge investment in time of removing the seeds meant cotton was a fiber that only the rich could afford to have made into clothes. Then along came a Connecticut Yankee.

On a visit to a Southern plantation in 1793, Eli Whitney noticed the slaves laboriously picking out the cotton seeds one seed at a time. He watched for a while, grabbed some cotton for himself, and then retired to a workshop. Within months he had developed what he called a cotton engine, a drum studded with metal teeth that easily removed the seeds from the cotton fibers. The work of thousands of fingers that had cleaned the picked cotton of seeds had been eliminated. Those same fingers were now free to pick the cotton from the fields.

At the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, the American South was poised to introduce itself to the world’s economy as the largest supplier of cotton. This introduction came quickly. Cotton exports from the United States climbed dramatically with eight times the volume of cotton heading for England in 1804 compared with 1796, just three years after the invention of the cotton gin. In 1793, cotton clothes were worn by just 4 percent of the population in Europe and the United States. Over the next one hundred years, that figure jumped to 73 percent.

Sailing directly from the four major cotton ports of Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, and New Orleans to the two major English cotton-milling ports of Manchester and Liverpool would have made the most sense for cotton growers. But that is not how the trade developed. New York may have been far from the Southern cotton fields, but early in the cotton trade in the late 1700s until the 1850s, it became the major port from which Southern cotton made its way across the Atlantic.

All the Southern ports had water deep enough to handle most of the oceangoing ships that could have made it to England safely, but New York had some important, nonnautical advantages over any Southern ports.

Most important of all, the city had financial infrastructure. New York’s banks had been dealing with the British textile manufacturers and their system of bills of exchange for fifty years. The city was home base to cotton brokers who visited the South to negotiate both the selling and the buying ends of a cotton transaction. These brokers ingratiated themselves with growers, convincing them there was no need for them to take care of the financial end of the business personally when their time could be better spent managing the slave labor force to grow more cotton.

Besides banks, the city also had scores of maritime insurance companies willing to insure ships and their cargoes on the voyage across the stormy Atlantic. Finally, New York had a long history of building and outfitting ships that could ply the world’s seas carrying tons of whatever crops the South wanted to export.

New York’s harbor also had a huge advantage over Southern ports in that it already had a long history of handling imports from Europe and a burgeoning population that wanted European imports. The Southern ports might be able to load up a large, heavy ship with cotton bales heading to England, but the South’s smaller population meant there was less demand for goods coming from Europe to fill the same ship going back to the same port. In 1860, right before the war, New Orleans, the South’s most successful port exported 107 million dollars’ worth of goods (primarily cotton) while importing only 22 million dollars’ worth of goods.

To handle the trade imbalance, instead of sailing directly to Europe, Southern cotton was loaded in Southern ports, taken to New York, and off-loaded onto larger ships that then sailed to England or New England. The smaller ships that had delivered the cotton to New York then sailed back south loaded with whatever goods Southerners purchased from New York importers.

While the managers of Southern ports could try to argue that it was much easier and less costly to ship cotton directly to England or New England without the time and expense of off-loading in New York, those port managers had no answer if asked which Southern banks would handle the intricate financial transactions with the final buyers of the cotton who could be six thousand miles away. In 1845, the total number of banks in seven Southern states that produced cotton was 102, with a combined capital of $64 million and loans of $65 million. Alabama had only six banks in the entire state, and Mississippi, one of the major cotton-producing states, did not have a single one.

New York State alone had 150 banks with capital of $44 million and loans of $70 million. Most of those New York State banks were based in New York City.

In the early nineteenth century, within a decade of the invention of Whitney’s cotton gin, as much as one quarter of the cotton reaching England came through New York’s harbor. Just twenty years into the nineteenth century, cotton accounted for up to 40 percent of the city’s exports to Europe. In 1850, the New York Herald wrote that New York would be “a great distribution point” for cotton.

Even though shipping their cotton through New York added hundreds of sea miles and weeks of time before their product could reach their customers, Southerners put up with it. Their New York cotton brokers had convinced them the system worked.

While the cotton growers never did a cost-benefit analysis, it was obvious to New Yorkers that the system worked very well for them. A host of intertwined New York businesses fed off the huge profits that moving the cotton through the city’s ports generated. Off-loading the cotton from ships coming from the South and then reloading it onto ships bound for Boston or England kept thousands of stevedores employed on the docks. Tracking the handling of those same bales kept clerks employed. Taking the bales to a New England or English port and then returning with agricultural equipment and luxury goods kept shipowners, their captains, and crews employed. Selling the latest Paris fashions to Southern belles kept New York City dry goods store owners employed. Importing the latest English steel plows or selling the more expensive ones manufactured in New England to Southern planters kept the agricultural merchants employed.

Eventually, the New York brokers gave in to the complaints of Southern growers who sometimes watched the price of cotton fall while their crop was still languishing on a New York dock when it could have been already spun into cloth had it sailed directly from Charleston.

The tonnage of cotton actually passing through New York declined in the mid-1850s, but cotton remained the mainstay of Northern trade. The shipowners were New Yorkers; the bankers who advanced Southern plantation owners the cash to plant and raise cotton were New Yorkers; the men who insured the ships and the cargo were New Yorkers; and the merchants who sold Southerners expensive goods and furnishings once the cotton was sold were New Yorkers. About the only New Yorkers who lost out on the slow shift of direct shipping from grower to spinning mill owner were the city’s dockworkers. Everyone else continued to make money on the fiber.

Giddy New Yorkers and grumpy Southerners both estimated that as much as forty cents of every dollar exchanged for cotton went to New Yorkers. New Yorkers had not planted, cultivated, picked, or baled any cotton, nor had they taken on any of the risk of flood, drought, wind, hail, or insects destroying that year’s crop, but they reaped the lion’s share of the profits from cotton.

New York bankers defended their involvement by insisting that were it not for wise New Yorkers handling the financial transactions, the babes-in-the-woods Southerners would be taken advantage of by the wily British textile manufacturers.

“Without the intervention of the great capital and demand at New York, the producer would be entirely at the mercy of the buyer in whatever port abroad his cotton might land, and he would in no case find a greater economy than at present,” observed one banking insider.

Other Northerners insisted that Southerners should thank their lucky stars that Northern bankers deemed cotton growers worthy of receiving Northern loans.

“The growth in wealth in the cotton states may be traced almost entirely to eastern capital. Everybody knows that the cotton planters of the Southwestern states procure large supplies of clothing for their slaves and of every article required for their own consumption, upon credit from the neighbouring merchants, in anticipation of the next year’s crop,” wrote one economist.

And it was not just from raw cotton passing through the city both literally and figuratively that New Yorkers were getting profits. The New York Journal of Commerce, a New York City publication, estimated that just in 1849 alone, Southerners had purchased more than 76 million dollars’ worth of goods from New York merchants. A decade later, another economist estimated that figure had nearly doubled, and the five major cotton states of the South (Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, Mississippi, and Alabama) had contributed more than $200 million in business for New Yorkers.

Even that considerable sum may be underestimated, as later economists believed that nineteenth century economists had not figured indirect financial benefits such as New York’s in-transit trade with New England and Midwestern states. These regions also manufactured considerable goods and foodstuffs that passed through New York on their way to the South. Inevitably, Northern culture and Southern culture began to touch each other, though both would have rejected merging either outright.

Southerners began to think of New York City as a vacation destination to see live theater, buy furnishings, shop for diamonds at Tiffany and Company (founded in 1853), and eat at famous restaurants such as Delmonico’s (founded in 1837).

In 1836, a Southern novelist sounded like a member of the New York Chamber of Commerce when he wrote: “Every southerner should visit New York. It would allay provincial prejudices, and calm his excitement against his Northern countrymen. The people here are warm-hearted, generous, and enthusiastic, in a degree scarcely inferior to our own southerners.”

Getting a tour of duty at New York’s Fort Hamilton was considered a plum assignment for all young officers. Lieutenant Robert E. Lee, U.S. Army, would often take the ferry from Brooklyn to New York City because he enjoyed riding his horse down Broadway.

Lieutenant Thomas J. Jackson would be less interested in the bright lights of Broadway, but more interested in studying religion at his stay at Fort Hamilton. Jackson would be baptized at St. John’s Episcopalian church in Brooklyn. Twenty years later when he was a professor at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia, Jackson, twice married, would bring both of his wives at different times to New York City. On one trip, he visited a famed New York hydrotherapist at 47 Bond Street (today’s Il Boco restaurant in NoHo). On another honeymoon, Jackson and his second wife climbed Trinity Church’s steeple to get a good look at the city.

Professor Jackson remained impressed with New York City for the rest of his life. When he bought a house in Lexington, Virginia, he ordered furniture from a New York City merchant.

In July 1861, Professor Jackson would win the nickname of Stonewall at the Battle of Manassas, Virginia.

Business interests occasionally sent New Yorkers south where they, too, felt welcome. Scotsman Archibald Gracie settled in New York in 1784 where he first found employment as a merchant. Later, he saw the value of New York’s harbor and launched a shipping line. Gracie’s son, Archibald II, moved to Mobile, Alabama, in order to feed the cotton better from the South to his father’s shipping line in New York. His son, Archibald III, continued in the family business of raising and shipping cotton.

The Gracie family made so much money in the cotton trade that they built a large mansion overlooking the East River. In 1942 the City of New York bought the Gracie Mansion that cotton built and made it the official residence of the mayor of New York City.

The business instincts of New Yorkers wanting to please long-term customers came into play whenever there was trouble in the South. When hot climate diseases such as malaria or yellow fever swept through Southern cities that were close to their cotton customers, New Yorkers organized relief missions or sent money. Those gestures were recognized and honored by Southerners who could curse greedy New Yorkers one year and praise the generosity of those same New Yorkers the next year. When yellow fever struck New Orleans in 1853, New York merchants sent money, resulting in a New Orleans city resolution saying, “We thank you for those generous exertions which have enabled us to comfort our sick and bury our dead. May you never need a return of our sympathy, but rest assured our hearts are throbbing with gratitude, and will ever be open to the call of humanity.”

It was during the Panic of 1857 that New Yorkers realized how important the South was to the city. A mild nationwide recession in 1856 turned into a nasty and deep recession in 1857. The international causes included a drop in American grain prices when England and Russia reentered the market after ending the Crimean War. Another cause was England pulling most of its cash investments out of U.S. banks to pay its war debts. Domestically, American banks and railroads failed after a rash of land speculation on future rail routes. The final straw came in September when the SS Central America, a ship loaded with more than three tons of gold coins, sank off the coast of North Carolina. The loss of that gold, which had been on its way to New York City banks, cast doubt in the minds of investors and merchants that the United States could back up its paper money with hard assets.

Within weeks of the start of the panic, every region of the country was affected except the South. Businesses and banks were failing all over the nation, but cotton prices on the world market remained stable, so the South’s economy remained solidly in the black. Southerners continued buying from New York merchants and dealing with New York banks and cotton brokers as if nothing was happening in the economy that could affect their spending.

The successful cotton planters essentially sat out the short-lived severe recession. That meant that the steady infusion of Southern cash kept New York City’s merchants and port workers employed, successfully weathering the losses they were suffering from drops in business from other regions.

New Yorkers knew that free-spending Southerners had saved the city, and they were willing to do just about anything to keep the symbiotic relationship between the slaveholding South and the cotton-dependent metropolis intact. That included speaking up for the rights of slaveholders.

As the Panic of 1857 was ending, the nation was seeing a resurgence of abolitionist talk. In 1833, the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) was founded in New York by a handful of black and white ministers and a tiny number of merchants either who did not cater to Southerners or who felt compelled to speak out against the immorality of slavery.

Most of the city’s businessmen feared what could happen if the abolitionist movement took hold in New York City. According to them, freeing the Southern slaves would mean the end of civilization, at least in New York City.

James Watson Webb, owner and editor of the Courier and Enquirer, the largest circulating newspaper in the city and the nation, raged when he heard of the formation of the AASS: “Are we tamely to look on, and see this most dangerous species of fanaticism extending itself through society?…Or shall we, by promptly and fearlessly crushing this many-headed hydra in the bud, expose the weakness as well as the folly, madness and mischief of these bold and dangerous men?”

Despite Webb’s warnings, the AASS continued to preach against slavery. Two years after its founding, a merchant, identified only as “a partner in one of the most prominent mercantile houses in the city,” spoke candidly to abolitionist Samuel J. May at a meeting in May 1835. The man asked May to walk with him so he could quietly deliver a threat that was not even veiled:

Mr. May, we are not such fools as to not know that slavery is a great evil, a great wrong. But a great portion of the property of the Southerners is invested under its sanction; and the business of the North, as well as of the South, has become adjusted to it. There are millions upon millions of dollars due from Southerners to the merchants and merchants alone, the payment of which would be jeopardized by any rupture between the North and the South. We cannot afford, sir, to let you and your associates endeavor to overthrow slavery. It is not a matter of principles with us. It is a matter of business necessity…. We mean, sir, to put you abolitionists down by fair means if we can, by foul means if we must.

Twenty-five years later, attitudes had not changed. Abolitionists who had no ties to the trade in cotton or with the South were continuing to preach that slaves should be freed, even if it meant the collapse of the Southern economy. The defenders of slavery had not given in either. Even on the brink of the American Civil War, New York City’s bankers, merchants, and average citizens were still searching for ways to protect the South’s institution of slavery.

A prominent Southern journal warned of a New York calamity in very plain language if slavery were abolished. In 1859, months before the November 1860 presidential election, Alfred A. Smith, a South Carolina–based writer for the New Orleans–based agricultural journal De Bow’s Review, predicted that the South would secede if a “Black Republican” (Lincoln) were elected president.

In making his point that the North needed the South, Smith quoted export records that the South had exported more than 2 billion dollars’ worth of goods from 1821 to 1855 compared with only $990 million from the North. Furthermore, Smith found that the Northern textile mills consumed more than 82 percent of the cotton bales produced for domestic use. Smith then made a prediction if pressure on the South to free the slaves forced it out of the Union and into a confederacy of other Southern states:

What would become of this interest if the supply of Southern cotton should be cut off? What would become of the immense mercantile marine of the country? What would become of the great metropolis New-York? The ships would rot at her docks; grass would grow in Wall Street and Broadway; and the glory of New York, like Babylon and Rome, would be numbered with the things that are past.

New Yorkers were not sure if Smith’s predictions were hyperbole or not. They were not willing to take the chance. On the issue of continuing slavery in the South, New York would support the South.