Slavery: Not Just Something For The South

Slavery: Not Just Something For The South

Part III

Thank you, Belle, I hope you and others will enjoy this thread and will be able to add to it as we go along.  It's new ground (at least for me, and I'm sure, for at least some others) but it sheds new light on our country, a country where we pride ourselves on being "the best and the brightest".  I would hope that we would also like to be the best informed about our own history.  Slavery was not just restricted to the South, although with the apologies being made right and left, we give the impression to the world that slavery must have sprung full-grown right in the middle of the South and stayed confined there.

Nothing could be further from the truth.  And although I think it's absurd for a people who never owned slaves to apologize to a people who never were slaves, if we're going through with this absurdity, then by all means, New England step forth and start with your own apologizing, unless your own history has been such a well-kept secret that you are unaware of your own part in slavery's history.

As I have said, I would like very much for this thread to delve into what was happening in the nation's financial and manufacturing centers, like New York and Massachusetts.

The years leading up to the war saw hundreds of New York businesses, and countless more throughout the North, connected to, and dependent upon, cotton. As New York became the fulcrum of the U.S. cotton trade, merchants, shippers, auctioneers, bankers, brokers, insurers, and thousands of others were drawn to the burgeoning urban center. They literally packed lower Manhattan, turning it into the nation's emporium, in which products from all over the world were traded.

In these prewar decades, hundreds of shrewd merchants and smart businessmen made their fortunes in ventures directly or indirectly tied to cotton. The names of some of them still strike a note today.

Three brothers in Montgomery, Alabama were cotton brokers before they moved to New York and helped to establish the New York Cotton Exchange. Today of course, the world knows Lehman Brothers as an international investment firm.

One industrious father, Junius Morgan, arranged for his son, J. Pierpont Morgan, to study the cotton trade in the South as the future industrialist and banker was beginning his business career. Morgan Sr., a Massachusetts native who became a major banker and cotton broker in London, understood that knowledge of the cotton trade was essential to prospering in the commercial world in the 1850s.

Real estate and shipping magnate John Jacob Astor - one of America's first millionaires (and namesake of the Waldorf-Astoria and whole neighborhoods in New York City) made his fortune in furs and the China trade. But Astor's ships, like those of many successful merchantshippers, also carried tons of cotton.

An ambitious young man who dreamed of opening a "fancy goods" store in New York was given money by his father, who operated a cotton mill in eastern Connecticut. The son opened his first store, on Broadway, in 1837. But more important than the $500 stake made from cotton was the young man's destination and timing: Charles L. Tiffany had begun serving a city in extraordinary, and enduring, economic ascent.

Most people know about Archibald Gracie, the Scotsman who immigrated to New York after training in Liverpool, Great Britain's great cotton port. He became an international shipping magnate, a merchant prince, building a summer home on the East River , Gracie Mansion, which is the official residence of the mayor of New York.
His son and grandson left the city to become cotton brokers in Mobile, Alabama.

It is vital to understand the economic climate - the vast opportunities for wealth that the cotton trade created, and that linked New York City so tightly to the South. Before the Civil War, the city's fortunes, its very future, were considered by many to be inseparable from those of the cotton-producing states.

Many in New York's business community had thought privately, and occasionally in the pages of journals, that the city would be better off as a "free port," independent of tariff-levying politicians in Albany and Washington. As America unraveled many Northern politicians and businessmen became frantic to reach out to their most important constituency: Southern planters.

The secession crisis not only threatened New York but in Massachusetts, birthplace of America, and the center of an increasingly troublesome movement called abolitionism, the Southern states frequent threats to secede had become an ongoing nightmare for powerful textile industry leaders.

By 1860 New England was home to 472 cotton mills, built on rivers & streams throughout the region.  Thompson, Connecticut alone, for example, had 7 mills within its nine-square-mile area. Hundreds of other textile mills were scattered in New York State, New Jersey, and elsewhere in the North. Just between 1830 and 1840, Northern mills consumed more than 100 million pounds of Southern cotton. The economy of New England was connected with shipping and manufacturing included, to textiles.

There are many American staples such as corn, wheat, and tobacco that have an exalted status in our nation's history, as well as other resources: whale oil, coal, and gold that were main characters in defining chapters of American history. I hope to be able to unravel the movers and shakers behind some of these fortunes and how their attitudes would have been effected by the war. So much is known about Southerners and how they made their profit. It should be interesting to see what the North and other sections of the country had been doing before the event that transformed this country forever.

By Allen (Piewacket1861) He is member in the forum