“King Cotton” Diplomacy Didn’t Work for the Confederacy; “Tsar Energy” Won’t Work for Russia
On March 4, 1858, Senator James Hammond of South Carolina rose in the chamber and delivered a bold speech:
Without firing a gun, without drawing a sword, should they make war on us, we could bring the whole world to our feet… What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years?…England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her, save the South. No, you dare not make war on cotton. No power dares make war on it. Cotton is king!
By that time the belief that the American South was unassailable because the world depended on its cotton was sacrosanct in the South. The book that popularized it, Cotton is King by David Christy, published in 1855, was as widely read and revered in the pro-slavery South as Uncle Tom’s Cabin was in the abolitionist North. The idea became dogma to the plantation-owning oligarchs and politicians of the South, encouraging their bellicosity, their threats of secession, and the specter of civil war.
Vladimir Putin’s Russia seems to have been as cocksure that dependency on its exports of oil and natural gas would prevent the international community from opposing its designs as Jefferson Davis’s Confederacy was of its own cotton-padded protection. This proposition will now be tested as the United States has forsworn all Russian Oil imports and European nations are announcing their plans to become independent of Russian energy as quickly as possible. The U.S. imports no natural gas and about 8% of its crude oil from Russia while the European Union imports about 40% of its natural gas and almost 30% of its crude oil, so the far greater economic blow would be taken by the bloc.
The South’s “King Cotton” argument wasn’t so much that the North wouldn’t attack the South - a war to restore the Union would, in fact, be one way to reclaim its cotton - but that the nations of Europe, particularly England and France, would at the very least recognize the legitimate statehood of the new Confederacy or - and this is further evidence of the delusional hold that “King Cotton’s” power had on the Southern mind - that the nations of Europe, with their imposing Navies, would come to their defense, going to war against the industrial North in exchange for low-tariff cotton.
When the war began and the North blockaded Southern ports, Europe was indeed nervous. England imported about 80% of its cotton from the South, and France imported a whopping 93% in 1860. Entire cities like Lyon and Lancashire depended on the staple crop for their economic survival. As the English satirical magazine Punch put it:
Though with the North we sympathies
It must not be forgotten
That with the South we’ve stronger ties
Which are composed of cotton.
The American cotton trade shrank, and the Confederate citizens of New Orleans proudly burned tens of thousands of dollars worth of cotton on their wharves and levies rather than let it fall into Union hands when the city was captured. And yet for the duration of the war, England and France remained neutral, never officially recognizing the Confederacy as a sovereign nation.
The big-picture explanation why is that the moral argument ultimately defeated the economic one: England and France, having abolished slavery and fought hard to bring the Atlantic slave trade to heel, couldn’t very well ally themselves with a force proudly fighting to protect the evil institution. For the first part of the war, while Lincoln’s administration - attempting to appease moderates and border states - insisted that it was fighting for Union and not abolition, many upper-class Europeans did favor the South for economic reasons. They rationalized this partisanship by wondering aloud by what right the Americans - with all their high-minded talk of independence, liberty, and self-determination - could violently stop the Southern states from seceding, an argument heard from Putin apologists today who wonder why America and its allies, with their cataclysmic blunders and follies in Iraq and Afghanistan, should have any business intervening in Ukraine.
Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation - by turning the Union’s war aims explicitly into an abolitionist moral cause - made European diplomatic fence-sitting untenable. Many politicians grumbled to each other that the Proclamation itself was a cynical attempt to play on European public opinion. And in part it was - Lincoln himself said that “no European power would dare to recognize and aid the Southern Confederacy if it became clear that the Confederacy stands for slavery and the Union for freedom.” But its two main effects - freeing the slaves in the Southern states and giving greater moral weight to the fight - stand up as righteous on their own.
It is tempting to seek neat historical equivalencies when the battle-lines of good and evil seem so neatly drawn as in the case of a Confederacy fighting for the right to enslave people or a giant autocratic country attempting to wipe out its much smaller democratic neighbor. But differences abound. For one, US Secretary of State Henry Seward was much more wont to issue bombastic Putin-esque threats that “the whole world will be engulfed and revolution will be the harvest!” if Europe dared intervene in the war.
Ironically, Tsarist Russia was the only great power that was consistently and explicitly pro-Union throughout the war (hoping that a unified US would remain an Atlantic counterbalance to the Western European naval powers, who would have benefited from a weak and divided America.) It also must be admitted that in the case of the Civil War, it was technically the North who fought against the Confederacy’s sovereignty, which seemed to be the popular will of the South’s white citizens - the only people whose votes were counted.
But a few general lessons may be gleaned from the South’s hubristic faith in King Cotton and why Europe didn’t take the bait. The first is that the Confederacy grossly underestimated European public opinion on the moral evil of slavery: France and England decided that, despite the inevitable economic damage, it was still worth not recognizing - or bankrolling - a slave nation’s armies. Thus the moral case for ditching Russian oil would need to be made explicit always.
Second, the citizens of the nations that rely on the resource need to be constantly reminded that there will be economic pain for them but that the cause is righteous enough that they must bear it. After the Emancipation Proclamation, textile workers in Manchester publicly voted their support of Lincoln and the Union, effectively declaring that their own immediate plight was nothing if the cotton they worked and wove might soon be picked by the hands of free men and women. Similar acts of labor solidarity have been seen in the past week, as when British dock workers refused to unload Russian oil.
Third, governments have to take take strong and clear measures to ease the economic sufferings of the population and to reassure them. During the cotton shortages, European nations increased bread subsidies to textile centers, began public works projects to employ workers, released surplus cotton from storage, and pivoted to encouraging the linen and wool industries.
Following from that, the fourth lesson is that some economic interests will end up trumping ethical ones, leading to moral compromises and lesser Faustian bargains; right now the US is courting the Russian-allied Venezuelan government of Nicolas Maduro partly in the hopes that that country’s oil reserves might soften the blow to the world economy. During the Civil War, Britain’s plan to become independent from American cotton rested entirely on exploiting the people and land of Egypt and India with an even heavier Imperial hand.
The fifth lesson is a dark one: despite the blockade of Southern cotton, despite the British and French refusal to recognize or aid the Confederacy, despite the fact that the nations and empires of Europe were officially and outspokenly against slavery, the Civil War ground on for five sanguinary years before the South surrendered. One of the many reasons for this was that, in spite of all reason and evidence to the contrary, the dogma of “King Cotton’s” power had become fully embedded in the Southern mind.
One can hope that the sooner Russia learns that much of the world would rather suffer than consume another drop of “Tsar Energy” to support Putin’s cause, the sooner Russia might realize that that cause is ultimately a lost one.