The Pride of Wealth and Lust for Power

FOSTERED BY THE COTTON MONOPOLY, THE CAUSE OF THE REBELLION – TWO CLASSES OF SLAVEHOLDERS – ONE FOR THE UNION – KING COTTON AN INSULT TO GREAT BRITAIN AND FRANCE, AND A CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE COMMERCIAL WORLD.

TO ABRAHAM LINCOLN, President of the United States:

Respected Sir:  I propose to consider in this Letter the causes which have led to impending Rebellion, and to show the advocates of emancipation that they have every reason to be satisfied with the progress that operation is making.

The cause or causes of the rebellion may be summed up in the single phrase, Pride of Wealth and Lust of Power.  These are not peculiar to the South, but have their influence in the North as well.  North and South they pervade, with honorable exceptions, those classes of society which find means to live and enrich themselves without manual labor.  North as well as South the feelings of these classes revolt against a Government controlled by the toiling millions, and would overthrow it if they could.  In the North the attempt would be hopeless, and the aristocratic classes quietly acquiesce in things as they are.  In the cotton region of the South the laborers have no political rights, and the aristocratic classes govern in all that relates to local affairs.  But they are not content with that. – Their pride revolts at association in any government, however mild and beneficent, in which laboring men participate directly or indirectly.  To get rid of such a government, though it has been the chief source of all their prosperity, is the object of the present rebellion.  The avowed design of the South Carolina leaders is the organization of a community composed of gentlemen and laborers, in which the gentlemen shall be the masters and the laborers their slaves. – To this end they were, before the rebellion broke out, avowedly in favor of re-opening the African slave trade and have since submitted with a bad grace to a restriction in the Confederate constitution, dictated by an apprehension that it would not be safe at present so far to outrage the feelings of the civilized world.

But there is a considerable class of slaveholders, especially in the border slave holding states, who do not entertain this antipathy to labor. – It is composed of men of moderate means owning but few slaves.  They are the self-made men, whose industry and economy have enabled them to purchase one or more slaves, and they may often be seen at work in the same field with their own negroes.  They do not sympathize with cotton, rice, and sugar planters, who reckon their slaves by the hundreds, and who never put their own hands to the plow, the hoe, or the axe.  These small slaveholders, numerically probably more numerous than the richer class, have no repugnance to being associated in a Government controlled in part by the laboring men of the North, and they are generally faithful to the Constitution and the Union.  Slavery does not make them rebels.

Cotton is a more prolific element than slavery in generating the “pride of wealth and lust for power” which have produced the rebellion, tho’ both have co-operated.  Had cotton, like wheat and corn, been a product of the North as well as the South, its cultivation would not have been a source of inordinate wealth to Southern planters; for the free labor of the North would then have been brought into direct competition with the slave labor of the South., and the price of the article would have been reduced to a moderate profit.  But climate has given to the South a monopoly of this culture, and it is a monopoly not at all dependent on the existence of slavery.  It would still exist as effectually as it does now if slavery were swept out of existence, and the commercial effect would probably in that event be an enhancement of the price.

The invention of the cotton gin and improvements in manufacturing machinery so cheapened the preparation and manufacture of cotton as to bring it into competition, under most favorable conditions, with every other article used in clothing the human family, and the demand for it so rapidly increased that production could not keep up with it.  The consequence was an increase in the price of the raw material until it has reached a point far above that of any article which can be brought in competition with it in the markets of the world.  This is not the effect of slavery, but in its causes, though not in its effects, it is entirely independent of that institution.  But, by this intervention of the demand for cotton, the slaveholders in South Carolina and a few other States were enabled to employ their negroes in a species of culture peculiar to their climate, the profits of which could not be lessened by general competition.  Though there has been a prodigious increase of production, the consumption has fully kept pace with it, and up to the breaking out of the rebellion, in no part of the earth for the last thirty years, and in no period of history, have the profits of agricultural labor been so great as in cotton growing regions of the United States.  But these profits would have been as great, if not greater, had the Southern production, as is the Northern manufacture, been the proceeds of hired free instead of slave labor.

With the immense profits of the monopoly the cotton planters became intoxicated, and thought that, by means of their cotton, they could rule the world.  “Cotton is King,” they exclaimed; and through his power they aspired to break up the Union and compel Great Britain and France to aid them in the fratricidal operation.  It has seemed strange to me that the rulers of those nations have not seen in this rebellion, or rather in the means by which the leaders proposed to compass success, an insult to their sovereignty and a conspiracy against the commercial world.  Openly they say to those proud nations: “We have the power and intend to use it, by withholding our cotton, to compel you to become our allies under penalty of riot and rebellion among the operatives in your own dominions.”  If they have any such power it is the interest of the world it should be broken, and one would think that the sagacious Napoleon, and the proud Palmerston, instead of meditating their recognition, would say to them: “Lay down your arms, and not only give us your cotton, but restore to us the market of an united and peaceful country, without which your raw material will be comparatively of little value.”

AMOS KENDALL.

February 19, 1862.

– Published in The Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, March 8, 1862, p. 1