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Cotton and Race in the Making of America: The Human Costs of Economic Power

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This is a fact-packed account of how the cotton trade was intertwined with the evil that was slavery in America. Mr. Dattel makes a strong case that slavery was perpetuated by economic motives, not just racial bias. How else to understand the paradoxical fact that the Confederate constitution banned the importation of slaves into the Confederacy? Explains Mr. Dattel, "Slaveowners simply did not favor an increase in the supply of slaves, which would have reduced the value of their existing workforce."

Along the way, there are some wonderful swipes at elites, beginning with the New York Times, which editorialized, even after Lincoln's election, "We do not believe it is either just or wise to introduce into discussions of the day any schemes for the abolition of Slavery. It must be distinctly understood that we of the North have nothing to do with that subject, that we propose no Congressional action upon it, but that we regard it as exclusively under the distinction and control of the Slaveholding States."

Mr. Dattel writes this story with an eye for illuminating numbers. For example: in 1866, 20 percent of all revenues in the Mississippi state budget were spent on artificial limbs for Confederate veterans. With the introduction of the tractor, the American mule population, which had risen to 26 million in 1920, declined to 4 million by 1958.

Well worth a read for anyone interested in American slavery and its aftermath.

Being a proud fifth-generation Southerner, I thought that I fully understood why the Civil War was fought. Most of my understanding was based upon the influence of society and culture within which I grew up. Although none of my family were flag flying Confederates, there was very much pride in being a Southerner and having ancestors who fought for the Confederacy.

After reading this book, I honestly believe that I better understand why the Southerners did what they did. Within my lifetime I have been told over and over that the war was fought over the issue of slavery. As this book shows, slavery was at the root of the war. The primary issue of the war, however, was pure economics.

I had always accepted blame for the war as a Southerner. I felt that the Northern influence of slavery was insignificant or nonexistent. I was wrong. Just as the masses of Southerners were not the cause of the war, nor were the masses of the Northerners the cause of the war. Both North and South, it seems from this book, a relatively small number from the "United States" had the production of cotton paramount in their minds and their lives. It was all about MONEY. No cotton, no money. No money, no cotton. No slaves, no cotton. No slaves, no money. I really believe that it is that simple and this book led me to that conclusion.

I highly recommend this book to any citizen of the United States of America. I believe that having read this book, we can better understand our history. Maybe we can even prevent repeating bad history.

My thanks to the author in this extremely fine work. Although this was not an "easy" book to read, it should be read from cover to cover.

Growing up in the South during the era of the Civil Rights Act, I had a lot of misconceptions about the Civil War and the relationships between blacks and whites. Mr. Dattel's book should be required reading in the history classes of every school in America. It has solved many of the great mysteries as to why the Civil War started and how the horribly mismanaged Freedmen's Bureau served to drive a wedge between the races.

The contributions made by the Negro race prior to the Great Rebellion, if truly understood by both sides, probably had as much to do with the success of our country as the outcome of the Revolutionary War.

For me, Mr. Dattel's excellent book created one of the most profound "Ah Ha!" moments in the course of my life. The North's greed in building the great slave markets in the South to create the wealth the North needed to construct the world's most powerful financial markets in the history of the world, leaves one to ponder if the ends justified the means.

If you are a Civil War buff, I promise you, once you read the first paragraph, you will read this book to exhaustion.

Author Gene Dattel takes the tragedy of slavery and economics of cotton production and weaves an engrossing story of enormous importance even today. He examines the origins of the humble cotton plant and its horrific intertwining with slavery; its astounding importance in international trade and the true economic origins of the Civil War. He places blame fairly and all round, no section of country was blameless here, in fact the North made enormous profits on the production of cotton and the transportation and sale of slaves.

The writer's style is interesting and very comprehensible, I am awed by his ability to give a tragic human face to such dry economic data. You will never look at a cotton item the same way again I promise you.

Dattel takes an oft-ignored corner of American history and explores it with diligent research and insights. This tale ranks with Rising Tide and Undaunted Courage as the tops in non-fiction. The racist comments of abolitionists alone are enough to acquire, read and cherish this wonderful history. Absolutely tops.

This is a good book, a good read and I highly recommend it. As to the depth, breadth and logical consistency of the research and references, I , not a historian, cannot speak. However, in this book you'll find a story that has the ring of truth, describing as it does Americans as we know them, not the imaginary figures usually represented by historians as toiling away at the great moments. Instead of men battling injustice and ignorance, this story is populated by characters drenched in racism and driven by greed. Who knew the value of cotton exports? Fascinating, absolutely fascinating.

Cotton and Race in the Making of America: The Human Costs of Economic Power offers a fine, pioneering study of central social issues in the story of cotton development and race relations, discussing the leading export crop of the country and its connections to Afro-American experiences. Any college-level library strong in race relations and economic and social influences will find this narrowed focus key to understanding cotton's role in race relations and developments.

This book is not for the everyday reader. It is more like a class book for college. Unless you need this for a class, don't bother.

Gene Dattel grew up in a small town called Ruleville, located in Sunflower County, in the Delta region of Mississippi, working at his father's dry goods store. So, one may reasonably wonder how that kid from Ruleville Miss got to Yale, then Wall Street, then became an expert on cotton slavery? I'll bet that no one else from Ruleville ended up as a Wall Street director. Not Fanny Lou Hamer, a spunky civil rights icon who hailed from Ruleville.

Maybe it's just my overactive imagination, but possibly Dattel's store overcharged black sharecroppers to get the money to put Gene through Yale! Were his own family, through the store, somehow involved with racism and oppression? It seems that Gene headed off to Yale at about the same time that Mississippi was burning, in 1963. Perhaps my fractured history is way off base, but Dattel's stentorian pronouncements about the evils of cotton make me wonder about his personal history, not just the cotton. I ask you, how could such a person, a Yale grad, one of the Masters of the Universe in Tom Wolfe's memorable phrase, from Bonfire of the Vanities, how could a Wall Street lawyer/financier find himself comfortable, motivated, qualified in writing about cotton and slavery in Mississippi? Did Gene feel so guilty about his own success that he renounced his exalted job making millions on Wall Street because he's white? Could his writing be an atonement for his family's racism (if they were), an expression of his positive sense of Jewish Guilt and his need to rewrite his personal history? Why would a fellow with such an intense moral convictions about right versus wrong, such an absolute enemy of exploitation, work in international investments at Morgan Stanley on Wall Street in the first place? How did a white guy who made millions as a managing director at Salomon Brothers, get reborn as a race historian and moral scold? It doesn't add up.

Thus, in reading this otherwise dull and moralistic book, I can see in its place a truly interesting autobiography where Gene Dattel explains his Jewish identity, his family's emigration from Latvia to Mississippi, his escape to Yale, Freedom riders, his halcyon years on Wall Street, moving back to Ruleville to fight poverty, etc. Maybe such a book could put his own Ghosts of Mississippi to rest. It would be more interesting than the book he has written about cotton slavery, which is a disorganized mess, laborious, and hard to read. In fact, I'm skeptical that the blurbs on the cover of his book, terrific recommendations from such superstars as Niall Ferguson, could be on the level. Did Niall Ferguson really read this book, or did he just write the recommendation for his old banker friend?

First off, the book isn't really about the Cotton Business. Little is said about Cotton until Chapter 26, its properties, its habits, its care and feeding, Boll Weevils. There's no agriculture in the book. Not much more is presented about Cotton Plantations, although quite a lot must be known by now. Very little research information about slavery is forthcoming. Hardly a word is heard from the slaves themselves, or the sharecroppers they became after the War during Reconstruction. These subjects ought to have been taken up by the author.

The only cotton subject that really interests him is the story of cotton farming in the Mississippi Delta in the late 19th Century up to the 1930s, where it seems that he knows his stuff. He writes about Mound Bayou, the Montgomery Family, and the Delta and Pine Land company. Shockingly in light of what came before Chapter 26, he makes the case that sharecropping wasn't so bad, that it represented an imperfect yet viable method to reconcile the Planters, the share croppers and the financiers -- otherwise no cotton. In doing so he comes within one inch of advocating the awful implication that blacks were lazy, shiftless, and they were not prepared to own and farm land. Here again, I am given to wonder about his family's store.

Secondly, his evidence doesn't support his conclusions. His idea of causes runs like this: Slavery was caused by the nature of the cotton business. Capitalist greed stood behind cotton. Therefore, the cotton business ran roughshod over anything that got in its way. But cotton didn't win the Civil War for the South. Cotton could not bring the English into the War. Cotton broke countless planters every time prices fell. Cotton didn't earn enough to free planters from predatory merchants and bankers in New York. Sharecropping existed without outright slavery. Today we have plenty of cotton without sharecropping or slavery. It just doesn't add up.

Third, his unremitting moralizing tone makes the book annoying to read. Dattel takes aim at everyone, particularly Northerners, such Charles Sumner the abolitionist, Harriet Beecher Stowe (who owned a Cotton Plantation after she wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin!), the English who bought American cotton, cotton traders, New England ships owners who carried cotton, New York bankers who financed the plantations, Northern Newspapermen and politicians, and even Lincoln himself -- it is not enough for Dattel that Lincoln freed the slaves! All these people are to be send to Hell, not Purgatory, because their views about blacks don't match the views of Freedom Riders in 1964, when Gene was safe among the communist left wing at Yale.

The main target of Dattel's contempt is the insensitive, materialistic, white American public, both North and South, who despised, hated, and ostracized, blacks -- regarding them as bestial and inferior, down to the present day. But he never really explains why such race hatred was so widespread and so deep. There was more to it than cotton, surely. All historical events are placed into this procrustean bed of racism, cotton slavery, and greed. Readers get tired of such repetitious moralistic writing. It's like a story about the battle between good and evil, where there was no one on the side of the angels. Surely there were just a few whites who didn't hate blacks, even in 1850.

It's foolish and unwarranted to view all of our history through this one holy prism, looking backwards from our perfect moral clarity in 2010. Most Whites in 1850, even 1950, just didn't have the capacity to see how whites and blacks could live peacefully in the same space. Their racism was real and it continues today, although overt expressions of racism have largely been driven underground by political correctness among the educated classes. It's wrong to demand that people from 1850 answer to moral dictates that are popular in 2010. Dattel's moral absolutism is dangerous and unfair, like an ex post facto law, where people from ancient history are made to submit to retroactive codes. Shall we condemn our Constitution because it sanctioned slavery? Shall we reproach our Presidents, 12 of whom owned slaves, including Washington and Jefferson -- just excise them from our history and restart American History with Lyndon Johnson and the Civil Rights Act? Is it absolutely necessary to make white southerners denounce their long dead ancestors who fought for the South -- such as Robert E. Lee? I've lived in the United States long enough to see how capricious and flexible our moral codes really are. Leave the dead to rest in peace. Ease up, Gene.