Cotton in the South The Hermitage - Andrew Jackson House, Nashville Tennessee
The cash crop of the antebellum South was cotton. Cotton bales were as good as coins. Goods, lands, and slaves were purchased with them. Merchants' accounts, for example, record payments in cotton bales as do letters to and from creditors seeking to distribute profits. Jackson's business deals, particularly in his stores, illustrate this point. He bought and accepted others' cotton as payment and then used it to purchase material goods, which he would then sell to those living around Nashville.
When the market was strong, borrowing against the future yield risked only a farmer's luck and agricultural savvy. In a depressed economy, or a scenario wherein supply exceeds demand, circumstances of the credit system seemingly conspired to keep the producer in debt. In 1803, for example, the cotton market in England suffered because of the commercial war in Europe, the Napoleon effect, and several factors failed. The collapse of George Barclay & Company of London, for example, caused Andrew Jackson's mercantile associates in Philadelphia to express the hope that their friends in Liverpool would be safe. They advised Jackson not to count on fetching high prices for his cotton, and certainly to expect no more than ten to twelve cents per pound, a significant drop from the twenty-six to twenty-eight received earlier.
Compounding this credit-for-crop economic cycle, men offered their "notes" as payment. Essentially, the note represented a man's word, his honor pledged in exchange for what was owed. These notes were sort of an "IOU" accepted in lieu of hard currency and a harvested crop in anticipation of a cash influx before they became due. When signed, they were legally binding. This form of paper money often got the endorser in trouble because, regardless of subsequent fiscal circumstances, he had to deliver. The notes were met even when crops failed, when the hogsheads or bales were ruined during transport, when land speculation deals collapsed, and when attempts to sell property fell on deaf ears.
This is what happened to Andrew Jackson after he accepted notes from an acquaintance, David Allison, for land Jackson wanted to sell. Jackson used the notes (after endorsing them) as payment to his own creditors. Allison ended up in a debtor's prison in Philadelphia and Jackson was at risk for a similar fate. Jackson, however, sold most everything he had to meet his obligations including his home plantation, Hunter's Hill. It was then that he bought the property that became The Hermitage.
The universality of cotton production on large and small farming operations was a nineteenth-century phenomenon. Earlier, planters tried to raise cotton with little success. In 1786-87, for example, planters on the Georgia coast produced a strain with green seeds that flourished. Despite its promise, the difficulty in removing the lint from the seeds prevented it from replacing tobacco as the region's agricultural stalwart at that time. Cotton, then, was not a determining factor in the agricultural decisions and land allocation, even for the affluent, until the advent of the ginning machine in the 1790s.
In 1793, Eli Whitney invented a machine that separated the lint and seeds; other designers almost simultaneously followed suit. The technology, traditionally credited to Whitney, enabled small farmers to compete with large-scale plantations. Each benefitted from the intrinsic qualities of cotton chiefly its relative lightness, sanctity from bugs, and unlikelihood of spoilage in comparison to tobacco and the hazards inherent in readying and shipping the weed to market. As a large-scale operator, Andrew Jackson had a cotton gin by March 1801; he, moreover, ginned for his neighbors who worked smaller farms and within tighter budgets and so could not have their own gin. Not being able to possess a cotton gin did not exclude them from the benefits of cotton production as illustrated the receipt Jackson issued to a neighbor in 1801. Expanding his cotton interests, Jackson contracted Jesse Dawson to build a cotton gin for him. This was in February 1802, and coincided with Jackson's agreement with Thomas Watson and John Hutchings regarding the establishment of stores in Wilson and Davidson Counties. On Watson's property, Jackson and Watson had a store, cotton gin and distillery; in Wilson County, Jackson and Hutchings had a store, gin, and press. The traders bought goods in Philadelphia and Baltimore to furnish the stores, and expected to pay (probably in cotton received from their customers) in the following December, January, and February. Sometimes, in spite of packing the cotton in the desirable square bales and a reportedly good price, cotton traders experienced setbacks. In transport, part of Jackson's cotton was ruined, not by bugs or spoiling or packaging as tobacco was prone to do, because one boat was damaged. His contact in New Orleans, however, re-bundled the cotton and saved all but one bale.
Although associated with Whitney's design for the cotton gin, westward expansion began almost concurrently to the English crown's declaration that the Appalachian Mountains were the (arbitrary) boundary of British colonial America in 1763. This was done in an effort to keep white and Native Americans apart once England vanquished France from the new world east of the Mississippi. Nevertheless white Americans crossed the Appalachians, and to the dismay of Native Americans, stayed in the territories affiliated with the initial thirteen states. They settled in the Ohio Territory, in Kentucky, in western Virginia, and in western North Carolina. The latter, sometimes referred to as the "old" southwest, gained territory status in 1793 and statehood in 1796 under the name of Tennessee.
Prior to Tennessee's recognition as a state, frontiersmen James Robertson and John Donelson (who was the father of Andrew Jackson's wife Rachel) reached a salt lick in the Cumberland Valley. They settled there in 1779-80, and named the locality Nashville. The white establishment of Nashville, however, encroached on Native Americans' ground. It had long been a hub of their activities relating to the fur trade and to obtain salt. In spite of opposition by Native Americans, enough white people lived there for the North Carolina legislature to create a county, as an instrument necessary for representative government, in 1783. The legislature named the entity for William L. Davidson, a Revolutionary War hero. Nashville became the county seat.
Many of the Native Americas were hostile to the white settlers and that feeling was reciprocated. Jackson, in particular, acted on those sentiments in his political and military duties because he perceived the Indian tribes as a menace. His escapades included contributions to the treaty with the Cherokees that led to the cessation of the western lands in present-day Tennessee. They also included actions taken while he was Governor of Florida, taken on behalf of the United States during the War of 1812, particularly against the Creek Indians, and ultimately, as President. During his tenure in the White House, Jackson signed into law the Indian Removal Act in 1830. The Cherokees passed through Nashville in 1838 on their way to the western reserves; their route became known as the "Trail of Tears" and was a direct result of the law. By 1838, though, the white men mitigated the threat of Native Americans in the east and turned their attention to the land opened to them.
Perhaps the settlers of European descent always thought of the frontier as virgin land, available for the taking. Native Americans did not fence fields, build towns, and farm the soil as white Americans did, and significantly, understood. The difference in cultural perception contributed to the white men's occupation of lands that they interpreted as uninhabited, at least not permanently, but endangered by roving Indian tribes. Cultivated land exhibited ownership, the white man's civilizing mark, for others to see and acknowledge. By operating outside this milieu, the Native Americans were at a disadvantage in early America. The visual effect created an inferior position of ownership for the Native Americans and justified the white Americans' grabbing of what they assumed was unused, wasted land waiting to be claimed, cleared, and planted. Ironically, even those Native Americans who tried to assimilate were ousted unceremoniously with those who held tightly to traditional ways. Many of the Cherokee Indians in Georgia, for example, adopted agricultural, political, and legal methods of the whites and lost their land in spite of their efforts to participate in the federal and state system. By the 1850s, those Native Americans farming east of the Mississippi had only the poorest soil on which to subsist. Frederick Law Olmsted commented that of
Having disposed of the Native American presence, and incipient danger they represented, antebellum farmers adopted the technology offered them by Whitney and turned Tennessee into the fifth largest cotton producer by 1850. Memphis was the largest inland cotton center; the city also had become a nexus of slave trading, merchants, and cotton factors in the upper Mississippi Delta. This prosperity was the cumulative effect of thirty years or so of exploiting the rich soil between the Tennessee and Mississippi Rivers; it was here, in the western reaches of the state, that many in the eastern counties looked to move to start anew and to make the money their father's had. Andrew Jackson, Jr., for example, began buying property on the Mississippi in the 1840s and planned to relocate there as his fortunes crumbled in Nashville in the 1850s. Likewise, part of the Donelson clan departed Davidson County for Memphis because no more money could be made there.
Dependency on cotton created a unified economy and cohesive outlook from the Carolinas to Texas. While regionally binding, cotton did not foster introspection or isolation from northern markets and international trade. Cotton linked the South to metropolitan centers throughout the United States, such as Philadelphia and New Orleans, as well as abroad, in places like London and Liverpool. Andrew Jackson, for example, first tested the market in New Orleans and then in search of a better price, shipped his bales to Liverpool. Backcountry inhabitants maintained cultural ties, and forged new economic alliances, with the eastern states and so were not geographically and culturally cloistered. Cotton also locked the South into the slave system because of the pressing need for agricultural laborers and to keep production costs low. Since the early 1800s, the slave population was reproducing itself. This enabled the slave owners to perpetuate the institution of bound-labor without the expense of importing new people from Africa directly or by buying them from a sugar plantation in the West Indies. Children of the Negroes, so called for the color of their skin as well as to accentuate the difference in appearance from whites, adopted the status of their mother. This made women both producers and reproducers for their masters. It did not, however, keep them from the cotton fields where they worked alongside the men.
