Abraham Lincoln believed that the Civil War was a fight to answer the fundamental question concerning the morality of slavery. He once said, “I never knew a man who wished to be himself a slave. Consider if you know any good thing that no man desires for himself.”[1] He knew that the war would have lasting consequences for the nation. Emancipation of the slaves would affect the South profoundly socially as well as economically. After he Civil War, the South struggled to rebuild their economy. Agriculture had long been a lucrative source of income for the South, but with the infrastructure all but destroyed, it would be a long and hard road to economic recovery. The “economic consequences of emancipation” also had a major impact, reshaping the South from plantation-based slave labor to hired sharecroppers, particularly in connection with cotton production.[2] According to Scott Marler, in his article entitled, “Two Kinds of Freedom: Mercantile Development and Labor Systems in Louisiana Cotton and Sugar Parishes After the Civil War,” sharecropping became a way for freed individuals to become wage laborers, not “forced tenants.”[3]
Even before the end of the war, the demands for both cotton and sugar were on the rise. In Michael R, Cohen’s book, Cotton Capitalists: American Jewish Entrepreneurship in the Reconstruction Era, he wrote that, “after Grant’s victory at Vicksburg…The legal cotton trade resumed amidst tremendous global demand…The world’s thirst for cotton allowed many…not only survive the war but also thrive.”[4] Emancipation did not just open the door for the creation of a new group of laborers, it also created a “new potential customer base.”[5] Emancipated African Americans could now share in the profits earned from their hard labor. Cotton production was on the rise, but would it alone be enough to rebuild the South’s economy?
Sugar also played a major role in the South, even though Cotton was considered to be king, sugar was certainly financially sweet, too. Kathryn Cornell Dolan stated in her book, Beyond the Fruited Plain: Food and Agriculture in U.S. Literature, 1850-1905, “By the 1880s the United States was consuming more sugar than any nation other than Britain.”[6] The production of sugar initially relied heavily on slave labor, but that changed with emancipation. Now much of the labor force consisted of freedmen working for wages – hired laborers. Unfortunately, these new freedmen were still indentured laborers, only now they were called sharecroppers who had to pay rent for the land they worked.[7]
Cotton and sugar had both success and failure after the Civil War. For cotton, positive impacts came in the form of technological advances like the cotton compress, the use of the railroad for transporting cotton to distant markets, and better communication through the use of the telegraph. Negative impacts were due to changes in the labor market – caused mainly by emancipation along with crops failures. There was a major crop failure in 1866-1867, but crop yield improved between 1868 to 1872. Other problems caused cotton earnings to fall such as flooding, particularly along the gulf region of the south, and the arrival of the boll weevil, which literally ate up the profits.[8] The cotton industry also found itself falling out of favor on the global market, “as a fear of higher prices convinced European powers to open new lands for cheaper cotton production, harnessing the power of colonialism to the detriment of American cotton.”[9] The cotton market had changed, and in the South, cotton was dethroned as the king.
Sugar production had its fair share of technological advances, but it still relied heavily on human labor, “performed by African Americans.”[10] Mark Twain wrote a description of the process of producing sugar in his book, Life on the Mississippi, in 1883. Twain’s description stated, “The great sugar-house was a wilderness of tubs and tanks and vats and filters, pumps, pipes, and machinery…The thing looks simple and easy. Do not deceive yourself. To make sugar is really one of the most difficult things in the world. And to make it right is next to impossible.”[11] Even with all of the technological advances, the overreliance on human labor, would eventually take its toll on the profitability of sugar production in the South. Kathryn Cornell Dolan reiterated this when she wrote, “The U.S. South was losing money in the sugar industry – while plantations around the globe were growing…the southern producers were feeling the strain of greater competition – a strain literalized in the bodies of the laborers.”[12] Sugar may have been financially sweet at one time, but it was labor intensive to produce and with the changes brought by emancipation and a more competitive global economy, no longer the cash crop it once was.
Emancipation brought incredible change to the lives of the slaves in the South, but it was a brutal blow to an economy in ruins after the war. For a time, the demand that had gone unfulfilled during the war for American cotton, buoyed Southern hopes for an agricultural renaissance. Unfortunately, the loss of slave labor drove up costs and cut into plantation profits. Combined with increased competition from overseas producers and a growing shipping network, cotton production was not enough to restore the Southern economy. Sugar was in high demand in and out of America, but production was labor intensive, and labor was no longer free. Emancipation drained the tank from the Southern economic engine and not even king cotton and sweet sugar could save it.
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