ABSTRACT
In 1858, South Carolinian James Henry Hammond boasted that "The slaveholding South is now the controlling power of the world. No power on earth dares to make war on cotton. Cotton is King". On the eve of the Civil War, cotton fields covered nearly the entire region. They swept from North Carolina to Texas and from Tennessee to the Florida panhandle. Planters first grew cotton in the South Carolina and Georgia upcountry. Then they moved it south and west toward occupied Indian lands. With the forced removal of the Creeks, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Cherokees in the 1830s, the United States made room for the expansion of its Southern cotton kingdom. "King Cotton" did more than rule the Southern economy. Cotton also transformed the Northern states and England. It fueled the Industrial Revolution in both the United States and abroad, and in return, the demand for cotton increased even more.
