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In Cuba, the Chinese emigrants do not receive so much even as one-third of this." The dynasty of Cotton is based on the monopoly of the cotton-culture in the Cotton States of the Union; its whole policy is directed to the two ends of making the most of and retaining that monopoly; and economically it reduces everything to subserviency to the question of cotton-supply; thus Cotton is King.
A belief was prevalent in the North that great profit might be derived from the cotton-culture, and that with the assured sympathy of the colored men they would be able to command the requisite labor more readily than the old slave masters. As a mere business enterprise cotton-growing at that period, except in a very few instances, proved to be unprofitable.
They had abandoned their early belief that their cotton was king, and dreaded the crash that was to announce the overthrow of all their hopes. In their theory that cotton-culture was unprofitable, unless prosecuted by slave labor, these men could only see a gloomy picture for years to come. Not so the new occupants of the land.
It is a mere truism to say that the cotton-culture is the cause of the present philosophical and economical phase of the African question. Throughout the South, whether justly or not, it is considered as well settled that cotton can be profitably raised only by a forced system of labor.
Greene had the satisfaction of being able to invite a gathering of gentlemen from different parts of the State to behold with their own eyes the working of the newly invented cotton-gin, with which a negro man turning a crank could clean fifty pounds of cotton per day. This solution of the last problem in cheap cotton-culture made it at once the leading crop of the South.
Gidi Mavunga, wearing pagne and fetish-bag, and handling a thin stick in which two bulges had been cut, led us out of Banza Nokki, and took a S.S.W. direction. I sent home specimens of this gossypium arboreum, which everywhere grows wild and which is chiefly used for wicks. There is scant hope of cotton-culture amongst a people whose industry barely suffices for ground-nuts.
It was when slave labor and slave breeding began to bring large and rapid profits, by the extension of cotton-culture consequent on the invention of Whitney's gin, and the purchase of Louisiana, that slavery was found to be identical with religion, and, like Duty, a "daughter of the voice of God."
Thus the Old World and the New had a common interest in the production of cotton. While one watched the demand, the other closely observed the supply. Some of the factors in New Orleans were fearful lest the attention paid to cotton-culture in other parts of the world would prove injurious to the South after the war should be ended.
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