Cotton and Evangelical Christianity

Abstract

Abstract During the halcyon years of the Age of Exploration, Christopher Columbus purportedly declared that ‘‘the best thing in the world is gold . . . it can even send souls to heaven.” Three hundred and fifty years later, when James Henry Hammond rose to defend his native South before the United States Senate, the eloquent South Carolinian claimed only sovereignty, not divinity, for cotton. ‘‘No, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to make war upon it,” Hammond declared. “Cotton is King.”1 Tendentious as their claims appear at first glance, probably neither Columbus nor Hammond was guilty of anything more than slight metaphoric exaggeration. The mercantilist lust for gold bullion certainly saved no souls, and probably damned more than a few, but the precious metal provided the foundation for an unparalleled expansion of world commerce and international trade during the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Later, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the cotton trade became the mainstay of the burgeoning industrial revolution in Great Britain and the catalyst for a smaller industrial boom in the northern United States. “The traditional view which has seen the history of the British Industrial Revolution primarily in terms of cotton is correct,” argues Eric Hobsbawm. “If cotton flourished, the economy flourished, if it slumped so did the economy. “2