Charleston and Savannah by Thomas D. Wilson

Author:Thomas D. Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Economic Tide Begins to Recede

After the turn of the century, Charleston and Savannah began losing their status as the most prosperous of southern cities. The Upper South was diversifying economically, and its towns were growing. Richmond surpassed Savannah in population and was growing faster than Charleston. To the southwest, New Orleans became part of the United States with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and soon rivaled Charleston in wealth. It also became another busy slave port, eclipsing a century and a half of Charleston’s dominance of the trade in 1840.

The rise of New Orleans became inevitable after the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1794 and the invention of the steamboat by Robert Fulton in 1811. The former brought about mass processing of cotton fiber, while the latter revolutionized commerce by making it bidirectional on the Mississippi River and its major tributaries. Rising demand for cotton in the early 1800s and strong existing demand for Louisiana sugar put New Orleans in the right place at the right time. By 1820 it surpassed Charleston in population and became the South’s largest city.

Wealthy South Carolinians, anxious to expand into emerging markets, invested in land in the Mississippi Valley and became cotton farmers. Their investments spurred the growth of cotton production from just over three thousand bales in 1790 to nearly four million bales in 1860. South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond would famously boast in 1858, “No, you dare not to make war on cotton. No power on the earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is king.” The boast (with its typical Lowcountry flourish) gave rise to the name King Cotton.

Charleston and Savannah retained much of their status as influential southern cities through the antebellum period. While they steadily lost ground in population and economic importance, they remained centers of wealth and self-defined southern political culture. The Lowcountry aristocracy built up the idea of White racial superiority, which served the dual purposes of rationalizing their peculiar institution of slavery while also diminishing the likelihood of any Black-White alliance against the slaveholding elite. Jacksonian universal White male suffrage reinforced the sense of racial commonality.

Yet as racism grew and bonded the White population, other factors worked to deepen class divisions among Whites. The Specie Circular executive order of 1836, one of the last actions taken by President Jackson while in office, contributed to the Panic of 1837 and increased class divisions. Jackson’s executive order required gold or silver (specie coinage) to purchase land, rather than paper money issued by state banks. The intent of the order was to reduce land speculation and price inflation following Native American removal. An unintended consequence was lowering the landowning prospects of poor Whites and increasing class divisions.

At the end of the Revolutionary War, the Deep South (or Lower South) was composed of South Carolina and Georgia, with populations of 249,073 and 82,548 respectively. The more populous Upper South (three and a half times larger than the Deep South) comprised Virginia and North Carolina, with populations of 747,550 and 395,005.

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