"A Crisis Unprecedented" > Cotton Malefactors
By the mid-nineteenth century, New York’s merchants had outpaced all competitors to establish their City as America’s preeminent port. One-third of the nation’s exports and two-thirds of all imports passed through the wharves and warehouses of Brooklyn and Manhattan. Even the Yankee captains of the New England Society accepted defeat, toasting “The City of New York – the emporium of America; commerce her glory, rivalship hopeless.”
Vessels traveling from the harbor found profit in all directions; North and West up the Hudson to the Erie Canal, East toward Europe, and South for the Carolinas, Alabama, and Louisiana. Of these markets, the latter were most crucial. Cotton was the City’s key commodity – the link that connected it, in one way or another, to the chains of global commerce. Though most bales were shipped directly from the South to Liverpool or Havre, New York merchants speculated on prices, and also closed the triangle by forwarding European manufactured goods down to Dixie.
For a generation, elite merchants in the City had cultivated reciprocal bonds with their Southern colleagues. They could hardly afford any disruption to these relationships. Yet, by 1859, tensions had risen toward the point of dissolution; in November, the New York Chamber of Commerce sent a harsh ultimatum to its counterparts in the plantation states.
“The adulteration of cotton with sand,” the letter charged, “has become more & more frequent, until it has assumed a prevalence + magnitude injurious + embarrassing to merchants + manufacturers, damaging to the reputation of planters, + perhaps endangering the preeminence of the United States as the great producer of this necessary article.”
The New Orleans Chamber of Commerce – “than whom a more honorable body of men does not exist” – responded with stiff hauteur, “indignantly repel[ling] the imputation implied."
Tainted cotton bales threatened to tear apart the Union.
The suggestion of dishonesty tore at the fabric of a trade that relied wholly on mutual trust. Bales of cotton, 450 pounds of knotted fiber apiece, could not be thoroughly inspected. During their journey from plantation to mill – a passage consisting of “two loadings, two unloadings, three or four stowages + as many or more cartages” – the planters’ marks were often completely effaced. Personal reputations of agents and factors were the only guarantees of quality upon which merchants could rely.
But recent events had frayed these connections. A bad harvest in 1857-1858 had increased demand until cotton “of any quality” had been “eagerly sought for” by industrial buyers. “Finding neglect at once easy and profitable,” planters had taken less care with their crop so that cotton bales rife with dust and sand were widely marketed.
Furthermore, a recent trade innovation had made these transactions even more chancy than before. To save on shipping costs, agents had begun sending samples – rather than shipping entire cargoes – of cotton to New York. The bulk of the goods went directly to Europe, while speculators in Lower Manhattan bid sight unseen. Dealing in “transit,” as the practice was called, cut transport fees, but it also meant that merchants had to bid on whole consignments based on just a few small examples of the product.
The system lent itself to dishonest brokerage. Hence the urgency of the New York merchants’ request to “the Chambers of Commerce in the various Cities of the cotton-growing districts, inviting them to urge their State legislatures to take measures forthwith to prevent the fraudulent packing of cotton …”