By Lee A. Daniels

In 1865, the North’s victory in the Civil War freed black Americans from slavery.

But it did not free them from cotton.

Instead, victimized by a pernicious, post-war compact between the white North and the white South, the overwhelming majority of blacks remained in the South bound to cotton –America’s most profitable export for nearly one hundred fifty years—for nearly a century after the Emancipation Proclamation took effect.

Their continued actual bondage to “King Cotton” in the nation which loved to boast of its commitment to liberty and justice for all both reflected and intensified the wrenching, contradictory social impulses which stemmed from white America’s “overwhelming attachment to material progress at whatever the human cost.”

So declares Gene Dattel in his powerful, disturbing book, Cotton and Race in the Making of America: The Human Costs of Economic Power. Dattel plunges into the morass of those contradictions to show how whites’ quest for economic power, and cotton’s “shockingly important” role in delivering that power, easily subverted the Constitution’s lofty rhetoric about human beings’ inalienable rights before and after the Civil War.

Cotton’s importance to America was evident soon after the invention of the cotton gin in 1793. It quickly became the leading force fueling antebellum America’s territorial expansion and economic growth—from 1803 to 1937 it was America’s leading export—and the foundation of the Industrial Revolution. Dattel cites the words of Karl Marx, who wrote in 1846 that “without cotton, you have no modern industry,” and “Without slavery, you have no cotton.”

Contrary to the still-popular misconception, the North from the first was centrally involved in the growth of the cotton economy: New York City, not New Orleans, was the financial center of the cotton trade. And, although the North as a whole did not favor Negro Slavery, the anti-black attitudes it held combined with those of the white South to infuse capitalism’s fundamental dynamic of exploitation with a frightening toxicity.

After Appomattox, those congruent prejudices and the benefits of resuming full-scale cotton production for the American economy and the projection of American power abroad completely scuttled any chance that Reconstruction would enable blacks to gain effective civil rights in either the South or the North.

White America quickly solved the vexing question of what to do with the unwanted black masses by chaining their status to the country’s vital economic need. Dattel writes: “Despite the confusion (of the postwar years), two things were clear: … freedmen would remain in the South, and they would cultivate cotton.” That deliberately-crafted policy, which Dattel describes as “containment,” was the reason 90 percent of black Americans—the slaves—lived in the South in 1860, and 90 percent of black Americans still lived in the South in 1930.

Dattel’s wide-ranging narrative also makes it clear that white Americans, too, were bound to cotton: bound to the wondrous advances in the design, comfort and flexibility of clothing it made possible; bound even more to the enormous profits it generated for merchants and financiers in the U.S., Britain and elsewhere; and bound even more than that to cotton as an economic justification for subjugating black people. The consequence for blacks was that for a century after the Civil War they were marooned in a vast sea of cruelty.

Reading Cotton and Race brought to mind the advertising campaign for cotton of a few years ago. “The fabric of our lives” was its point. Cotton and Race proves how tragically true that once was: cotton was the commodity which more than any other created the warped fabric of America’s life from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.

Dattel repeatedly reminds us of one of the book’s three major points: that “economic laws, not moral precepts”, directed the destiny of race relations in America.

But he also doesn’t ignore the toll the most terrible dynamic of American history exacted on African Americans – the Americans who above all others were created in America and from the most fertile soil of America.

This is an epic story with a deeply tragic element to it, as the book’s subtitle makes clear; and Dattel explores it with a steeliness that raises the most serious questions about the nature of the American democratic experiment today.

Cotton and Race exposes a history of America that is not only far from the egregiously false presentation of American history that reigned in scholastic and collegiate texts and the popular media until the 1960s. His unsparing narrative also lays waste to the seemingly more truthful—and certainly widely-accepted—narrative that replaced the old, overtly-racist one.

One can characterize that now-dominant replacement narrative as the “mistakes-were-made” version of American history. In this telling, the racism of the past down to the 1960s is, seemingly, acknowledged and condemned. But this version also declares, sometimes explicitly, most often implicitly, that “it-all-worked-out-for-the-best,” as if black Americans’ three and a half centuries of suffering was their – and America’s – immutable destiny.

My praise of Dattel’s book isn’t meant to ignore the penetrating, corrective examinations of our past that, thankfully, have come in abundance since the 1960s from black, white and other scholars.

On the contrary, these books force us to face squarely that the history of blacks and whites in America from 1619 to the 1960s was a one-way race war, which whites as a group waged against blacks with an unrelenting, comprehensive ferocity.

True, there was often a rich complexity to race relations alive beneath the broad regime of pervasive, vicious racism. The actions of individual and small groups of whites toward individual blacks or black Americans as a group indicated that a sense of compassion and a commitment to moral behavior did exist among some whites, after all. But it was not until the 1960s, when a critical larger segment of white America accepted the “self-evident truths” the Constitution asserted, that black Americans gained a substantial measure of their American citizenship and, with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, American society structurally became a democracy in fact, not just rhetorically.

In tracking the century and a half reign of King Cotton and how it fit with so many of the forces that made America powerful, Cotton and Race reminds us that history is an ever-flowing stream, and the material which made that history what it was and the energy it generated are not easily disposed of. America loves to boast of its tradition of freedom, its tradition of inclusion. Dattel’s book underscores the fact that for most of American history it was the tradition of exclusion that determined the status of black Americans. It’s only been in the last half century – but a moment in the sweep of American history – that that balance of power has changed for the better.

Acknowledging that reality, set forth in such powerful terms here, should lead us to ask: in terms of race relations, what fundamental attitudes constitute the fabric of America’s life now?

Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, and Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline