#stravation

King Cotton, The South Refused To Stop Planting-Planter’s Greed Starved The South

“Plant corn! Plant corn!” the editor of the Macon Telegraph wrote. “We must have large supplies, or poverty and suffering will come upon us like a strong man armed.” The True Democrat in Little Rock, Arkansas demanded that not a single seed of cotton be planted. 

The Florida Sentinel of Tallahassee bluntly warned that the planters’ addiction to cotton would lead to famine and the fall of the Confederacy.

But, Southern planters generally ignored these laws and pleas, and continued to grow as much cotton as possible.

By the fall of 1862, there was so much cotton being harvested that the South’s warehouses could not store it all. As a result of the South oligarchs’ arrogant greed, there was never enough food grown to meet the South’s needs. Thousands of letters from desperate women whose men were in the Confederate Army began to flood the offices of local and state officials. Most of them included pitiable pleas for assistance, or requests that their husbands be allowed to leave their military units and return home, even if only temporarily.

One woman wrote directly to Jefferson Davis: “If I and my little children suffer and die while there Father is in Service I invoke God Almighty that our blood rest upon the South.”

An open letter to the Savannah Morning Newsbluntly declared “The crime is with the planters . . .  as a class, they have yielded their patriotism, if they ever had any, to covetousness . . . . for the sake of money, they are pursuing a course to destroy and demoralize our army—to starve out the other class dependent on them for provisions.”

Photo: African-American men, women and children pick cotton in in a cotton field, Savannah, Georgia, circa 1890. Three of the woman have baskets full of cotton balanced ont their heads. Photograph by O. Pierre Havens.