civilized world with her save the South.  No, you dare not make war on cotton.  No power on earth dares make war upon it.  Cotton is King[656].”  Two years later, writing before the elections of 1860 in which the main question was that of the territorial expansion of slavery, this same Southern statesman expressed himself as believing that “the slave-holding South is now the controlling power of the world....  Cotton, rice, tobacco and naval stores command the world; and we have sense enough to know it, and are sufficiently Teutonic to carry it out successfully[657].”

These quotations indicative of Southern faith in cotton might be amplified and repeated from a hundred sources.

Moreover this faith in the possession of ultimate power went hand in hand with the conviction that the South, more than any other quarter of the world, produced to the benefit of mankind.  “In the three million bags of cotton,” said a writer in De Bow’s Review, “the slave-labour annually throws upon the world for the poor and naked, we are doing more to advance civilization ... than all the canting philanthropists of New England and Old England will do in centuries.  Slavery is the backbone of the Northern commercial as it is of the British manufacturing system[658]....”  Nor was this idea unfamiliar to Englishmen.  Before the Civil War was under way Charles Greville wrote to Clarendon: 

“Any war will be almost sure to interfere with the cotton crops, and this is really what affects us and what we care about.  With all our virulent abuse of slavery and slave-owners, and our continual self-laudation on that subject, we are just as anxious for, and as much interested in, the prosperity of the slavery interest in the Southern States as the Carolinan and Georgian planters themselves, and all Lancashire would deplore a successful insurrection of the slaves, if such a thing were possible[659].”

On December 20, 1860, South Carolina led the march in secession.  Fifteen days earlier the British consul at Charleston, Bunch, reported a conversation with Rhett, long a leader of the Southern cause and now a consistent advocate of secession, in which Rhett developed a plan of close commercial alliance with England as the most favoured nation, postulating the dependence of Great Britain on the South for cotton—­“upon which supposed axiom, I would remark,” wrote Bunch, “all their calculations are based[660].”  Such was, indeed, Southern calculation.  In January, 1861, De Bow’s Review contained an article declaring that “the first demonstration of blockade of the Southern ports would be swept away by the English fleets of observation hovering on the Southern coasts, to protect English commerce, and especially the free flow of cotton to English and French factories....  A stoppage of the raw material ... would produce the most disastrous political results—­if not a revolution in England.  This is the language of English statesmen, manufacturers, and merchants, in Parliament and at cotton associations’ debates, and it discloses the truth[661].”