Because cotton growers in the antebellum American South produced 70-80 percent of the industrialized world's supply of raw cotton, they collectively possessed price-setting power in the market for raw cotton. These growers debated how best to use King Cotton before and during the Civil War. Brian Schoen's book details the growers' developing awareness of their collective power from the 1790s to the onset of the war. He focuses on the economic reality facing Lower South planters and politicians and their geopolitical outlook.

Schoen characterizes southern planters not as passive victims of the vicissitudes of economic and political forces: “individuals who chose to experiment with cotton did so not as hopeless agrarians but as entrepreneurs with opportunity and profits foremost in their minds” (p. 3).

While we of the twenty-first century take the American South's domination of raw cotton during the nineteenth century as foregone, Schoen demonstrates just how contingent such dominance was on exogenous factors. Cotton was not an important crop for southern growers in 1790. While debating the Constitution, southern delegates failed to mention cotton while discussing the region's key crops. Because of British and American government edicts, American-grown raw cotton got useful boosts from favorable duties and navigation rules. In addition, former British Loyalists, whose temporary exile to the British West Indies introduced them to the cultivation of cotton, invigorated the cultivation of cotton in America upon their return in the late 1700s.

Southerners embraced laissez-faire economic policy (except, of course, where applied to African Americans) as both beneficial for society in general and also to protect slavery. Some modern-day libertarians like to think of the antebellum South as an epitome of classical liberal thought, but Schoen deftly dissects the glaring dichotomy in the Southerners' beliefs. While Schoen demonstrates that Southerners resolved the apparent contradiction by appealing to a racialist argument (“blacks needed white supervision to motivate them out of their inherent laziness”), the actions of such Southerners as Jefferson Davis, who felt African Americans to be inferior to white persons and yet who felt free to leave a trusted slave in charge of the plantation during the Civil War, are more difficult to explain.

Perhaps more amusing for modern readers is the mental gymnastics required for southern apologists to claim that slavery resulted in a greater harmony between capital and labor than did free labor. Of course, in many ways free labor was not an enviable status during the 1850s. Certainly free white labor in the North had much to bemoan, and free sailors in, say, the British navy might envy slaves on a material level.

Southerners hoped to forge an alliance with residents of the burgeoning western (i.e., today's Midwestern) states through their mutual distaste of protection for eastern manufactures and the building of west-to-south railroads. Their attempts largely failed throughout the antebellum period. Decades later, southern cotton growers would ally with Midwestern grain farmers to get desired crop restrictions to prop up prices during the Great Depression. Unfortunately for Southerners, by then the region's ascendency in the market for raw cotton had since passed, so getting monopoly prices was no longer the goal of the price supports.

Southern economic and political power within the United States may have reached its zenith during the 1840s under Presidents Tyler and Polk. Schoen believes, though, that Southerners over-reached, particularly in their bid to annex Texas, in part to extend slavery. He cites John Calhoun's fears that such annexation would be injurious to the South, as it would reignite northern fears about slavery's extension, as well as introduce large numbers of Catholic residents into the United States.

Although Schoen discusses the planters' conventions of the 1840s and 1850s, he does not describe their largely futile efforts to reduce the cotton crop in order to get a monopoly price. An adroit use of their price-setting power to obtain better prices was an alternative strategy to withholding cotton as a war-winning weapon. He, instead, focuses on calls to deny Europe raw cotton in order to induce them to support southern policies.

The Confederacy never formally enacted an embargo on the export of raw cotton, although individual growers opted not to forward their crops to southern ports. Their hopes of inducing British and French intervention went stillborn. Between British dislike of slavery, need for northern grain, suspicions of French intentions, and other factors, Great Britain refused to become entangled in the Civil War. France would not intervene without British cooperation.

While outside the scope of his book, Schoen does mention the underlying tension between the Upper and Lower South on the resumption of the international slave trade suggesting that the nascent Confederate government would not be free of intra-regional strife.

I found myself reading this book in light of current events. Schoen does a good job pointing out that legislative victors may rue their triumph, while losers may inadvertently reap benefits from loathed legislation. Cotton growers and Southerners generally disliked Jay's Treaty, but the treaty ultimately redounded to their benefit as “the peace it preserved provided the necessary backdrop for a vibrant Anglo-American cotton trade that returned the region to economic profitability” (p. 39). He also adroitly points out the recurring desire for and criticism of legislation that clearly benefits one segment of society at the expense of other segments (shades of auto and bank bailouts). He cites at length nineteenth-century legislator William Lowndes' analysis of protectionist tariffs: “by directing the largest amounts of these [America's limited capital and labor] into branches which require most encouragement, we really divert them from those into which they would flow with most advantage.” Lowndes concluded that tariffs “would not create a beneficial home market or a stronger union but political strife and a fierce struggle between the various interests within the Union” (p. 110).

The book is clearly written and should appeal mostly to historians and economists specializing in nineteenth-century American history.