Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War

by Howard W. French

By the time the Stovalls had acquired their plantation, the toil of slaves supplied through methods like these had already made the deep topsoil of the Delta the most valuable farmland on earth. Such rich, black earth had produced a torrent of wealth that vastly exceeded even the enormous fortunes created for France by Saint Domingue, and it had more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the United States to show for it. The numbers, however true, still strain credulity. In 1790, American cotton production hovered somewhere around 1.5 million pounds. By 1800, it had risen to 36.5 million pounds. In 1820, annual production stood at 167.5 million pounds. And by the eve of the American Civil War, the output of cotton, expanding geographically but still concentrated in the Mississippi River Valley, was nearing an astounding 2 billion pounds annually. In the comparison of the historian Sven Beckert, cotton became to the nineteenth-century United States what oil was to Saudi Arabia in the twentieth, making it the richest and most successful slave society in history. As American output soared, it established itself firmly as the world’s most valuable commodity. On a per capita basis, this made residents of the South wealthier than the people of any European country other than England.