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The following is from Zaakir Tameez, Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation, 2025:
“Thanks to cotton, slavery had expanded after the time of the Founding, instead of declining as the Founders had thought. ‘Nothing is more clearly written in the book of destiny than the emancipation of the blacks,’ Thomas Jefferson once wrote. One of Jefferson’s best friends, the French general Marquis de Lafayette, also believed that slavery wouldn’t last much longer after the American Revolution. ‘I would never have raised my sword in the cause of America,’ he explained decades later, ‘if I could have conceived that thereby I was founding a land of slavery.’
“Only a few years after the ratification of the Constitution, slavery began to expand. In 1793, Boston Brahmin Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, a machine that increased the speed of deseeding cotton by a factor of ten. Seizing on the gin’s promise, slaveholders transformed southern land into lucrative cotton fields that eventually stretched across two million acres. On these cotton plantations, slaveholders and their overseers brutalized men, women, and children, forcing them to plant, pick, deseed, and pack cotton, which the gin had made so easy to produce.
“At first, southern slave-produced cotton was shipped solely to British textile mills. But in the 1810s, Boston Brahmins Francis Cabot Lowell and Nathan Appleton had traveled to England, learned the ins and outs of textile production, and returned to Boston to start their own textile mills. Then they formed relationships with southern enslavers and established trading routes to bring raw cotton from the South into Massachusetts for refining. By the middle of the century, textiles were the leading engines of economic growth in New England. Cotton now benefited the South and North alike. After decades of refining slave-produced cotton, Lowell, Appleton, and other textile mill owners became the most powerful men in Massachusetts, controlling two-fifths of Boston’s banking capital and one-third of the state’s railroad tracks.
“New England textile mills, along with their counterparts in Great Britain, played a key role in driving the growth of southern slavery. In [Charles] Sumner’s youth in the 1810s, cotton represented just a quarter of America’s exports. By the time he practiced law in the 1830s, cotton had expanded to nearly half of America’s exports. Even more cotton was remaining within the country and being shipped to New England. As the cotton and textile industry grew, the country’s enslaved population doubled. In the 1810s, there were around one million enslaved people in America; by the 1830s, there were two million. Thanks to cotton, the gin, and textile mills, American slavery was growing rather than shrinking. As one slaveholder famously boasted, ‘Cotton is king.’
“Boston’s cotton gin inventors and textile magnates came from the city’s premier Brahmin families. Whitney, Appleton, Lowell, and their peers were the philanthropists of the city, building its young museums, schools, and literary societies. They served in high-level political positions. They fueled Boston’s remarkable economic vibrancy, a vibrancy that made possible the careers of Boston’s bankers, lawyers, merchants, railroad barons, and other businessmen. And their wealth, all of it, in one way or another, was directly tied to the cotton plantations of the South. Thanks to them, Boston was in a symbiotic relationship with slavery” (Tameez, Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation, pp. 102, 103).
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