Why Was Cotton 'King'? 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro: The
lucrative crop didn't reign just in the slaveholding South. (The
Root) -- 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro No. 17: How much did
the cotton industry shape American history and the lives of
enslaved Africans? “C” stands for Cotton. Its beautiful bolls,
And bales of rich value, the Master controls. Of “mud-stills” he
prates, and would haughtily bring The world to acknowledge that
“Cotton is King.” --The Gospel of Slavery, by “Iron Gray,” [Abel
C. Thomas] 1864. The most commonly used phrase describing the
growth of the American economy in the1830s and 1840s was "Cotton
Is King." We think of this slogan today as describing the
plantation economy of the slavery states in the Deep South,
which led to the creation of "the second Middle Passage." But it
is important to understand that this was not simply a Southern
phenomenon. Cotton was one of the world's first luxury
commodities, after sugar and tobacco, and was also the commodity
whose production most d