David Christy

Cincinnati journalist David Christy was neither a southerner, a slaveowner, nor a secessionist. Yet his argument for slavery drew on the South's motto that "Cotton is King"—a position to be seriously reckoned with by northern abolitionists and antislavery legislators. Slavery was the cornerstone of the cotton business, and cotton made up more than half the nation's foreign exports in the decades before the Civil War. Slavery bound the North, South, and Europe together in a powerful economic web, one that many believed could only be disrupted at great danger to the nation's expansion and prosperity.

Christy's book Cotton Is King was first published in 1855 and went through three popular editions by the beginning of the Civil War. Southerners pointed to it as a wellreasoned and irrefutable justification of slavery. At the same time, Europe's dependence on southern cotton...