Cotton Culture

The Life and Times of King Cotton, by David L. Cohn. 286 pp. New York: Oxford University Press. $5.00

The history of King Cotton is indeed the story of a “romantic troublemaker.” It all began in 1793 on Mulberry Plantation near Savannah, when a young Connecticut Yankee, under the urging of local planters, invented a machine to comb the seeds out of “vegetable wool.” Little did Eli Whitney realize that he had “stopped the slow dying of Negro slavery and stimulated it anew on a vast scale, started a westward cotton movement that is still in progress, founded a cotton plantation system that profoundly affected the culture and politics of a great region, fostered the controversy that ended in civil war, and fastened upon the United States a massive race problem.”

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Richard M. Weaver

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The Life and Times of King Cotton, by David L. Cohn. 286 pp. New York: Oxford University Press. $5.00

The history of King Cotton is indeed the story of a “romantic troublemaker.” It all began in 1793 on Mulberry Plantation near Savannah, when a young Connecticut Yankee, under the urging of local planters, invented a machine to comb the seeds out of “vegetable wool.” Little did Eli Whitney realize that he had “stopped the slow dying of Negro slavery and stimulated it anew on a vast scale, started a westward cotton movement that is still in progress, founded a cotton plantation system that profoundly affected the culture and politics of a great region, fostered the controversy that ended in civil war, and fastened upon the United States a massive race problem.”