The history of Sea Island Cotton was presented by Bill Riski of the Dataw Historic Foundation on Sep 30, 2019.
In the late 1700’s, a superior type of cotton made its way from the British West Indies to the Lowcountry of South Carolina. By careful seed selection, this cotton evolved into Sea Island Cotton. It was recognized as the finest cotton ever grown.
Only about 360 families, out of 1.6 million families living in the South in the 1800’s, had the wealth, ambition, and the mobility to start cotton plantations on the sea islands of South Carolina. From 1790, when William Elliott produced the first commercial crop of Sea Island Cotton on Hilton Head Island, to 1861, when all the plantation owners fled the area after the Battle of Port Royal, sea island cotton generated great wealth for them. This unique cotton grew on James, Johns, Wadmalaw, Edisto, and St Helena islands, to name a few. Over 500 million pounds of Sea Island Cotton were produced and exported through Charleston to foreign markets, primarily England. For this, they were paid $3.6 billion (2018 value) in the first half of the 19th Century.
Sea Island Cotton was a small percentage of all cotton grown in the South. By 1860, the southern U.S. cotton belt from the Carolinas over to Texas produced two-thirds of the world’s cotton. Almost 90% of the cotton imports to England came from the U.S.; 1.6 billion pounds of cotton per year. Many in the South felt that if it came to war, Britain would support the South, ensuring a swift victory. This U.S. cotton dominance is what drove South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond (1807–1864) to taunt northern sympathizers on the U.S. Senate floor in an 1858 speech where he said, in part:
“You dare not make war on cotton—no power on earth dares make war upon it. Cotton is king.”
The British textile industry around Lancashire suffered a severe economic depression and famine from 1861 – 1867, due in large part to the lack of U.S. cotton exports during the war. However, Britain formally remained neutral during our Civil War.
However, the genuinely awful side of this story is that Sea Island Cotton, like all cotton, was only profitable in this era when enabled by slavery. Though it generated enormous wealth for a few, it required great suffering by many. Freedmen planted Sea Island Cotton on St. Helena Island during the war. There were attempts after the war to grow Sea Island Cotton on several sea islands, but they failed. Sea Island Cotton, the best of the best, effectively died off over the next few decades. It never again came close to the production quantities reached before the Civil War, levels that could only be achieved using slave labor. And what little resurgence it had was dealt a fatal blow with the arrival of the boll weevil in South Carolina in 1918.