Lot 407

Previous image preload Next image preload
Back to catalog
Lot 407
image_0 image_1 image_2 image_3 image_4 image_5
Former President Tyler Declares Cotton King and Expresses Excitement about Domestic Market Just Twelve Years before the Civil War
Former President Tyler Declares Cotton King and Expresses Excitement about Domestic Market Just Twelve Years before the Civil War
image_0 image_1 image_2 image_3 image_4 image_5
Description:

Former President Tyler Declares Cotton King and Expresses Excitement about Domestic Market Just Twelve Years before the Civil War

JOHN TYLER, Autograph Letter Signed, to Hamilton Smith, February 5, 1849, Sherwood Forest, Virginia. 6 pp., 7.625ʺ x 12.5ʺ. Significant tears on folds; some edge chipping. Together with an engraving of John Tyler by J. B. Forrest from a drawing by J. R. Lambdin. 1 p., 5.75ʺ x 7.25ʺ, in a paper frame.

In this extensive letter, former President John Tyler expresses a variant of the “Cotton is King” philosophy. Unlike many southern slaveowners who saw the tariff on manufactured goods as an evil, Tyler recognized that it had developed American industry, especially textile mills to which southern cotton could be shipped. He foresaw a not-too-distant future in which American looms and spindles would supply not only a growing American market but also export finished textiles all over the world.

Tyler owned as many as seventy slaves, and yet he does not mention slavery, the labor system that made growing cotton so profitable, nor does he mention growing controversies over the “peculiar institution” in this lengthy letter. Within a dozen years, other southern leaders, also confident that cotton was king, were willing to secede from much of the Home market and most of the manufacturing capacity that Tyler praises in this letter. They believed that European nations, especially Great Britain and France, would support the Confederacy because of their need for cotton to feed their textile mills and clothe their people. Tyler initially opposed secession but then presided over Virginia’s Secession Convention and served in the Confederate Congress until his death in 1862. Ultimately, cotton’s world appeal was no match for the manpower and manufacturing capabilities of the Union, while the South’s enslaved laboring population proved a liability for a would-be nation at war.

Tyler wrote this letter to attorney and businessman Hamilton Smith of Louisville, Kentucky. Smith worked with investors like U.S. District Judge Elisha Mills Huntington (1806-1862) to develop the Cannelton Cotton Mill in Cannelton, Indiana, on the Ohio River sixty miles west of Louisville. When completed in 1851, the Cannelton Cotton Mill was the largest industrial building west of the Allegheny Mountains. The area was rich in cannel coal (or candle coal), a type of bituminous coal or oil shale, that provided fuel for steam engines to operate the textile mill. Smith hoped to create a western milling center to rival Lowell, Massachusetts.

Complete Transcript
Sherwood Forest Va
Feb 5 1849
My Dear Sir
Your letter of the 8th January with its enclosures duly reached me, and I have read both the one and the other with much interest. Of late years it has become manifest that whenever an encreased demand for breadstuffs, which is necessarily attended with encreased prices, takes place in foreign countries, there is a proportionate decline in the price of cotton. Men must eat. That is a primary necessity which cannot be dispens’d with, and when they are driven to purchase breadstuffs at a high price, they are forced into a curtailment of expenditure in providing themselves with the material for clothing, which is also a necessity under the influence of organized and civilized society, but a necessity neither so pressing or urgent. One may well be content to wear a patched coat in preference to going supperless to bed. It is obvious that there is but one remedy for the cotton planter in the contingency mentioned, and that is to multiply as far as possible the markets for his cotton. To depend upon the market of a single country, Great Britain for example is to incur the certainty of a periodical prostration of the price. The failure of a single crop of corn in that country would spread ruin over the cotton growing region. But with other markets to supply, although undoubtably affected by the loss of any single market, yet the Planters profits would continue to be remunerating. Hence the great importance to him of a free interchange with all the nations of the Earth, which in view of the immensity of the production, invites the constant unceasing efforts of the government to attain. In this view of the subject the Home market is undoubtedly of the greatest importance considering the extent of our country—its shores now washed by the waters of two oceans, the rapid increase of its population, a population which duplicates in a series of 23 years, and all the wants of a refind and civiliz’d society in a still greater ratio, along with its almost metanatural development of power and strength, the day may be consider’d as near at hand, if it has not in fact come when the plough and the spindle must and will be in the closest proximity, and when the American market will be of vastly greater importance to the Cotton Planter than that of much of the world beside. This state of things may be unduly hasten’d or delay’d by the action of the Federal Govt, but it will finally come, and come it would have done, somewhat later possibly but more quietly and peaceably, if you or I had never heard of a Tariff for protection. Natural causes would inevitably have produced it, and man the creature of self interest would be the voluntary and ready instrument to atchieve the result.
The cotton planter has seen or fancied that he saw in the early states of our population an injury inflicted on him in the effort of high duties to restrict the field of the foreign fabricator in order to induce a portion of our people to give up the axe and the plough, the ship and the sea, for the loom and the spindle. He wanted the markets of the old world fully open for his cotton and the ports of this country equally as wide open for the introduction of foreign fabricks thereby encre[as]ing the demand for the raw material through the greater ability to purchase. Not that he was oppos’d to the development of the arts in America, but that he desird to see that development the result of natural and not artificial causes. The time for that development he knew would come with the encrease of our population, but he wishd in the interim to enjoy the advantages of existing systems which had grown up in the midst of the overgrown population of Europe. The fact that under the tariff act of 1846 new manufactories and in considerable numbers are rising up all over the country, is proof that the day has already dawn’d in which the cotton planter may look for an immensely valuable market at his own door, and when his now 20 and shortly to be 40,000,000 are to be cloth’d out of the product of his fields, through their own industry, and that too without sensibly abridging the supplies which he can and must furnish to the foreign fabricator. The U. States may justly be regarded as having a virtual monopoly of the cotton plant. Neither Egyptian, Brazillian or East India cotton can, if the competition be left free, compete with that raised upon our soil. This is seen by a reference to the European prices current. The day which has begun to dawn on the plantation states, will go on increasing until the Home price shall regulate the foreign price. When the Englishman shall look more to the American price current than to those of his own country. Now, you know, it is different. London, Liverpool and Manchester regulate the prices at Boston Charleston and New Orleans. When this shall have chang’d the cotton grower will want no better barometer to indicate his prosperity. Affected he will be undoubtedly even then by short crops in Europe, but the great Home demand will still continue uninfluenced to any considerable degree by the price of bread stuffs, and his remuneration for his labour will be comparatively certain. Home demand for the raw material has astonishly encreased in the last few years and will be most rapidly augmented for the time to come. Domestics are already constituting an important item in our list of exports, and are found in greater or less quantities in every part of the globe. We lose ourselves in an attempt to calculate the progress of American industry, skill and capital. The Philosopher in his closet may deduce the existence of a new Planet, and locate it in the heavens, and the Political economist may deduce from the past the probable advance of society in other quarters of the globe, but our progress defies calculation. The figures for today merely shadow forth the results of tomorrow. The boy is told of howling wildernesses inhabited only by wild beasts, or men more savage than they. Manhood dawns upon him and the same wilds have become a highly cultivated country abounding in the arts of civilization and refinement. The day is on us even now when our 20 millions of people are clothd by American Looms, and the day will arrive sooner than he can calculate when those same looms will clothe the millions of other countries. These are and must be the natural results of our progress. No new impulse from govt. is necessary to produce it. It is fortunate that it is so and that our cotton manufactories are placed on a footing no longer to be influenced by the movements at Washington. This great interest is taken away from the politicians who have for years us’d it as a football with which to play the game of politics. Natural decrees are not to be subverted or hindered in their course by the efforts of men. She wills and what she wills is done. Export duties to be laid in pursuance of the amendment you suggest to the Constitution might in some respects be productive of good, but they would not be unaccompanied by evil. One of the evils which suggests itself is that the duty would operate as a bounty on the producer of cotton in other countries. The true policy of our govt should be to preserve as far as possible the monopoly of the plant, in our own hands, so as to hold controul over the issues of peace and war. But without pursuing the enquiry it is only necessary to say that such constitutional amendment is impractable as are all efforts to amend the Constitution. The Politicians will break it, but will never amend it. You and I then arrive at our conclusions by different ways, but still we do conclude that American spindles and looms will not only supply the millions of America but at no distant time the millions of the world.
Your previous numbers which were forwarded to me sometime ago by our friend Judge Huntingdon place the [elegibility?] of the western waters as sites for manufacturing establishments upon grounds too obvious to be disputed. I need add nothing under that head. You and the Judge by your establishments now in the course of erection have only got the start of others. Hundreds are destined at an early day to tread on your heels.
I have an interest in coal lands within sixty miles of the mouth of the Ohio, a vein of Candle coal lies in close proximity to a vein of bituminous – both have been partially open’d. The Candle coal vein is from 36 to 40 inches in width. The bituminous vein is a five feet vein of excellent quality. I have united a friend with me and it is our purpose to work the mines for shipment at some day not distant. I have no doubt that he would readily consent to the organization of a company for working the mines, and the building up a factory or factories, and we should listen to proposals for these objects. For your kind proposal to aid us in these objects, you have my best thanks, and I shall be greatly oblig’d to you for any aid you may render.
With sentiments of high respect
I am Dr Sir / Yrs
John Tyler
H. Smith Esqr

John Tyler (1790-1862) was born in Virginia and graduated from the College of William and Mary in 1807. He studied law and was admitted to the bar at the age of 19. His father was at the time the governor of Virginia, and the younger Tyler started a law practice in Richmond. He served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1816 to 1821, as Virginia governor from 1825 to 1827, and as U.S. Senator from 1827 to 1836. In 1841, he became the tenth President of the United States and the first president to be elevated to office from the vice presidency, William Henry Harrison died after only a month in office. Tyler’s ascension led to the Constitutional question of whether he was actually president or still the vice president merely performing presidential duties. From his perspective, he had properly assumed the office, and he delivered an inaugural address. Dubbed “His Accidency” by critics, Tyler refused to fall under Henry Clay’s influence and instead charted his own course as president, leading to vetoes, Cabinet resignations and an impeachment attempt. Tyler retired to a Virginia plantation he named Sherwood Forest. In February 1861, he chaired a convention in Washington to avert civil war but disapproved of the convention’s proposed resolutions and then presided over the Virginia Secession Convention, which removed that state from the Union. He later served in the Provisional Confederate Congress until his death.

Hamilton Smith (1804-1875) was born in New Hampshire and graduated from Dartmouth College in 1829. He studied law, then practiced in Louisville, Kentucky from 1832 to 1837. He invested in coal land in Cannelton, Indiana, in 1840. Smith wrote for a number of local and national periodicals, emphasizing the necessity of building factories in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys near coal and cotton. He was part of a group of men that included future U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase and federal judge Elisha Mills Huntingon, who organized to build the Cannelton Cotton Mill. The mill went into operation in 1851, and Smith moved to Cannelton late that year. Although the textile company was sold in 1853, Smith remained as president and general manager of the American Cannel Coal Company until 1873.

This item comes with a Certificate from John Reznikoff, a premier authenticator for both major 3rd party authentication services, PSA and JSA (James Spence Authentications), as well as numerous auction houses.

WE PROVIDE IN-HOUSE SHIPPING WORLDWIDE.

Accepted Forms of Payment:

American Express, Discover, MasterCard, Money Order / Cashiers Check, Paypal, Personal Check, Visa, Wire Transfer

Shipping

We do our own in-house worldwide shipping!

Applicable shipping and handling charges will be added to the invoice. We offer several shipping options, and remain one of the few auction houses who proudly provides professional in-house shipping as an option to our clients. All items will ship with signature required, and full insurance. Most items are sent via Federal Express, with P. O. Box addresses being sent through USPS. We insure through Berkley Asset Protection with rates of $.70 per $100 of value, among the lowest insurance rates in the industry. Our shipping department cameras document every package, both outgoing and incoming, for maximum security. In addition, we compare our shipping and handling rates against those of other auction houses, to ensure that our charges are among the lowest in the trade.

Upon winning your item(s), you will receive an invoice with our in-house shipping and handling fees included. ***We will ship to the address as it appears on your invoice, unless you inform us otherwise, immediately upon your receipt of invoice***

International shipments: In order to comply with our insurance provider, all international shipments will be sent via Fed Ex and customs paperwork will show a value of $1.00. International buyers should contact our office directly with any questions regarding this policy.

Third Party Shipping Option: If a third party shipper is preferred, the buyer is responsible for contacting them directly to make shipping arrangements. For your convenience, we have provided some recommended shippers. For your protection, we will require a signed release from you, confirming your authorization for us to release your lots to your specified third party Please copy and paste this following link into your browser: http://universityarchives.com/UserFiles/ShippingInfo.pdf. At that point, our responsibility and insurance coverage for your item(s) ceases. Items picked up by third party shippers are required to pay Connecticut sales tax. Items requiring third party shipping due to being oversized, fragile or bulky will be denoted in the item description.

Please see our full terms and conditions for names of suggested third party shippers.


After payment has been made in full, University Archives will ship your purchase within 5 business days following receipt of full payment for item.


Please remember that the buyer is responsible for all shipping costs from University Archives' offices in Westport, CT to the buyer's door. Please see full Terms and Conditions of Sale.

January 6, 2021 10:30 AM EST
Wilton, CT, US

University Archives

You agree to pay a buyer's premium of up to 25% and any applicable taxes and shipping.

View full terms and conditions

Bid Increments
From: To: Increments:
$0 $99 $10
$100 $299 $20
$300 $499 $25
$500 $999 $50
$1,000 $1,999 $100
$2,000 $2,999 $200
$3,000 $4,999 $250
$5,000 $9,999 $500
$10,000 $19,999 $1,000
$20,000 $49,999 $2,500
$50,000 + $5,000