ver, a strong Southern effort must
be made, and the time seemed propitious. Moreover by July, 1862, it was
hoped that soon, in the cotton districts, the depression steadily
increasing since the beginning of the war, would bring an ally to the
Southern cause. Before continuing the story of Parliamentary and private
efforts by the friends of the South it is here necessary to review the
cotton situation--now rapidly becoming a matter of anxious concern to
both friend and foe of the North and in less degree to the
Ministry itself.

"King Cotton" had long been a boast with the South. "Perhaps no great
revolution," says Bancroft, "was ever begun with such convenient and
soothing theories as those that were expounded and believed at the time
of the organization of the Confederacy.... In any case, hostilities
could not last long, for France and Great Britain must have what the
Confederacy alone could supply, and therefore they could be forced to
aid the South, as a condition precedent to relief from the terrible
distress that was sure to follow a blockade[654]." This confidence was
no new development. For ten years past whenever Southern threats of
secession had been indulged in, the writers and politicians of that
section had expanded upon cotton as the one great wealth-producing
industry of America and as the one product which would compel European
acquiescence in American policy, whether of the Union, before 1860, or
of the South if she should secede. In the financial depression that
swept the Northern States in 1857 _De Bow's Review_, the leading
financial journal of the South, declared: "The wealth of the South is
permanent and real, that of the North fugitive and fictitious. Events
now transpiring expose the fiction, as humbug after humbug
explodes[655]." On March 4, 1858, Senator Hammond of South Carolina,
asked in a speech, "What would happen if no cotton was furnished for
three years? I will not stop to depict what everyone can imagine, but
this is certain: England would topple headlong and carry the whole
civilized world with her save the South. No, you dare not make war on
cotton. No power on earth dares make war upon it. Cotton _is_
King[656]." Two years later, writing before the elections of 1860 in
which the main question was that of the territorial expansion of
slavery, this same Southern statesman expressed himself as believing
that "the slave-holding South is now the controlling power of the
world.... Cotton,