How the 1619 Project Rehabilitates the ‘King Cotton’ Thesis

The New York Times’ series on slavery relies on bad scholarship to make an argument with an inauspicious history.

‘I say that cotton is king, and that he waves his scepter not only over these 33 states, but over the island of Great Britain and over continental Europe!” So thundered Senator Louis T. Wigfall of Texas in December 1860, as an intended warning to those who doubted the economic viability of secessionism. Like many southerners, Wigfall subscribed to the “King Cotton” thesis: the belief that slave-produced cotton commanded a controlling...