The Lehman Trilogy and King Cotton

One can almost picture fat cats of old, sitting back, feet raised and crossed on wooden desks, smoking cigars and intoning the slogan that made America rich. King Cotton. Those two words, used just as we might today use “Bull Market,” summed up the prominence the industry built around the crop. Viewers of The Lehman Trilogy, indeed, get a glimpse into King Cotton’s power. After all, it was the commodity on which one of the largest financial institutions in the world, at the time of its collapse in 2008, was built. The name, much like our own flag, has been used as a food brand, to sell sheets, put on the names of luxury hotels, and even nabbed by John Philip Sousa, that composer of rousing Americana music, as a march. As of this writing, Sousa’s march “King Cotton” is slated to be part of the soundscape of this production.

In the early 1800s, America’s place as a major economic force took hold because of cotton. From the first use of the cotton gin in 1794 to the American Civil War (and arguably even after), America’s number one crop and chief export was cotton. The output of cotton rose from 1.5 million pounds a year in 1790, to, in 1860, 2.2 billion pounds. In those years when Great Britain was the globe’s most powerful empire, much of that wealth was fueled by its textile industry; 79% of that cotton came from America. Across the channel, 90% of France’s textile industry was cotton grown in the United States. And that was just the cotton that made it across the Atlantic. In New England, textile mills were responsible for filling the coffers of banks and barons’ pockets, using 67% of the 422.6 million pounds of cotton processed in the United States. It was a booming economy of the relatively young country, and its economic impact spread far beyond the American South.

Behind all those numbers and that wealth was the ugly truth that, not only was American slavery older than the republic itself, but that in the decade before the start of the Civil War, which would test that republic, 3.2 million enslaved people of African descent were the forced labor upon which the economy was built. So valuable was slave labor to the American economy that hundreds of laws and the nation’s culture revolved around keeping and bolstering America’s ‘peculiar institution.’ Statutes that demanded that children born to enslaved women ”Follow the condition of the mother” (ie. were born owned, not free, despite paternity), prohibitions against teaching people of African descent to read and write, prohibiting Black property ownership, making it legal for “owners” to kill their “property,” the rise of the patrols to catch run-aways (the origins of modern policing), the manufacturing of torture devices to control resistors, laws demanding the run-aways who made it to free states be returned, the permission for sexual assault, and the application of the lash were all employed to control the forced labor of African Americans every sunrise to every sunset, from birth to death. In the years before the cotton gin’s proliferation, the institution of slavery seemed to be on the decline as the insidious system was becoming less profitable. Then the cotton gin’s facility for separating cotton from its seed made human bodies the most valuable part of the US economy: 7 times the value of the currency in circulation, twelve times as valuable as the cotton crops they picked, and 48 times as valuable as the expenditures of the US Federal government.

The need for enslaved labor to feed the booming cotton industry created a Second Middle Passage in which a million enslaved from the North and upper South were sold to cotton-producing states. One third of children were separated from parents; one
fifth of recorded partners were separated (many African American partnerships weren’t recorded at all). Those forced rendings do not take into account the adult children, siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents ripped from each other. This forced migration had a cruel relative. The Trail of Tears, during the height of the cotton boom, was a government-backed land seizure to provide more soil for cotton. That policy was a barbarous inversion–Indigenous people were forced to march from and chained Black people were forced to march to rich, fertile land on which cotton grew. There at work and death camps, gussied up and lovingly called plantations, Black people toiled in the unrelenting southern sun, tending the crop that fueled the American economy.

Knowing that the Lehman brothers participated in the economy as enslavers–a fact omitted by the play–merchants, and brokers, why produce the play or see it? Their dramatized story is but one of the many complex stories of the larger American story, not a celebration of wealth acquisition, but a cautionary tale. The country’s narrative, particularly when it comes to slavery, is complex and intertwined. A Mayer Lehman in one generation owned Black humans, and a Herbert Lehman in the next spoke up for civil rights as a US Senator, while both enjoyed positions of privilege. Thus is the contradiction and truth of America. The Lehman Trilogy is a theatrically masterful work that stuns with its scope and invites discussion. Similarly, seeing Hamilton is a chance to witness theatrical artistry and can lead to an opportunity to reexamine the slave owning legacies of its characters, Washington, Jefferson, and, yes, Alexander Hamilton himself. And because this production is happening, you’re reading this essay now and have a greater insight into the interwoven fabric of our country. You can view the story in its complexities and also hear the very real deduction of King Cotton uttered in this play: “[it] was built on a crime.”

–Derek Charles Livingston