What did cotton production and slavery have to do with Great Britain? The figures are astonishing. As Dattel explains: "Britain, the most powerful nation in the world, relied on slave-produced American cotton for over 80 per cent of its essential industrial raw material. English textile mills accounted for 40 percent of Britain's exports. One-fifth of Britain's twenty-two million people were directly or indirectly involved with cotton textiles."

And, finally, New England? As Ronald Bailey shows, cotton fed the textile revolution in the United States. "In 1860, for example, New England had 52 percent of the manufacturing establishments and 75 percent of the 5.14 million spindles in operation," he explains. The same goes for looms. In fact, Massachusetts "alone had 30 percent of all spindles, and Rhode Island another 18 percent." Most impressively of all, "New England mills consumed 283.7 million pounds of cotton, or 67 percent of the 422.6 million pounds of cotton used by U.S. mills in 1860." In other words, on the eve of the Civil War, New England's economy, so fundamentally dependent upon the textile industry, was inextricably intertwined, as Bailey puts it, "to the labor of black people working as slaves in the U.S. South."

If there was one ultimate cause of the Civil War, it was King Cotton -- black-slave-grown cotton -- "the most important determinant of American history in the nineteenth century," Dattel concludes. "Cotton prolonged America's most serious social tragedy, slavery, and slave-produced cotton caused the American Civil War." And that is why it was something of a miracle that even the New England states joined the war to end slavery.

Once we understand the paramount economic importance of cotton to the economies of the United States and Great Britain, we can begin to appreciate the enormity of the achievements of the black and white abolitionists who managed to marshal moral support for the abolition of slavery, as well as those half a million slaves who "marched with their feet" and fled to Union lines as soon as they could following the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.

As always, you can find more "Amazing Facts About the Negro" on The Root, and check back each week as we count to 100.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research at Harvard University. He is also the editor-in-chief of The Root.

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