The Cotton Deals

[RJNorton]

Charles Higham's Murdering Mr. Lincoln deals with this topic. Inside the book's dust jacket it says, "Higham shows for the first time that Lincoln unwittingly sealed his own doom. By allowing trading with the South in contradiction of his own laws, he enriched a circle of powerful people who, once he had outlived his usefulness and handed over the arrangements to others, marked him very quickly for assassination."

One theory I once read somewhere noted that cotton prices became so inflated due to the war that many futures traders made a ton of money. But, then as the war wore down, the cotton traders began losing so much money that they wanted another President who they thought would rev up the war again, thus increasing cotton prices and recouping their losses. This theory would have it that Lincoln was targeted for financial reasons as prolonging the war would benefit the traders as cotton futures rose.

Of the North-South trading historian James McPherson has written, "The Davis administration looked the other way out of necessity; the Lincoln administration looked the other way out of policy."