“What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years?...England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her, save the South…. No power on the earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is King.” 

—Senator James Henry Hammond (1858) 

Savannah Cotton Exchange Building  

We will begin this story with General Nathanael Greene, who was George Washington’s most gifted and dependable officer in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War. A monument to Greene can be found in Savannah’s Johnson Square.  

His nickname was: ‘Savior of the South’ due to his brave efforts leading several successful battles that eroded the British hold on its southern American colonies during the American Revolution.  

And, yes, this is the proper spelling of Nathanael’s first name. 

After the war, Greene desired to become a successful planter. The Georgia legislature passed a bill to appropriate five thousand guineas to purchase a deserted plantation named ‘Mulberry Grove’ as a reward for the services Greene provided to the state of Georgia and for helping form this new country. 

Greene died in 1786, shortly after taking possession of the estate. Six years later, a young graduate of Yale College headed south to become a tutor. He accepted an invitation from Catherine Greene, widow to Nathanael, to stay at Mulberry Grove, located in Chatham County just outside of Savannah. 

The young college graduate went by the name: Mackenzie ‘Eli’ Whitney. While visiting Mulberry Grove, the young Whitney learned all about cotton production from Mrs. Greene and her plantation manager. At the time, farmers found cotton very easy to grow, but also very hard to make a profit due to the extensive challenge and extraordinary amount of labor to separate cotton seeds from the cotton itself.  

Eli Whitney soon solved that problem with his famous Cotton Gin. The word ‘gin’ being short for engine. And suddenly, the blooming idea and emerging reality of King Cotton was inspired and made possible. 

The cotton gin soon made growing cotton enormously profitable and inadvertently made the slavery deployed to grow additional cotton more essential than ever. Whitney was granted a patent in 1794. 

So, there I was standing around Johnson Square ready to paint another SCAD acquired and renovated building, the old Citizen’s and Southern Bank — now Propes Hall, and the subject of next week’s Postcard from Savannah — when I looked up the street to see the Savannah Cotton Exchange Building. 

And let me tell you, it is an eye-catcher — very cute, and most gorgeous; built for successful cotton merchants in 1887. So, without a thought, I turned my small easel due north to capture this scene.  

If you’re interested in the story of cotton, Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History is a source second to none. With a close reading of its history, the building of the Savannah Cotton Exchange comes as little surprise. What did come as a big surprise to this Russian-born girl was how the global Empire of Cotton later led to a Russian Tsar’s conquest of Central Asia, where I was born and raised. 

One thing, a revolution among colonies, led to another, a plantation outside Savannah, which led to another, a Yale educated tutor traveling the American South, to another, a Civil War over slavery, to another, Russia’s conquest of Kazakhstan, to a final thing — this painting by a Russian-American artist.