King Cotton

King Cotton is a historical fiction novel that covers all four years the U.S. Civil War.  The main character, Jack Bailey, is a 24-year-old cotton exporter working out of Charleston, South Carolina, for his father’s business in Liverpool.  During that period of history, cotton was the oil of the day, accounting for 60 percent of total U.S. exports.  In 1860, textile mills in New England consumed more than 280 million pounds of cotton per year and the U.K. imported more than twice that amount from various countries. 

With war looming, Bailey believes that Southern ports will be blockaded, which would put him out of business unless he can sell domestically—and specifically to the North.  In order to do that he'll need a cover that allows him to move across the lines, so he lands a job with famed Civil War photographer Mathew Brady.  This side hustle brings him into contact with many of the famous people of the times, including Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, Allan Pinkerton, Harriet Tubman, P.T. Barnum, John Wilkes Booth, and some of the other Lincoln conspirators.  He courts Anna Surratt, daughter of the first woman executed by the U.S. Government, Mary Surratt.  Although some of these associations suggest that Bailey was involved in Lincoln’s assassination, other than neglecting signs that may have been obvious in hindsight, he was not.  He is, however, a cad through it all, indifferent to the reasons for the war or its outcome so long as he is profiting from it.  That said, his experiences with the war, slavery and romance all serve to gradually improve his moral standards. Bailey’s moonlighting job with Brady and his efforts to sell cotton also put him at many of the most significant events during the war, including the bombing of Fort Sumter, the Battles of Bull Run, Gettysburg, and Antietam, other attempts to kill Lincoln, and the burning down of Columbia, South Carolina.  

While the book is historical fiction, almost all the characters, events, and timelines in it are real, including earlier attempts on Lincoln’s life. The story begins in Baltimore as Lincoln and his family are passing through on their way to his first inauguration, and it ends at the Petersen House across from Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865, the night Lincoln is shot. King Cotton offers up a factual account of this important era in America wrapped inside an entertaining story. 

A sequel, King Cotton II - Kentucky Gold picks up right where King Cotton ends, with Bailey once again destined to find himself on the scene at more than a few notable events in U.S. history, including the first quick draw gunfight in the old west, herding longhorn up the Old Chisholm Trail, one of the earliest train robberies in America, Black Friday of September 1869, and the Battle of Beecher Island, Colorado.