Since the Battle of Port Royal Union troops have been stationed in the vicinity of Beaufort, South Carolina. Some planters started burning their cotton to prevent it falling into Union hands. From the Richmond Daily Dispatch November 29, 1861:
The burning of cotton.
–The planters upon the Southern coast, at all those points which are exposed to the depredations of the Yankee invaders, are busily employed in removing their negroes to the interior and in burning their cotton. The comparatively small quantity of the staple which has fallen into the enemy’s hands could have been destroyed by the proprietors but for the confidence they felt in the ability of the slight fortifications in their neighborhood to resist attack. The success of the Yankees in their attack upon Port Royal has had a different effect from what they anticipated. Instead of opening a port for Southern cotton, it has rendered it impossible that another bale of Southern cotton shall ever fall into their hands. –Already the work of destruction has commenced. With a self-sacrificing patriotism nobler than the courage of the battle field, the planters are applying the torch to the rich product of their soil at every place where it is in danger of a visit from the enemy. The midnight sky on the seacoast of Carolina is lighted up with the flames of the coveted treasure, and systematic arrangements have been made to convert it into ashes universally, before it shall fall into the invader’s hands. All the Fire Zouaves of New York cannot extinguish this great conflagration. The signal of their approach will be the signal for the torch to be applied, and if the strong man must fall, he will pull down the pillars of the temple upon his persecutors and bury himself and them in a common ruin.
The Yankees do not understand the spirit of the Southern people. They might as well attempt to subjugate the winds as to conquer such a people. They have determined to sacrifice every worldly possession on the altar of independence and liberty. They will never permit Yankee Generals to wring from them either their rights, or, that which the Yankees are alone fighting for, their commerce. They are not themselves dependent upon cotton, valuable as it is to them, and essential to the rest of the world. They can give up the cultivation of cotton altogether, and still live in comfort and plenty. Their wonderful soil produces in boundless abundance every va y of agricultural production. They can raise more than enough of wheat, corn, rye, oats, hay, to supply their own population.–They will, in all probability, devote their soil exclusively the next year to the cultivation of the cereals, and whether the present crop shall be available for the use of the world depends entirely upon their own sovereign will and pleasure. The cotton is ready for the torch, and the torch is ready for the cotton. The Yankees have proved themselves successful inventors of agricultural machines, but when they employ the sword to raise Southern staples, they make a blunder which will destroy their commerce, ruin their cities, and convert the subjugation of the South, even if it would be accomplished, into their own financed [financial?] and political ruin.
According to an article reproduced at Civil War Home not by any means did all Southerners burn their cotton to keep it away from the Yankees:
If the Confederate government was able, albeit partially and belatedly, to gain control over the cotton trade with Europe, it had much less success in curtailing the cotton trade with the Union. On May 21, 1861, the Confederate Congress prohibited the sale of cotton to the North. Yet an illicit trade across military lines flourished between Southern cotton farmers and Northern traders. President Abraham Lincoln gave licenses to traders, who followed the Union army into the South. On March 17, 1862, the Confederacy gave state governments the right to destroy any cotton that might fall into the hands of the Union army. Some devoted Confederates burned their own cotton to keep it out of enemy hands. Other Southerners, however, discovered that Union agents were willing to pay the highest prices in over half a century for cotton or offered badly needed supplies as barter. Ironically, valuable currency for cotton from the North saved some small Southern farmers from starvation. But this selling of cotton to the North undermined Confederate Nationalism, as did the official Confederate trading of cotton with the North conducted in the last years of the war.
