What was the impact of the cotton boom on the economy?
Booming cotton prices stimulated new western cultivation and actually checked modest initiatives in economic diversification of the previous decade. The U.S. cotton crop nearly doubled, from 2.1 million bales in 1850 to 3.8 million bales ten years later.
How did the south benefit from the cotton industry?
Some southerners believed that their reliance on a single cash crop and its use of slaves to produce it gave the South economic independence and made them immune from the effects of these changes. Actually, producing cotton brought the South more firmly into larger American and Atlantic markets.
What caused the cotton boom of 1850s?
The Cotton Boom. While the pace of industrialization picked up in the North in the 1850s, the agricultural economy of the slave South grew, if anything, more entrenched. In the decade before the Civil War cotton prices rose more than 50 percent, to 11.5 cents a pound. Booming cotton prices stimulated new western cultivation and actually checked ...
What was the price of cotton before the Civil War?
In the decade before the Civil War cotton prices rose more than 50 percent, to 11.5 cents a pound. Booming cotton prices stimulated new western cultivation and actually checked modest initiatives in economic diversification of the previous decade.
What was the cotton boom?
How many bales of cotton were produced in 1850?
What were the most important economic units in the South?
What were the major economic developments in the South during the postwar years?
How did slavery affect the South?
What was the antebellum South?
What was the Southern economy like in 1860?
See 4 more
About this website
How did cotton affect the westward expansion?
The cotton gin made cotton tremendously profitable, which encouraged westward migration to new areas of the US South to grow more cotton. The number of enslaved people rose with the increase in cotton production, from 700,000 in 1790 to over three million by 1850.
How did cotton impact society?
Cotton is the most widespread profitable non-food crop in the world. Its production provides income for more than 250 million people worldwide and employs almost 7% of all labor in developing countries. Approximately half of all textiles are made of cotton.
What effect did the rise in cotton production have on westward expansion and slavery?
Cotton transformed the United States, making fertile land in the Deep South, from Georgia to Texas, extraordinarily valuable. Growing more cotton meant an increased demand for slaves. Slaves in the Upper South became incredibly more valuable as commodities because of this demand for them in the Deep South.
What were the effects of the cotton Kingdom?
The cotton kingdom also brought more people to the South. Getting rich by growing raising a cotton crop where slaves did all the hard labor was attractive to many farmers. Causing great growth in the areas new slave owning states such as Texas quickly grew.
How important was cotton to the American economy?
Cotton accounted for over half of all American exports during the first half of the 19th century. The cotton market supported America's ability to borrow money from abroad. It also fostered an enormous domestic trade in agricultural products from the West and manufactured goods from the East.
What are the positive impacts of cotton production?
Increasing soil health, erosion control and reducing compaction. Protecting biodiversity and ecosystem services. Improving water quality and conservation through more efficient irrigation techniques. Reducing reliance on harmful pesticides.
What were the positive and negative results of the cotton boom?
Positive results of the Cotton Boom was it lead to a better economy, and they could sell more cotton. Negative results of the Cotton Boom was there was a demand for slaves, and there was a reliance on one industry. The South did suffer, because the value of cotton decreased.
How does cotton affect the economy?
Annual business revenue stimulated by cotton in the U.S. economy exceeds $120 billion, making cotton America's number one value-added crop. The farm value of U.S. cotton and cottonseed production is approximately $5 billion.
Why was cotton so important during the Civil War?
When the southern states seceded from the United States to form the Confederate States of America in 1861, they used cotton to provide revenue for its government, arms for its military, and the economic power for a diplomatic strategy for the fledgling Confederate nation.
Why did cotton become the dominant crop after the war of 1812?
As a commodity, cotton had the advantage of being easily stored and transported. A demand for it already existed in the industrial textile mills in Great Britain, and in time, a steady stream of slave-grown American cotton would also supply northern textile mills.
Why was King Cotton important?
After the invention of the cotton gin (1793), cotton surpassed tobacco as the dominant cash crop in the agricultural economy of the South, soon comprising more than half the total U.S. exports.
What was cotton used for during slavery?
With the invention of the cotton gin, cotton became the cash crop of the Deep South, stimulating increased demand for enslaved people from the Upper South to toil the land.
What impact does cotton have on the environment?
Cotton cultivation causes soil degradation and erosion as well as loss of forest area and other habitat. The use of child labor and slavery is common in the industry. Cotton production is responsible for the emission of 220 million tons of CO2 annually.
Why was cotton so important in the industrial revolution?
Cotton was a main raw material of the industrial revolution. Its strong fibres were uniquely suited to the hard mechanical treatment in the spinning machinery. The fibre was cultivated in the colonies in India and the Middle East and in the USA, where until 1860 it was produced largely by slave labour.
How important is cotton?
Why is the value of cotton important? The value of cotton is an important measure of agricultural productivity because it measures the economic output of farms. Cotton is a significant crop; it is the most commonly used natural fiber, and it accounts for ⅓ of the world's fiber demand.
How is cotton good for the environment?
Grown using materials and methods that lower its impact on the environment, organic cotton is a fantastic sustainable alternative to commonly-grown crops. These eco-friendly production systems focus on maintaining soil fertility and don't involve any toxic pesticides, synthetic fertilisers and harmful chemicals.
Mapping History : The Spread of Cotton and of Slavery 1790-1860 ...
Introduction. This module has four parts. The first displays the dramatic growth of cotton production in the United States from 1790 to 1860.
The Economics of Cotton – U.S. History - University of Hawaiʻi
In the antebellum era—that is, in the years before the Civil War—American planters in the South continued to grow Chesapeake tobacco and Carolina rice as they had in the colonial era. Cotton, however, emerged as the antebellum South’s major commercial crop, eclipsing tobacco, rice, and sugar in economic importance. By 1860, the region was producing two-thirds of the world’s cotton.
What was the cotton boom?
The Cotton Boom. While the pace of industrialization picked up in the North in the 1850s, the agricultural economy of the slave South grew, if anything, more entrenched. In the decade before the Civil War cotton prices rose more than 50 percent, to 11.5 cents a pound. Booming cotton prices stimulated new western cultivation ...
How many bales of cotton were produced in 1850?
The U.S. cotton crop nearly doubled, from 2.1 million bales in 1850 to 3.8 million bales ten years later.
What were the most important economic units in the South?
Cotton Farms and Plantations. The image of the large cotton plantation dominates popular impressions of the antebellum South and Southern economy, and to be sure it was the preeminent economic unit of the region, but it was hardly the norm. Nearly three-fourths of free families in the South did not own slaves. The typical Southern white was a small farmer. Many of these families grew cotton, which unlike sugar or rice did not require heavy capital to cultivate. The crop was basically nonperishable and survived relatively rough handling, so it tended to survive transportation to distant markets in better shape than other crops. Small farmers often devoted at least part of their acreage to cotton, and small slaveowners could be found working alongside their slaves in the field throughout the region. Still, most slaves lived on — and the bulk of the cotton crop came from — plantations worked by twenty or more slaves. On the largest plantations, fifty or more slaves were divided into gangs, run by drivers and sometimes, though not always, by overseers. On these large plantations, complex divisions of labor evolved. The most developed plantations came to resemble village economies: one Virginia planter in 1854, for example, owned and managed eight plowmen, ten hoe hands, two wagoners, four oxcart drivers, a carnage driver, a hostler, a stable boy, and various craftspeople, including two carpenters, five masons, two smiths, a miller, two shoemakers, five spinners, a weaver, and the owners ’ household staff.
What were the major economic developments in the South during the postwar years?
Postwar Development. In aftermath of the war, the Southern economy began slowly to diversify and commercialize. Agriculturally, land-use patterns grew even more cotton-intensive as new stretches of upcountry shifted from food production, such as corn and pork, to cotton. But the region (like other parts of the nation) also underwent a boom in railroad construction, and enthusiastic boosters and carpetbaggers also started manufacturing enterprises in the 1860s. The rate of manufacturing growth leveled off in the following decade but redoubled in the 1880s and 1890s. These enterprises included cotton mills, commercial fertilizer manufacturing plants (by 1877 South Carolina phosphate mines were shipping more than 100,000 tons to foreign markets), and iron forges. Whereas antebellum Southern ironmakers had relied on outdated and inefficient charcoal-burning operations, their postwar counterparts ran modernized coal mines, coke ovens, and blast furnaces. The town of Birmingham, for example, became an industrial center during this period. Organized in 1871 as part of a land speculation project by the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, the town rapidly developed substantial iron- and eventually steelworks, contributing to a statewide coal output of nearly 200,000 tons in 1877 and pig-iron production of nearly 37,000 tons.
How did slavery affect the South?
As businesses, the plantations channeled economic functions that went well beyond cotton (or sugar or tobacco) cultivation. For example, larger plantation owners either procured or produced on site goods and services that, in the free-labor economy of the Northern states, were produced and exchanged as part of the wider economy. Thus, few towns or villages emerged in the South. Much of the region ’ s commercial exchange operated through the larger plantation owners or through businessmen known as cotton factors, usually agents of Northern or British firms, set up at river landings to market crops and provide planters with imported manufactured goods. The ideology of slaveownership probably inhibited key industrial values , fostering a fiercely defensive agrarianism and a sharp distaste for Yankee commercialism, industry, and wage labor, particularly as proslavery advocacy grew more insistent in the late-antebellum period. More tangibly, slavery cut off the potential immigration of free labor; while strong immigrant flows were feeding into the Northern economy in the 1850s, the South remained a largely closed society. Whether or not slaveowners can be called profit-minded entrepreneurs and capitalists (a question still under debate), the world they made was distinctly preindustrial, even anti-industrial.
What was the antebellum South?
The antebellum South was not all cotton plantations and riverboats. Small-scale industry did emerge in Southern towns such as Lynchburg, Virginia. By 1858 three railroad lines intersected there, and like railroad connections in the Midwest, the industrial infrastructure boosted manufacturing in the town.
What was the Southern economy like in 1860?
Not surprisingly, given these figures, the southern economy remained overwhelmingly agricultural. Southern capitalists sank. money into cotton rather than factories or land. More precisely, they invested in slaves; the average slave owner held almost two-thirds of his wealth in slaves in 1860, much less than he held in land.
How did the South depend on cotton?
The South’s dependence on cotton was matched by its dependence on slaves to plant, tend, and harvest the cotton. Despite the rhetoric of the American Revolution that “all men are created equal,” slavery not only endured in the United States but was the very foundation of the country’s economic success. Cotton and slavery occupied a central place in the nineteenth-century economy. Importing slaves into the United States was outlawed by Congress in 1808, but owning slaves remained legal. At the same time, falling tobacco prices caused a shift to wheat farming in the upper South. Raising wheat was much less labor-intensive than tobacco – in fact, the yeoman farmers Jefferson had imagined spreading westward grew plenty of wheat with no slaves at all. Rather than competing with farmers in the North and Midwest, slaveowners in states like Virginia, Maryland, and Kentucky went into the business of raising and selling slaves to the cotton plantations of the Deep South. As many as a million slaves were “sold down the river” in the domestic slave trade during the first half of the nineteenth century, generating immense fortunes for already-wealthy slaveowners in the upper South.
Why were steamboats important to the cotton industry?
Riverboats were already an important part of the transportation revolution due to their enormous freight-carrying capacity and ability to navigate shallow waterways. By 1837, there were over seven hundred steamships operating on the Mississippi and its tributaries. Major new ports developed at St. Louis, Memphis, Chattanooga, Shreveport, and other locations. By 1860, some thirty-five hundred riverboats were steaming in and out of New Orleans carrying an annual cargo of cotton worth $220 million (over $7 billion in 2019 dollars). Riverboats also came to symbolize the class and social distinctions of the antebellum age. While the decks carried the precious cargo, ornate rooms staterooms graced the interior where whites socialized in the ship’s saloons and dining halls while black slaves served them.
How did white southerners defend slavery?
White southerners defended slavery by criticizing wage labor in the North. They argued that the Industrial Revolution had brought about a new type of “wage slavery” that they claimed was far worse than the slave labor used on southern plantations. Defenders of slaveholding also lashed out directly at abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison for daring to call into question their way of life. Indeed, Virginians accused Garrison of instigating Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion. A Virginian named George Fitzhugh contributed to the defense of slavery with his 1854 book Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society. Fitzhugh argued that laissez-faire capitalism benefited only the quick-witted and intelligent, leaving the ignorant at a huge disadvantage. Slaveholders, he argued, took care of the ignorant slaves of the South. Southerners provided slaves with care from birth to death, Fitzhugh asserted, in stark contrast to the wage slavery of the North where workers were at the mercy of economic forces beyond their control. Fitzhugh’s ideas exemplified southern notions of paternalism.
What were the major slave revolts in the colonies?
Important slave rebellions in the British North American colonies and the United States included the New York Slave Revolt of 1712, the Samba Rebellion (1731), the Stono Rebellion (1739), the New York Slave Insurrection (1741), the Mina Conspiracy (1791), the Pointe Coupée conspiracy (1794), Gabriel’s conspiracy (1800), the Igbo Landing mass suicide (1803), the Chatham Manor Rebellion (1805), the German Coast Uprising (1811), George Boxley’s Rebellion (1815), Denmark Vesey’s conspiracy (1822), Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831), the Black Seminole Rebellion (1835-38), the Amistad ship seizure (1839), the Creole ship rebellion (1841), the Slave Revolt in the Cherokee Nation (1842), and John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry (1859) which included an attempt to organize a slave rebellion. One of the most traumatic for white Southerners was the revolt led by a slave named Nat Turner in 1831 in Southampton County, Virginia. Turner had suffered not only from personal enslavement, but also from the additional trauma of having his wife sold away from him. Bolstered by Christianity, Turner became convinced that like Christ, he should lay down his life to end slavery. Mustering his relatives and friends, he began the rebellion August 22, killing scores of whites in the county. Whites mobilized quickly and within forty-eight hours had brought the rebellion to an end. Shocked by Nat Turner’s Rebellion and aware that the use of slaves in Virginia was decreasing with the decline of tobacco, Virginia’s state legislature considered ending slavery in the state in order to provide greater security. In the end, legislators decided slavery would remain and that their state would continue to play a key role in the domestic slave trade.
How did the South sell slaves?
The selling of slaves was a major business enterprise throughout the history of the South, representing a key part of the economy. Beginning in the colonial period, when Thomas Jefferson wrote about the profits that could be made on the “natural increase” produced by enslaved women, white men invested substantial sums in slaves and carefully calculated the annual returns they could expect from selling a slave’s children. The domestic slave trade was highly profitable and between 1820 and 1860, white American traders sold a million or more slaves in the domestic slave market. Groups of slaves were transported by ship from places like Virginia, a state that specialized in raising slaves for sale, to New Orleans, where they were sold to planters in the Mississippi Valley. Other slaves made the overland trek in chains from older states like North Carolina to new and booming Deep South states like Alabama.
What did Garrison do to end slavery?
By 1838, the AASS had 250,000 members. They rejected colonization as a racist scheme and opposed the use of violence to end slavery. Influenced by evangelical Protestantism, Garrison and other abolitionists believed in moral suasion, a technique of appealing to the conscience of the public, especially slaveholders. Moral suasion relied on dramatic narratives, often from former slaves, about the horrors of slavery, arguing that slavery destroyed families, as children were sold and taken away from their mothers and fathers. Moral suasion resonated with many women, who condemned the sexual violence against slave women and the victimization of southern white women by adulterous husbands.
What was the largest slave market in the United States in the 1850s?
New Orleans had the largest slave market in the United States. A healthy young male slave in the 1850s could be sold for $1,000 (approximately $33,000 in 2019 dollars), and by the 1850s demand for slaves reached an all-time high, and prices therefore doubled. The high price of slaves in the 1850s and the inability of natural increase to satisfy demands led some southerners to demand the reopening of the international slave trade, a movement that caused a rift between the Upper South and the Lower South. Whites in the Upper South who sold slaves to their counterparts in the Lower South worried that reopening the trade would lower prices and hurt their profits.
What was the southern cash crop that had no impact on the west?
A. cotton was a southern cash crop that had no impact on the west
What did the West want the government to regulate?
A. they wanted the government to regulate farming and commerce in the west
How much did Thomas Jefferson buy the territory of France for?
Huge addition of land that doubled the country. Thomas Jefferson bought the territory from France for $15million for 828,000 square miles.
Which country reclaimed large portions of land in North America?
a. great britain reclaimed large portions of land in north america
How did the settlement of the West affect the West?
The Settlement of the West significantly impacted the west by spreading and fueling industrialisation with increased agricultural production, the spread of railroads, and the driving back of extermination of Buffalo and Indians.
Why was the settlement of the West important?
The Settlement of the West was integral to increasing industrial progress. As eastern population increased, and efficiency in meat processing and agricultural produce followed, more and more food production was needed in the west to fuel it. Cattle drivers brought more meat quickly to the East, and farms managed by industry created more grain production. The transformation of the west was for the gain of the North and South in order to continue to fuel their production and economic progress.
What were the main causes of the Westward Settlement?
The beginning of Westward settlement started as a peaceful occurrence along the Oregon trail between the Native Americans and the Westward Settlements but soon transitioned to violence as more and more land was necessary for these settlers. As well as the rush for gold with the migration of workers who wanted to get rich from gold; 1829, the Georgia Gold Rush in the southern Appalachians occurred; California Gold Rush of 1848-55 in the Sierra Nevada.
How did the railroad system help the West?
The railroad system transported crops and other goods to the westward settlements and allowed them to stay connected with the rest of the United States. With the ability to move people from one side of the United States to the Other the american settlers were able to seek new fortune in the western frontier and strike at rich.
Why did the West do the act?
Identity: Despite the idea that only individual men set out for the open west the act was often done by families and friends in order to make the job easier and not to leave any one behind to fend on their own. However the lifestyle remained quite vigorous as the land had very few resources at its disposal and the only resources available were to be delivered by railroad making settlements stay sheltered around other train stops in order to receive these much needed resources.
Why did Abraham Lincoln sign the Homestead Act?
P- Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act to facilitate the movement of people unto the western territories of the Union. It allowed for people to gain up to 160 acres of land, and was used greatly after the end of the CIvil War to ensure the settlement of the West.
What were the complications of the Westward Expansion?
As the borders moved westward, so did American settlers, which raised several serious questions over what certain Americans were bringing with them; particularly the slaves. Historians have often noted how the complications surrounding the acquisition of new territory exacerbated domestic sectional tensions within the country around several major economic and social issues, since both North and South saw the west as the place to guarantee their distinct and ultimately conflicting visions for the country. Despite multiple compromises to work around these issues, conflict inevitably came to a head as Southerners dug their heels in to defend the institution upon which they built their society from hindrance.
How did the Southern economy differ from the North?
Southern agriculture itself also differed from that of the North as it was built mostly on specific cash crops like cotton, tobacco, sugar and rice instead of food production. Those first three crops were extremely labor intensive, and so the use of unpaid, forced labor helped make their production far more profitable than it otherwise would have been. A little less than half of white southerners owned slaves, and only a small percentage of slave owners themselves ran the enormous plantations where these crops were grown, but since they, especially cotton, was in such high demand in the North and Europe, these men and their families became fabulously wealthy, enough to completely dominate Southern social and political life, as well as the representation of Southern states in Washington. The racialized aspect of slavery also gave poorer whites enough incentive to support slavery as well, as even the poorest white man possessed more dignity than any slave. And as the Northern economy began turning away from farms and towards factories, the South, outside of a few large cities, further entrenched itself in these specialized exports as well as the system of chattel slavery that supported it. But that entrenchment presented a problem for Southern elites, as it did not leave much room for the same kind of dynamic economic growth as the North was experiencing through industrialization. The South was convinced that the survival of their economic system, which intersected with almost every aspect of Southern life, lay exclusively in the ability to create new plantations in the western territories, which meant that slavery had to be kept safe in those same territories, especially as Southerners increasingly saw more and more hostility towards the practice.
What did the Supreme Court say about slavery in Kansas?
Violence continued in Kansas, and in 1857, the Supreme Court issued the infamous Dred Scott Decision, which declared that Congress never had the authority to restrict slavery in the territories to begin with.
Why did the Texas Revolution start?
The Texas Revolution, started in part by Anglo-American settlers seeking to preserve slavery after Mexico had abolished it , and its subsequent annexation by the U.S. as a state led to a flurry of criticism by Northerners against those they saw as putting the interests of slavery over those of the country as a whole.
What happened to the Virginia frontier in 1700?
By 1700 the Virginia frontier had been pushed as far west as the fall line —the point upstream at which the rivers emptying into the Atlantic became unnavigable.
When did the Scots-Irish move to the Appalachian Mountains?
Germans and Scots-Irish from Pennsylvania moved down the Shenandoah Valley, largely between 1730 and 1750, to populate the western portions of Virginia and the Carolinas. By the time of the French and Indian Wars, the American frontier had reached the Appalachian Mountains.
Where did the pioneers go in the 1830s?
During the 1830s and ’40s the flood of pioneers poured unceasingly westward. Michigan, Arkansas, Wisconsin, and Iowa received most of them. A number of families even went as far as the Pacific coast, taking the Oregon Trail to areas in the Pacific Northwest. In 1849 fortune seekers rushed into California in search of gold. Meanwhile, the Mormons ended their long pilgrimage in Utah.
When did the Great Plains become unsettled?
By 1870 only portions of the Great Plains could truly be called unsettled. For most of the next two decades, that land functioned as the fabled open range, home to cowboys and their grazing cattle from ranches in Texas. But by the late 1880s, with the decline of the range cattle industry, settlers moved in and fenced the Great Plains into family farms. That settlement—and the wild rush of pioneers into the Oklahoma Indian Territory—constituted the last chapter of the westward movement. By the early 1890s a frontier had ceased to exist within the 48 continental states.
What is the Westward movement?
Westward movement, the populating by Europeans of the land within the continental boundaries of the mainland United States, a process that began shortly after the first colonial settlements were established along the Atlantic coast. The first British settlers in the New World stayed close to the Atlantic, their lifeline to needed supplies ...
What was the cotton boom?
The Cotton Boom. While the pace of industrialization picked up in the North in the 1850s, the agricultural economy of the slave South grew, if anything, more entrenched. In the decade before the Civil War cotton prices rose more than 50 percent, to 11.5 cents a pound. Booming cotton prices stimulated new western cultivation ...
How many bales of cotton were produced in 1850?
The U.S. cotton crop nearly doubled, from 2.1 million bales in 1850 to 3.8 million bales ten years later.
What were the most important economic units in the South?
Cotton Farms and Plantations. The image of the large cotton plantation dominates popular impressions of the antebellum South and Southern economy, and to be sure it was the preeminent economic unit of the region, but it was hardly the norm. Nearly three-fourths of free families in the South did not own slaves. The typical Southern white was a small farmer. Many of these families grew cotton, which unlike sugar or rice did not require heavy capital to cultivate. The crop was basically nonperishable and survived relatively rough handling, so it tended to survive transportation to distant markets in better shape than other crops. Small farmers often devoted at least part of their acreage to cotton, and small slaveowners could be found working alongside their slaves in the field throughout the region. Still, most slaves lived on — and the bulk of the cotton crop came from — plantations worked by twenty or more slaves. On the largest plantations, fifty or more slaves were divided into gangs, run by drivers and sometimes, though not always, by overseers. On these large plantations, complex divisions of labor evolved. The most developed plantations came to resemble village economies: one Virginia planter in 1854, for example, owned and managed eight plowmen, ten hoe hands, two wagoners, four oxcart drivers, a carnage driver, a hostler, a stable boy, and various craftspeople, including two carpenters, five masons, two smiths, a miller, two shoemakers, five spinners, a weaver, and the owners ’ household staff.
What were the major economic developments in the South during the postwar years?
Postwar Development. In aftermath of the war, the Southern economy began slowly to diversify and commercialize. Agriculturally, land-use patterns grew even more cotton-intensive as new stretches of upcountry shifted from food production, such as corn and pork, to cotton. But the region (like other parts of the nation) also underwent a boom in railroad construction, and enthusiastic boosters and carpetbaggers also started manufacturing enterprises in the 1860s. The rate of manufacturing growth leveled off in the following decade but redoubled in the 1880s and 1890s. These enterprises included cotton mills, commercial fertilizer manufacturing plants (by 1877 South Carolina phosphate mines were shipping more than 100,000 tons to foreign markets), and iron forges. Whereas antebellum Southern ironmakers had relied on outdated and inefficient charcoal-burning operations, their postwar counterparts ran modernized coal mines, coke ovens, and blast furnaces. The town of Birmingham, for example, became an industrial center during this period. Organized in 1871 as part of a land speculation project by the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, the town rapidly developed substantial iron- and eventually steelworks, contributing to a statewide coal output of nearly 200,000 tons in 1877 and pig-iron production of nearly 37,000 tons.
How did slavery affect the South?
As businesses, the plantations channeled economic functions that went well beyond cotton (or sugar or tobacco) cultivation. For example, larger plantation owners either procured or produced on site goods and services that, in the free-labor economy of the Northern states, were produced and exchanged as part of the wider economy. Thus, few towns or villages emerged in the South. Much of the region ’ s commercial exchange operated through the larger plantation owners or through businessmen known as cotton factors, usually agents of Northern or British firms, set up at river landings to market crops and provide planters with imported manufactured goods. The ideology of slaveownership probably inhibited key industrial values , fostering a fiercely defensive agrarianism and a sharp distaste for Yankee commercialism, industry, and wage labor, particularly as proslavery advocacy grew more insistent in the late-antebellum period. More tangibly, slavery cut off the potential immigration of free labor; while strong immigrant flows were feeding into the Northern economy in the 1850s, the South remained a largely closed society. Whether or not slaveowners can be called profit-minded entrepreneurs and capitalists (a question still under debate), the world they made was distinctly preindustrial, even anti-industrial.
What was the antebellum South?
The antebellum South was not all cotton plantations and riverboats. Small-scale industry did emerge in Southern towns such as Lynchburg, Virginia. By 1858 three railroad lines intersected there, and like railroad connections in the Midwest, the industrial infrastructure boosted manufacturing in the town.
What was the Southern economy like in 1860?
Not surprisingly, given these figures, the southern economy remained overwhelmingly agricultural. Southern capitalists sank. money into cotton rather than factories or land. More precisely, they invested in slaves; the average slave owner held almost two-thirds of his wealth in slaves in 1860, much less than he held in land.
