The Agricultural South

During the 19th century cotton replaced tobacco as the South's most
important cash crop. The textile mills of New England and Europe
provided a steady market for cotton after the invention of the cotton
gin. And with plenty of fertile land available in the Southwest, the
cotton industry boomed. The "New South" had long, hot summers,
and rich soil of river valley, ideal conditions to grow cotton. But the
rise of King Cotton came at the expense of human lives. In 1850
more than half of the people in the South were enslaved.

Southern plantations generated three-quarters of the world's cotton

supply. The rapid growth of cotton production was an international
phenomenon, prompted by events occurring far from the American
South. The insatiable demand for cotton was a result of the
technological and social changes that are today known as the
Industrial Revolution. Beginning early in the eighteenth century, a
series of inventions resulted in the mechanized spinning and weaving
of cloth in the world’s first factories in the north of England. The
ability of these factories to produce unprecedented amounts of cotton
cloth revolutionized the world economy.

The invention of the cotton gin came just at the right time. British
textile manufacturers were eager to buy all the cotton that the South
could produce. The figures for cotton production support this
conclusion: from 720,000 bales in 1830, to 2.85 million bales in
1850, to nearly 5 million in 1860. Cotton production renewed the
need for slavery after the tobacco market declined in the late 1700s.
The more cotton grew, the more slaves were needed, to keep up with
the demand of cotton.
In Virginia more than three million African Americans (about 87
percent of the African American population) lived in bondage in 1850.
The slave population of the state of Virginia alone exceeded the total
number of free African Americans living in the United States.
Nationwide, just 424,183 African Americans enjoyed freedom in
1850. Of this number, more than 54,000 lived in Virginia.

In Georgia Congress had banned the importation of slaves in 1808. In

the two centuries before the ban, a total of about 661,000 African
people were brought to the United States against their will. After the
ban, Southern slaveholders relied on high birth rates among slaves to
continue the institution of slavery. The value of slaves and the free
labor they provided was considerable. The slaves themselves
represented almost 60 percent of the agricultural wealth in Georgia,
Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina.

Texas was admitted to the Union as a slave state in 1845. Its

admission opened vast amounts of acreage suitable for cotton
cultivation. As slavery spread westward, cotton production continued
to increase. In the year 1810, America produced less than 200,000
bales of cotton. By 1850 yearly production had grown more than
tenfold, to 2.5 million-plus bales. As the South's dependence on
cotton increased, so did its dependence on slavery.

At the beginning of 1850, the United States consisted of 30 states: 15

slave states and 15 free states. In Mississippi, as in the rest of the
Southern states, most farmers held no slaves at all. Yet the economic
fortunes of most Southerners were somehow intertwined with the
misery and brutality of slavery. Cotton brokers and shippers profited
by bringing cotton to market. Merchants sold plantation owners the
tools they needed to operate -- as well as the luxury goods afforded
by cotton profits. The unpaid labor of African Americans contributed
to a booming economy for whites living in the South.

Adapted from: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/lincolns/nation/map_agind_text.html (31 de

mayo de 2010).