US History

U.S. History Study Guide

11.11 Southern Culture Cotton and Slavery in the South The South remained rural and agrarian while the North became industrialized. Rich plantation owners saw little reason to spend their capital on risky industrial projects when cash crops brought in a large, steady income. The South took a different economic course than the North. After the Revolution, when tobacco income plummeted, cotton reinvigorated the stagnant Southern economy. The widespread use of the cotton gin made cotton plantations efficient and profitable. The demand for cotton grew and cotton plantations spread across the South. By 1850, the southern U.S. grewmore than eighty percent of the world’s cotton. As the cotton-based economy boomed, so did slavery, since slaves were needed to operate the large- scale and labor-intensive plantations. Although Congress banned the importation of slaves in 1808, the smuggling of slaves continued until the 1850’s, and the Southern slave population doubled between 1810 and 1830. Three-quarters of these slaves worked on cotton plantations, while the remainder worked a variety of skilled and unskilled jobs. The rise of slavery led to the development of a many classes in Southern culture with slavery being the lowest. Classes in the South Although the large plantation owners or Planter class are symbolic to the South, but they only made up a small portion of people in the South. The Planter Class Owners of large farms who also owned fifty or more slaves actually formed a small minority of the Southern population. Three-fourths of Southern Whites owned no slaves at all, almost half of slave- owning families owned less than six, and twelve percent owned twenty or more. This minority of large slave-owners exercised political and economic power far beyond what their numbers would indicate. They became a class to which all others paid deference, dominating the political and social life of their region. The Yeoman Farmers The largest groups of Southern Whites were the independent small farmers who worked their land with their family, sometimes side-by-side with one or two slaves, to produce their own food, with sometimes enough surplus to sell for a little extra cash. These simple folk predominantly lived in the upland south and constituted a sizeable element, even in the lower cotton-producing states. Their major crop was corn, and indeed the South's corn crop was more valuable than its cotton, but the corn was used at home for dinner tables and for animal feed, and ranked behind cotton as an itemof export. These people were generally poorer than their Northern counterparts.

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