Preview

Slavery In The South Analysis

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
601 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Slavery In The South Analysis
In post 1820’s the Southern regions of America diffused free labor, cotton trade, and plantation farms towards the westward expansion. Land development denoted a greater acceptance of slavery and offered large profits for those who involved in the trade. This lead to the Southern region’s prominent political presence and the beginning of a slave society. An integral element to the Southern American culture. By 1830 cotton fields expanded from the Atlantic seaboard to Texas. Consequently, cotton production increased greatly to 5 million bales by the end of 1860. The south’s sale production and profit thrived on the cotton industry that was dependent on the free labor of slaves. However, as cotton agriculture made movement westward, so did millions …show more content…
This validated the presence and influence of slaveholding office positions. The plain folk of the south made no effort to put slaveholders out of office, instead, many political contenders would attempt in winning the favor and trust of the plain folk. Slaveholding legislators protected planter’s interests and offered the impression that small farming folk interests would be defended as well. Slavery in the south could no longer be adjudged as evil or propose ideas to eradicate the practice.
Nearing the early nineteenth century, the northern and southern states beliefs on domestic slavery began to diverge. Northerners had abolished slavery and the practice itself would inevitably discontinue. However, the south had approached slave bearing to become integral to the south’s prosperity. Prompting a slave society. Economic factors, culture, politics, and the construction of New World southern society would be under the sway of
…show more content…
The south however thrived in slave trade, sugar, cotton, and tobacco production. Southern economic prosperity also derived from well developed plantation systems that were operated on free labor by black slaves. In “A Content Comparison of Antebellum Plantation Records and Thomas Affleck’s Accounting Principles”, Heier introduces Affleck’s Cotton Plantation and Record Book that documented the weather conditions of the plantations and crop progress. Financial documentation was often unneeded as the majority of transactions were made annually when the crop was sold on the market and the bills that had been accumulating the year prior had been paid. “A daily basis accounting procedure would only be required if the plantation had operated throughout the year such as a lumber mill..” explains

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    HIST131 Notes

    • 3331 Words
    • 14 Pages

    In the early 1800s, cotton production dominated all economic activity in the south. Slavery exhibited regional variation; still it is important to understand some generalities about slave life in the antebellum south.…

    • 3331 Words
    • 14 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    “Simultaneously, the slave population burgeoned, roughly doubling every thirty years” (180). Between the year 1790 and 1850 the slave population grew from 700,000 to 3.2 million. Although importation of slaves from Africa was banned in 1808, they still gained more and more slaves from reproduction. While they began to use machines in the North, in the Southern states, they continued to use slaves on plantations to plant crops. The Southerners believed it was okay to own slaves and abuse them, which was a peculiarity to others. Slaves did not agree with this system because they did not have the same rights as the whites. Slaves relied too heavily on their…

    • 1381 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Small domestic farmers with possibly a handful of slaves and a modestly sized plantation grew into powerhouses that used hundreds of slaves and acres of land for the sole purpose of growing cotton. The demand for this cotton came from large mills in New England and Great Britain using the material to mass produce cloth. (Video) These changes transformed the South. Southern states now played large a role in the industrial boom. Slave population grew from around seven hundred thousand around the year 1790 to nearly four million by 1860. Plantations grew, and with them, so did anti-slavery/abolitionist movement groups. By 1840, there were more than fifteen hundred local southern antislavery societies campaigning against the sudden increase in slave labor. (Enduring Vision; pg.…

    • 600 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The fact that the south’s economy was based off of agricultural goods was one of the reasons that slavery became so common down there. Compared to the south,…

    • 614 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The South's predominant economic principle before the War of Northern Aggression was "Cotton is King." The South, as it was known around the turn of the 19th century, was solely dependent upon its cotton production. Low prices, unmarketable goods, and over-used land were driving the necessity for slavery and the need for cotton production out. Were it not for a Yankee's ingenuity, the South as we study it now may have been vastly different.…

    • 1029 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Slave grown accounted for over half the value of United States exports and provided most of the cotton used in the northern textile industry and 70 percent of the cotton used in British mills. Slave-produced commercial crops required a host of middlemen to sell and transport them to markets and to finance and supply the slave-owning planters. Southern cities such as New Orleans, Mobile, Savannah, Charleston, and Memphis and northern ports such as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia depended heavily on the southern trade. Northern farmers and manufacturers found ready markets for their products in southern towns and cities, but especially on the southern plantations. If the products of slave labor stimulated the nations’ economic development, the slave South itself remained primarily agricultural and did not experienced the urban and industrial growth that took place in the…

    • 472 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Slavery was closely linked to the Industrial Revolution. According to class lecture, cotton plantation production boomed in the south and slave labor was needed to harvest the cotton and tend the cotton gins. The northern industries also benefited from slavery since they were supplied with cotton harvested by slaves. A primary source is the picture of a huge cotton gin shown in class that demonstrates how technological innovation contributed to the south’s success in becoming the world’s largest producer and provider of cotton. The new economies were intertwined as southern cotton feed northern textile mills. Although the northern states were against slavery, they contributed in the slave economy in the south. However, not all blacks were involved…

    • 189 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Difference of climate and location, industrialization, and lack of concrete government decisions, led the North and South to become two completely different societies with completely different values and ideas, the most controversial topic being slavery. Because of the rising concern of these factors, the two regions differences amplified during the 1800’s. Although the two were so different from each other, they relied on one another in order to maintain their separate ways of life. The South has a climate with lots sun, with humid summers and heavy rainfall. This is perfect for agriculture and the capability to produce an abundance of many different kinds of crops such as cotton, tobacco, rice, sugar cane, and indigo.…

    • 482 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Black slavery in the South created a bond among white Southerners and cast them in a common mold. Slavery was also the source of the South 's large agricultural wealth, which led to white people controlling a large black minority. Slavery also caused white Southerners to realize what might happen to them should they not protect their own personal liberties, which ironically included the liberty to enslave African Americans. Because slavery was so embedded in Southern life and customs, white leadership reacted to attacks on slavery after 1830 with an ever more defiant defense of the institution, which reinforced a growing sense among white Southerners that their values eventually divided them from their fellow citizens in the Union. The South of 1860 was uniformly committed to a single cash crop, cotton. During its reign, however, regional differences emerged between the Lower South, where the linkage between cotton and slavery as strong, and the Upper South, where slavery was relatively less important and the economy more diversified. Plantations were the leading economic institution in the Lower South. Planters were the most prestigious social group, and, though less than five percent of white families were in the planter class; they controlled more than forty percent of the slaves, cotton, and total agricultural wealth. Most had inherited or married into their wealth, but they could stay at the top of the South 's class structure only by continuing to profit from slave labor. Planters had the best land. The ownership of twenty or more slaves enabled planters to use a gang system to do both routine and specialized agricultural work, and also permitted a regimented pace of work that would have been impossible to impose in free agricultural workers. Teams of field hands were supervised by white overseers and black drivers, slaves selected for their management skills and agricultural knowledge.…

    • 1262 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    When you think about your family and who your great-grandparents are, do you ever think about what they did or what their great-grandparents did? Think about what your family was doing in the 1800’s. Were they wealthy? Did they live in the North or South? In 1850, the plantations were becoming a big controversy that everyone talked about.…

    • 1564 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Slavery in the American South describes struggles that slaves went through. This includes working conditions and the treatment of slaves.…

    • 402 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    had to work together. On the other hand, the South continued to hold onto an…

    • 2158 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    They believed they owned the slaves—not as people but as property. This sense of ownership blinded slave owners with greed and self-indulgence. They were focused on making profits and abusing their “property.” They were working towards immorality and corruption without the slightest remorse of their actions. However, there were some owners who, compared to others, treated their workers with a bit more compassion. These owners taught their laborers how to read and write. They, although seemingly cruel to their fellow Northerners, didn’t abuse their right of ownership. Instead of completely taking control of a slave’s mind, they gave him a taste of the outside world to suppress their rebellious mindsets. Owning slaves gave southerner’s power over them, granting them…

    • 669 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Slavery after 1808, supply of slaves now sempiternally inhibited, whites in the upper South could envision reducing their dependency on slaves and “whitening” their region through a slow but steady demographic reconfiguration of slavery, accomplished largely be selling off or “diffusing” their slaves to areas of high demand in the cotton South. Demand for slaves in the domestic market from lower South cotton growers provided an outlet for surplus slaves from the declining tobacco regions of the upper South.…

    • 426 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Colonial Slavery Essay

    • 510 Words
    • 3 Pages

    The geography of the southern colonies was not suited to standard farming as that of the northern colonies. The soil of the land was not suited to the growing of standard crops like wheat and corn. Also, the hot weather of the south did not allow for easy farming, because the weather was so hot many of the slave owners had to look for different crops to grow. Once they found the new crops it took a little while for the geography of the south to get on track and to produce goods that would sell.…

    • 510 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays