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The Southern Economy

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The Southern Economy
The southern economy flourished on the backbones of the men and women that were enslaved in the 18th and 19th centuries. With the threat of the removal of the core method of profit for hundreds of plantation owners, an anger rose that would lead to an illogical reaction of withdrawing their entire region from the country that had built them. In essence the South felt a strong need to protect what they believed they possessed: the use of humans as components in the profit machine. This fierce protectiveness and unwillingness to release this twisted mechanism from their grasp is ultimately what caused the war that inevitably led to their downfall. What was the South’s core method of profit? In the mid 1800’s the Southern economy flourished …show more content…
Slaveholders punished slaves through whipping, shackling, hanging, beating, burning, mutilation, branding, and imprisonment. The sexual abuse of slaves became part of a "southern culture" which treated all women, black and white, as property or chattel. Slavery in the United States included frequent rape and sexual abuse of slave women, a charge which even some Southern politicians conceded was true. Treatment of slaves varied, but the laws in slaveholding states left enslaved people without defense or recourse in any case. The use of slave labor very quickly became worth more than all the railroad factories combined. With this boom in income, the South moved toward the permanence of …show more content…
However, it has also been stated that the taxation on their crops is what drove them to want to succeed from the nation. The State of Mississippi argued in their Declaration of causes that slavery was their main concern for leaving, while South Carolina stated that their main concern was states' rights. So, it is very hard to know. The Secession during the American Civil War was a series of events that began on December 20, 1860, and continued through June 8 of the next year when eleven states in the Lower and Upper South severed their ties with the Union. The first seven seceding states of the Lower South set up a provisional government at Montgomery, Alabama. The Union was from then on out divided. Twenty-one northern and Border States retained the style and title of the United States, while the eleven slave states became the Confederate States of America. The border slave states of Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri remained with the Union, although they all contributed volunteers to the Confederacy. "Fifty counties of western Virginia were loyal to the Union government, and in 1863 this area was constituted the separate state of West Virginia. Secession in practical terms meant that about a third of the population with substantial material resources had withdrawn from what had constituted a single nation and

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