15 September 2009
The South and Slavery
This article is excerpted from the book Outline of the U.S. Economy, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 3.26 MB).
The South’s economy relied on the labor of slaves, a fundamental contradiction of the principle of equality on which America was founded. Congress outlawed the importation of slaves in 1808 but not slavery itself, and the domestic slave population kept expanding. American politics in the half-century preceding the Civil War (1861-1865) were increasingly dominated by the South’s tenacious defense of its “peculiar institution” and growing northern demands for slavery’s abolition. In 1860, in the 11 southern states that would secede from the Union, create their own Confederacy, and launch the Civil War, four out of 10 people were slaves, and they provided more than half of all agricultural labor.
One crop stood out above all others in the region. “Cotton is king,” declared James Henry Hammond, a South Carolina senator and defender of slavery, in 1858. Cotton was the nation’s most important export, vital to the economies of North and South. The low cost of slave-produced cotton benefited U.S. and British textile manufacturers and provided cheaper clothing for the urban centers. Southerners bought the output of northern manufacturers and western farmers.
The Civil War’s devastating economic impact widened the disparities between the victorious North and a defeated South. An earlier generation of historians argued that the war stimulated the great manufacturing and commercial expansion of the decades that followed. More recent research asserts that the U.S. economy would have expanded greatly with or without the war. The victorious North, in any case, moved to new heights, stumbled during a series of financial panics, but recovered and continued to advance.
The South mostly adopted a system of tenant farming that effectively broke up the plantation system on which the region’s economy had previously depended. While the Reconstruction years immediately following the Civil War saw real efforts to improve the lot of former slaves, the political will to see through these reforms ebbed, especially after 1877. The promised political and economic freedoms thus were not delivered. Instead the repressive system of “Jim Crow” segregation took hold throughout the South. By the end of the 19th century, poverty was widespread among blacks, as it was among many rural whites.
The Civil War marked the greatest threat to the Union’s survival, but it was also an opportunity for the war-time Congress—in the absence of representatives from the rebellious southern states—to expand the power of the national government. The first system of national taxation was passed; a national paper currency was issued; public land-grant universities were funded; and construction of the first transcontinental railroad was begun.
