Page 294 - American Stories, A History of the United States

U.S. Slave Population 1820
11.1

11.2

North - 1.2%
Upper South - 62.8%
Lower South - 36% 11.3

U.S. Slave Population 1860

North - .001%
Upper South - 38.7%
Lower South - 61.299%

FIGURE 11.1 U.S. SLAVE POPULATION, 1820 AND 1860.

plantation economy or with the industrializing free-labor system that was flourishing Quick Check
north of their borders. In what region did “internal” slave
trading become the most profitable
The Rise of the Cotton Kingdom industry? why?
The warmer climate and good soils of the lower tier of southern states made it pos-
sible to raise crops more suited than tobacco or cereals to plantation agriculture
and slave labor. Since the colonial or revolutionary periods, rice and long-staple
fine cotton had been grown profitably on vast estates along the coast of South Caro-
lina and Georgia. In Louisiana, between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, sugar was
the cash crop. As in the West Indies, sugar production required heavy investment
and backbreaking labor—in other words, large, well-financed plantations and small
armies of slaves. But cultivation of rice, long-staple cotton, and sugar was limited to
peripheral, semitropical areas. It was the rise of short-staple cotton as the South’s
major crop that strengthened the hold of slavery and the plantation on the southern
economy.
Short-staple cotton differed from the long-staple variety in two important ways:
Its bolls contained seeds that were much more difficult to extract by hand, and it cotton gin invented by eli
could be grown almost anywhere south of Virginia and Kentucky—the main require- Whitney in 1793, this device for
ment was a guarantee of 200 frost-free days. Before the 1790s, the seed extraction separating the seeds from the
problem had prevented short-staple cotton from becoming a major market crop. fibers of short-staple cotton
Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin, a machine that separates the seeds from enabled a slave to clean fifty times
raw cotton fibers, in 1793 resolved that difficulty, however, and the subsequent more cotton than by hand, which
reduced production costs and
westward expansion opened vast areas for cotton cultivation. Unlike rice and sugar, created more demand for slavery
cotton could be grown on small farms and plantations. But large planters enjoyed in the South.

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