Page 296 - American Stories, A History of the United States

60
11.1
58%

50 52% 11.2

11.3
40
Percent of all U.S. Exports 30 32%

20

10

7%
0
1800 1820 1840 1860
Year

FIGURE 11.2 COTTON AS A PERCENTAGE OF ALL U.S. ExPORTS, 1800–1860.

advantages that made them the main producers. Only relatively large operators could
afford their own gins or possessed the capital to acquire the fertile bottomlands that
brought the highest cotton yields. They also had lower transportation costs because
they could monopolize land along rivers and streams that were the South’s natural
transportation arteries.
The first major cotton-producing regions were inland areas of Georgia and
South Carolina, but the center of production shifted rapidly west. By the 1830s,
Alabama and Mississippi had surpassed Georgia and South Carolina as cotton-
growing states. By the 1850s, Arkansas, northwest Louisiana, and east Texas were
the most prosperous and burgeoning plantation regions. The rise in production
that accompanied this expansion was phenomenal. Between 1792 and 1817, the
South’s output of cotton rose from about 13,000 bales to 461,000; by 1840, it was
1.35 million. (see Figure 11.2 for cotton as a percentage of all U.S. exports.) In 1860,
output peaked at a colossal 4.8 million bales. (Each bale weighed 480 pounds.) Most
of the cotton was exported to the booming British textile industry.
But the rise of the Cotton Kingdom did not bring uniform or steady prosperity to
the Lower South. Many planters worked the land until it was exhausted and then took
their slaves west to richer soils, leaving depressed and ravaged areas behind them.
Fluctuations in markets and prices also ruined planters. Depressions, including a
wave of bankruptcies, followed boom periods. But during the rising output and high
prices of the 1850s, the planters began to imagine they were immune to economic
disasters.
Despite the insecurities, cotton production represented the Old South’s best
chance for profitable investment. Hence planters had little incentive to seek alterna-
tives to slavery, the plantation, and dependence on a single cash crop. Slavery was an
economically sound institution in 1860 and showed no signs of imminent decline. In
263