4.13 The Society of the South in the Early Republic

After the cotton gin (1793) made short-staple cotton profitable, cotton spread from Georgia and South Carolina into Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and later Texas. Demand from British and New England textile mills seemed endless. By the late 1830s cotton made up more than half the value of all US exports, and the South supplied most of the raw cotton used in British mills.

Southerners began speaking of 'King Cotton' because the crop seemed to rule the economy. Cotton profits flowed north too, to the banks, insurers, shippers and mill owners who financed, moved and spun it.

Congress banned the importation of enslaved people from abroad beginning January 1, 1808. But the enslaved population kept growing through births, from about 900,000 in 1800 to about 2 million in 1830 and about 4 million by 1860.

As soil wore out in the Upper South (Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky) and cotton lands opened in the Deep South, about a million enslaved people were forcibly moved from the Upper South to the Lower South between 1790 and 1860. Many moved with migrating owners, but a large share were sold by traders, marched overland in chained groups called coffles or shipped to markets like New Orleans. Historians sometimes call this a 'Second Middle Passage'. It tore apart countless families.

Southern society was a pyramid. At the top was the planter elite. By 1860 only about one-quarter of white Southern families owned any enslaved people, and only about one in eight slaveholders owned 20 or more, a common definition of a planter. Yet this small group held most of the wealth and political power.

Most white Southerners were yeoman farmers, independent small farmers who owned their land, grew food for their families and perhaps some cotton, and owned few or no enslaved people. Below them were poor whites with little land.

Why did non-slaveholders support slavery? Many hoped to own enslaved people one day; slavery gave even poor whites a sense of racial status above Black people; they had family, church and business ties to planters; and they shared fears of slave revolt and of outside interference.

• Less urban and less industrial than the North; capital was invested in land and enslaved people rather than factories.
• Fewer immigrants and weaker public school systems.
• A culture of personal honor, including dueling, and a paternalistic ideal in which planters claimed to care for enslaved people like children, a claim that hid brutal violence.
• Strong support for states' rights and opposition to protective tariffs (4.3, 4.8).

In the founding era, many Southern leaders, including Jefferson, called slavery a regrettable 'necessary evil'. By the 1830s, faced with abolitionist attacks and slave revolts, many defended it as a 'positive good'. John C. Calhoun used that phrase in an 1837 Senate speech. Defenders claimed slavery was sanctioned by the Bible, that it was kinder than Northern wage labor, and that Black people were inferior and needed white control. These arguments were racist and false, but they shaped Southern politics and hardened sectional conflict.