The South Before the Civil War

The South has a warm climate and a long growing season for crops. So it's not surprising that the South's economy came to depend on agriculture. By the 1820s, the South produced and exported rice, sugar, and especially, cotton. The South felt no need to develop factories. And it remained rural; New Orleans was its only large city.

Crops like cotton were best grown on plantations - large landholdings. They also required a large labor force. For this, the old South depended on slaves, who were originally brought from Africa. Slavery was the basis for the South's economy; it was also what, more than anything, made the South different from the rest of the country. (By 1820, the other states had ended slavery.)

People often think that whites in the old South lived an elegant life - something like the beginning of the famous movie Gone With the Wind. In fact, very few whites lived on plantations. Most whites were small farmers who did not own any slaves. But these small farmers also favored slavery; it gave them someone to look down on.

Slaves'  lives differed greatly, depending on their masters. But the basic fact was that slaves had no real control over what happened to them. A husband and wife could be sold to different owners and never see each other again. Slaves often worked for long hours in the fields and received insufficient food, clothing, and shelter.

Slaves were able to survive because they developed a strong culture of their own. This culture combined African and American elements. Songs and stories, religion and community were all important.

For a long time, the North and the South each developed differently but without conflicts. The conflicts came when the nation began to expand west. Southern states said the new areas that were being settled should allow slavery; the Northern states disagreed. In the 1840s and 1850s Congress passed a series of laws that were compromises between the North and the South. In the end, the compromises failed.

Randee Falk: Spotlight on the USA; Oxford University Press, 1993, page 65 f.