Pre Civil War essays

Pre Civil War essays Slavery was the dominating reality of all southern life from about 1840-1860. Social and economical aspects of Southern life can validate this generalization. Socially, the elite people who owned large farms for planting the cash crop relied on slave labor, which caused them to obtain more slaves. Economically, southerners profited from the slaves because of their slave labor, which produced Cotton, as the worlds leading export. One of the deciding factors of social class was the number of slaves a landowner possessed. The social group of the planters consisted of the upper class that owned 50 or more slaves. They became a class to which all others paid deference, and they dominated the political and social life of their region.(APUSH 65). The elite possessed more slaves than any other class thus they assumed superiority over the blacks. Furthermore there were the yeoman farmers who were the independent whites of the middle-class-they owned 1-2 slaves. Finally there were also the poor white trash, the lower class that had no slaves at all in-fact they lived in squalor worse than the slaves (APUSH 65). Since the purchase of slaves made all jobs requiring manual labor scarce, the poor became even poorer due to the absence of jobs. Hence as the necessary relationship of this plantation expanded, the Peculiar Institution of black slavery fastened itself upon the Southern people, even as it isolated them from t he rest of the world. (APUSH 65). The southern economy was a slave based cash crop agriculture that was dependent on the exportation of cotton. Also the whole U.S. was dependent on cotton because the south produced more than half of the entire world s supply of cotton" (Bailey 360) because of the slaves. Even the British relied on the south for cotton. Therefore in 1840 the exportation of cotton alone earned the US $75million and in 1860 the amount raised to $19...