*On this date, 1776, the Antebellum South is briefly described. The Antebellum South (also known as the Antebellum Era or plantation era) was a period in the history of the Southern United States of America from the late 18th century until the start of the American Civil War in 1861.
This period in the South's history was marked by the region's economic growth, largely due to its heavy reliance on slave labor and political influence on the U.S. federal government. It was also characterized by the rise of abolition and the gradual polarization of the country between abolitionists and supporters of slavery. This agrarian era saw large expansions in farming while manufacturing growth remained relatively slow. The then-Southern economy was characterized by low capital accumulation (largely labor-based) and a shortage of liquid capital.
When forced by the need to concentrate on a few staples, the widespread anti-industrial and anti-urban ideology and the reduction of southern banking led to an American South dependent on export trade. In contrast to the economies of the North and West, which relied primarily on their domestic markets because the Southern domestic market consisted primarily of plantations, southern states imported sustenance commodities from the West and manufactured goods from the North.
The plantation technique was a factory system applied to agriculture, with a concentration of slave labor under skilled management. However, while the industrial manufacturing-based labor economy of the North was driven by growing demand, maintenance of the plantation economic system depended upon the use of slave labor, which was both abundant and cheap. The five major commodities of the Southern agricultural economy were cotton, grain, tobacco, sugar, and rice, with the production of the leading cash crop, cotton, concentrated in the Deep South (Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana).
One historian of this era was Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, who studied slavery as a social and economic system focusing on the large plantations that dominated the South. Phillips addressed the unprofitability of slave labor and slavery's ill effects on the Southern economy. His methods inspired the "Phillips school" of slavery studies between 1900 and 1950. He debated that large-scale plantation slavery was efficient and progressive. It had reached its geographical limits by 1860 or so and eventually had to fade away (as in Brazil). In 1910, he argued in "The Decadence of the Plantation System" that slavery was an unprofitable relic that persisted because it produced social status, honor, and political power. "Most farmers in the South had small to medium-sized farms with few slaves, but the large plantation owner’s wealth, often reflected in the number of slaves they owned, afforded them considerable prestige and political power."
During the roughly 100-year Antebellum era, the demand for slave labor and the U.S. ban on importing more slaves from Africa drove up prices for slaves. This made it profitable for smaller farmers in older settled areas such as Virginia to sell their slaves further south and west. The actuarial risk, or the potential loss in the investment of owning slaves from death, disability, etc., was much greater for small plantation owners. Accentuated by the rise in the price of slaves seen just before the American Civil War, the overall costs associated with owning slaves to the individual plantation owner led to the concentration of slave ownership seen on the eve of the American Civil War.
Much of the antebellum South was rural and, in line with the plantation system, largely agricultural. Except for New Orleans and Baltimore, the slave states had no large cities, and the urban population of the South could not compare to that of the Northeast or the agricultural West. This led to a sharp division in class in the southern states between the landowning, "master" class, poor whites, and Black slaves, while in the northern and western states, much of the social spectrum was dominated by a wide range of different laboring classes. The American North and the South were characterized by high inequality during the plantation era. The profit distribution was much more unequal in the South than in the North, shown primarily through land, slave labor, and wealth distribution. Six percent of southern landowners controlled one-third of the gross income and an even higher portion of the net income. Most landowners who had smaller-scale plantations saw a disproportionately small portion in revenues generated by the slavery-driven plantation system. While the two largest classes in the South included land and slave owners and slaves, various social classes existed within and between the two.
In examining class relations and the banking system in the South, the economic exploitation of slave labor arose from a need to maintain certain conditions for slavery and a need for each of the remaining social layers to remain in the status quo. For slavery to continue, white, landowning slave owners had to compete with other members of the master class. This was to maximize the surplus labor extracted from slaves. Likewise, to remain within the same class, white, landowning slave owners (and each subsumed class below) must expand their claim on revenues derived from the slave labor surplus. Phillips also contended that masters treated slaves relatively well; his views on that issue were later sharply rejected by Kenneth M. Stampp.
His conclusions about the economic decline of slavery were also challenged in 1958 by Alfred H. Conrad and John R. Meyer in a landmark study published in the Journal of Political Economy. Their arguments were further developed by Robert Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, who argued in their 1974 book Time on the Cross that slavery was efficient and profitable as long as the price of cotton was high enough. In turn, Fogel and Engerman were attacked by other historians of slavery. As slavery began to displace indentured servitude as the principal supply of labor in the plantation systems of the South, the economic nature of the institution of slavery aided in the increased inequality of wealth seen in the Antebellum South.
