Everyone in the South irrespective of colour, sex and status was offered by the workings of the plantation economy. The first Southern agricultural staple was tobacco in the Chesapeake region. After 1800, tobacco culture spread westward across the upper South whereby mid century (1850), more tobacco was bang grown than any other crop except cotton.
Only the wealthier planters could successfully grow rice and sugar, the South's two other significant staples. Both crops required a large amount of labour which was easily drawn from the dense Black population of lowland South Carolina, Georgia and Southern Louisiana. The size of these plantations was of course unmatched by these of the cotton kingdom of the lower South. As early as 1820, the South's cotton crop had become more valuable than all its other crops combined. Just before the Civil War(1861- 1865), two thirds of the nation's export came from cotton.
With a little capital, a small plot of land and a few slaves, a cotton farmer could make a profit, yet with a large labour supply, cotton turned out to be the ideal staple on large plantations spreading over the Southwest. By 1860, slaves were growing more than 93% in the Mississippi crop.
Where land was plentiful and clean and labour expansive, the essence of good plantation management was high productivity per slave, not per acre. A planter with effective slave drivers, the more slaves he had, the greater the margin of success with cotton. .
Southerners were different from White Northerners, in terms of economy, prosperity and lifestyle. Many of them feared the impact of factories upon their agrarian slave society. Some felt that slaves who worked in factories were already half-free.
In spite of these misconceptions and fears, attitude towards manufacturing was favourable during the 1820s and early 1830s when the South became more conscious of its dependence on the Northern industry.
