Prompt: "Slavery was the dominating reality of all Southern life." Assess the validity of this generalization for TWO of the following aspects of Southern life from about 1840 to 1860: political, social, economic, and intellectual life.
Slavery was the dominating reality of all Southern life. The effects of Slavery in the south can be seen both socially and economically. Cotton was king and the white government of the South meant that slavery wouldn't go away unless something of great magnitude happens to change everything.
In America at the time, a slave was a piece of property that could be bought, sold, loaned, used as collateral, or willed to another if the owner wanted it. The economy at the time in the south was dying because not enough cotton could be picked up fast enough to profit. This would make slavery useless as it took a slave a whole day to pick out all the seeds from one piece of cotton. As this would happen, slavery would no longer be useful and they would all become free. It happened so that a Negro man by the name of Eli Whitney invented a machine called the Cotton Gin. This allowed the seeds of a piece of cotton to be removed from faster and safer. You would think that this would decrease the number of slaves a slave owner had but it worked the other way. Slave owners wanted more slaves to make more profit, thus cotton became the South's leading export over tobacco and sugar. To a slave owner "Cotton was King", the gin was his throne, and the black bondsmen were his henchmen." (Bailey, 361).
The Southern families finally had their taste of wealth just as the North has with their factories but the South wanted more. The farmers were greedy, money hungry people and as long as there was rich, fertile, soil for cotton, there were slaves working for the benefit of their owners. The invention of the cotton gin made farmers buy more land and this meant that they needed to get more slaves to produce more cotton.
