By the mid-19th century, southern commercial centers like New Orleans had become home to the greatest concentration of wealth in the United States. Slavery shaped the culture and society of the South, which rested on a racial ideology of white supremacy. And importantly, many whites believed slavery itself sustained the newly prosperous Southern economy.
However, cotton was a labor-intensive crop, and many plantation owners were reducing the number of people they enslaved due to high costs and low output. In 1793, Eli Whitney revolutionized cotton production when he invented the cotton gin, a device that separated the seeds from raw cotton. Suddenly, a process that was extraordinarily labor-intensive could be completed quickly and easily. By the early 1800s, cotton emerged as the South’s major cash crop—a good produced for commercial value instead of for use by the owner. Cotton quickly eclipsed tobacco, rice, and sugar in economic importance.
Printed depicting enslaved people using the cotton gin. In the foreground, two enslaved black men process cotton using the gin. Enslaved black women carry the cotton in baskets. In the background, two well-dressed white men inspect the cotton.
Printed depicting enslaved people using the cotton gin. In the foreground, two enslaved black men process cotton using the gin. Enslaved black women carry the cotton in baskets. In the background, two well-dressed white men inspect the cotton.
Printed depicting enslaved people using the cotton gin. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons
American plantation owners began to turn to the world market to sell their newfound surplus. Cotton had the advantage of being easily stored and transported. A demand for it already existed in the industrial textile mills in Great Britain, and in time, a steady stream of slave-grown American cotton would also supply northern textile mills. Southern cotton, picked and processed by newly-profitable slaves, helped fuel the 19th-century Industrial Revolution in both the United States and Great Britain.
This lucrative international trade brought new wealth and new residents to New Orleans as products and people travelled down the new water highway of the US, the Mississippi River. The invention of the steamship dramatically increased the use of the river as a quick and easy way of transporting goods. By 1840, New Orleans alone had 12 percent of the nation’s total banking capital. Enslaved people, cotton, and the steamship transformed the city from a relatively isolated corner of North America to a thriving metropolis that rivaled New York in importance.
By 1850, of the 3.2 million enslaved people in the country’s fifteen slave states, 1.8 million were producing cotton. By 1860, slave labor was producing over two billion pounds of cotton per year. Indeed, American cotton soon made up two-thirds of the global supply, and production continued to soar. By the time of the Civil War, South Carolina politician James Henry Hammond confidently proclaimed that the North could never threaten the South because “cotton is king.”
The production of cotton brought the South more firmly into the larger American and Atlantic markets. About 75% of the cotton produced in the United States was eventually exported abroad. Exporting at such high volumes made the United States the undisputed world leader in cotton production. Although the larger American and Atlantic markets relied on southern cotton in this era, the South also depended on these markets for obtaining food, manufactured goods, and loans. Thus, the market revolution transformed the South just as it had other regions.
