Southern society in the early republic

Expansion of the cotton kingdom

Antebellum southern economic activity shifted dramatically towards increased cotton production and exports after the patenting of the cotton gin in the 1790s. By 1850, more than half of all US export revenue was generated from cotton production and sales. Within the southern states, millions of acres of farmland became available with expanded settlement, including the forced relocation of Native Americans under the federal Indian Removal Act and state legislation aimed at confiscating indigenous land and offering it for sale to white farmers and planters. With the additions of Florida and Texas, the latter quickly becoming a major cotton producer and exporter, southern agriculture, including cattle production, expanded; on the other hand, increased cotton production coincided with a shift away from tobacco cultivation in some areas of the south.

Planter society

Southern society was dominated economically and politically by the wealthiest planters, owners of large farms and plantations relying on the forced labor of enslaved persons. While at least ¼, and possibly ⅓, of southern whites owned slaves in the antebellum period, the majority of slaveholders owned fewer than 10 enslaved persons while a tiny fraction, represented by men such as Edward Lloyd V, a slaveowner in Maryland from whose plantation Frederick Douglass escaped, and Governor John L. Manning of Louisiana, owned 100 or more enslaved persons. With the dramatic expansion of cotton production throughout the first half of the 19th century developed a price dichotomy in the southern economy - cotton prices generally declined during the antebellum period whereas the price of slaves generally increased, meaning that the greatest wealth for the southern planters came from their control over enslaved laborers.

As the southern states relied on labor-intensive cash crop agriculture far more than the New England and (mid)western states, **urbanization **was often slower in the south than in other regions of the country. With southern planters dominating the economic and political systems of the south, industrialization was limited primarily to a few cities such as Birmingham, Alabama and Atlanta, Georgia before the Civil War.