Antebellum South

The Antebellum South era (from Latin: ante bellum, lit. 'before the war') was a period in the history of the Southern United States that extended from the conclusion of the War of 1812 to the start of the American Civil War in 1861. This era was marked by the prevalent practice of slavery and the associated societal norms it cultivated. Over the course of this period, Southern leaders underwent a transformation in their perspective on slavery. Initially regarded as an awkward and temporary institution, it gradually evolved into a defended concept, with proponents arguing for its positive merits, while simultaneously vehemently opposing the burgeoning abolitionist movement.^[2]

Quick Facts Location, Including ...

Antebellum Period in the Southern United States
1815–1861
There were just over 3.2 million slaves in the U.S. in 1850, about 14% of the total population.[1]
Location	Southern United States
Including	Era of Good Feelings Jacksonian Era Buildup to the Civil War
President(s)	James Madison James Monroe John Quincy Adams Andrew Jackson Martin Van Buren William Henry Harrison John Tyler James K. Polk Zachary Taylor Millard Fillmore Franklin Pierce James Buchanan Abraham Lincoln
Key events	Adams–Onís treaty Missouri Compromise Indian removal Trail of Tears Manifest destiny Nullification crisis Mexican–American War Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo Compromise of 1850 Fugitive Slave Act Bleeding Kansas Election of Lincoln
Chronology War of 1812 Jeffersonian Era American Civil War Confederate States of America

Close

Society was stratified, inegalitarian, and perceived by immigrants as lacking in opportunities. Consequently, the manufacturing base lagged behind that of the non-slave states. Wealth inequality grew as the larger landholders took the greater share of the profits generated by enslaved persons, which also helped to entrench their power as a political class.

As the country expanded westward, slavery's propagation became a major issue in national politics, eventually boiling over into the Civil War. In the years that followed the Civil War, the war was romanticized by historical revisionists to protect three central assertions: that the Confederate cause was heroic, that enslaved people were happy and satisfied, and that slavery was not the primary cause of the war.^[3] This phenomenon has continued to the present day to contribute to racism, gender roles, and religious attitudes in the South, and to a lesser extent the rest of the country.^[4][5]

In the 18th century, the Atlantic slave trade brought enslaved Africans to the South during the colonial period as a source of labor for the harvesting of crops. There were almost 700,000 enslaved persons in the U.S. in 1790, which was approximately 18 percent of the total population or roughly one in six people. This would persist through the 17th and 18th centuries, but it was not until the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in the 1790s that slavery grew very profitable and that the large plantation system developed. In the 15 years between the invention of the cotton gin and the passage of the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, the slave trade increased, increasing slavery in the United States.^[6]

The Antebellum South saw large expansions in agriculture, while manufacturing growth remained relatively slow. The Southern economy was characterized by a low level of capital accumulation (largely slave-labor-based) and a shortage of liquid capital, which, when aggravated by the need to concentrate on a few staples, the pervasive anti-industrial and anti-urban ideology,^{[citation needed]} and the reduction^[how?] of Southern banking, led to a South dependent on export trade. This was in contrast to the economies of the Northern and Western U.S., which relied primarily on their own domestic markets. Since the Southern domestic market consisted primarily of plantations, Southern states imported sustenance commodities from the West and manufactured goods from England and the North.

The plantation system can be seen as the factory system applied to agriculture, with a concentration of labor under skilled management. But while the industrial manufacturing-based labor economy of the North was driven by growing demand, maintenance of the plantation economic system depended upon slave labor, which was abundant and cheap.^{[citation needed]}

The five major commodities of the Southern agricultural economy were cotton, grain, tobacco, sugar, and rice, with cotton the leading cash crop. These commodities were concentrated in the Deep South (Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana).

Much of the Antebellum South was rural, and in line with the plantation system, largely agricultural. With the exception of New Orleans, Charleston, and Richmond the slave states had no large cities, and the urban population of the South could not compare to that of the Northeast, or even that of the agrarian West. This led to a sharp division in class in the southern states, between the landowning "master" class, yeoman farmers, poor whites, and slaves; while in the northern and western states, much of the social spectrum was dominated by a wide range of different laboring classes.

Mercantilist ideologies largely explain the rise of the plantation system in the United States. In the 16th and 17th centuries under mercantilism, rulers of nations believed that the accumulation of wealth through a favorable balance of trade was the best way to ensure power. As a result, several European nations began to colonize the Americas to take advantage of rich natural resources and encourage exports.

One example of England utilizing the American colonies for economic gain was tobacco. When tobacco was first discovered as a recreational substance, there was a widespread social backlash in England, spearheaded by King James I himself. By the middle of the 17th century, however, Parliament had realized the revenue potential of tobacco and quickly changed its official moral stance towards its use. As a result, tobacco plantations sprung up across the American South in large numbers to support European demand. By 1670, more than half of all tobacco shipped to England was being re-exported to other countries throughout Europe at a premium. In similar ways Britain was able to profit from other American staple crops, such as cotton, rice, and indigo. As Russell Menard puts it, Britain's capitalizing on increased European demand for these crops "fueled the expansion of the American plantation colonies, transformed the Atlantic into an English inland sea, and led to the creation of the first British Empire."

Many claim that being a part of the British mercantilist system was in the best economic interest of the American colonies as well, as they would not have been able to survive as independent economic entities. Robert Haywood, in his article "Mercantilism and South Carolina Agriculture, 1700–1763", argues that "it was unthinkable that any trade could prosper in the straight-jacket of regimented and restricted international trade, without the guiding hand of a powerful protecting government."^[12]

The plantation system created an environment for the South to experience an economic boom in the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries. However, reliance on both the plantation system and more widespread slave labor, left the South in a precarious economic situation. This was the subject of the highly influential 1857 book The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It, by Hinton Rowan Helper. Following the end of the Civil War and into Reconstruction era (1865–1877), the South experienced economic devastation. Some states that relied less heavily on the plantation system managed to fare better following its downfall.^[13] Ulrich Bonnell Phillips contends that the plantation "sadly restricted the opportunity of such men as were of better industrial quality than was required for the field gangs." Essentially, men who would have been otherwise capable of performing other skilled jobs were nonetheless relegated to field work because of the nature of the system.^[7]

A 1984 journal article by Claudia Goldin and Kenneth Sokoloff suggested that the South misallocated labor compared to the North, which more eagerly embraced women and child labor in its factories to push forward industrialization due to their relative value to Northern agriculture being lesser than in Southern agriculture.^[14]

While the South still attracted immigrants from Europe, the North attracted far more during the early-to-mid 1800s, such that by the time of the American Civil War, the population of the North far exceeded the non-enslaved population of the South per the 1860 United States census. Colin Woodard argued in his 2011 book American Nations that the South was relatively less successful in attracting immigrants due to the South's reputation as a more stratified society. Striving immigrants who sought economic advancement thus tended to favor the more egalitarian North, compared to the more aristocratic South, where there were fewer perceived opportunities for advancement.^[15]

Look up antebellum in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Confederate States of America
• Reconstruction era
• Deep South
• Old South, the pre-Civil War economy and society of the Southern U.S.
• New South, the post-Reconstruction era economy and society of the Southern U.S.