The Antebellum South

The Antebellum South. The Antebellum South (1820-1861) was the slaveholding society of the American South in the decades before the Civil War, an era when cotton was king. The invention of the cotton gin and the hunger of the world's textile mills made upland cotton fantastically profitable, and plantation slavery spread across the Deep South, from South Carolina and Georgia to Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. By 1860 the region held some four million enslaved African Americans, and its cotton supplied most of the world's mills.

Slavery was the foundation of everything. Enslaved people worked the fields in gangs under overseers, cleared new lands, and labored in houses, workshops, and cities; they were bought and sold, their families broken by sale, and their labor built the wealth of the planter class and much of the nation. The enslaved resisted in countless ways, through work slowdowns, escape, and the preservation of family, faith, and culture, and in rare open revolts such as Nat Turner's rising of 1831, after which the southern states tightened their slave codes still further.

White southern society was dominated by the planter elite, though most white families owned no slaves. Planters ruled the statehouses and much of the national government, celebrated a code of honor and paternalism, and increasingly defended slavery not as a necessary evil but as a positive good. As the North industrialized and antislavery feeling grew, the sections clashed repeatedly over the spread of slavery into the western territories.

The conflict could not be contained. The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, on a platform opposing the extension of slavery, drove the cotton states to secede, and in 1861 the country descended into civil war. Defeat destroyed slavery and the world the planters had made, but the legacy of the antebellum South, in race, wealth, and memory, has shaped America ever since.

To read more about this topic:

Encyclopedia.com: Slavery in the Antebellum South OpenStax U.S. History: The Economics of Cotton Library of Congress: Slavery and the Plantation System Springer: Slavery in the U.S. South