Antebellum period

The Plantation era, also loosely referred to as the Antebellum era, was a period in the history of the Southern United States, from the late 18th century until the start of the American Civil War in 1861, marked by the economic growth of the South based on slave-driven plantation farming.

Much of the economic growth of this era can be attributed to the rise of the plantation system and the use of slave labor. The plantation system eventually grew to form the industrial and social frame of government in the Southern slave states, while the associated institution of slavery became the basis of the Southern social system, ideology, and a set of psychological patterns.

Many historians believe that the end of slavery in the United States following the Civil War to be responsible for the economic woes of the South during the Reconstruction Era. The concurrent rise in large-scale farming and in plantation slavery has led to studies on the institution of slavery as an economic system.

The antebellum, plantation-era 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 labor-based) and shortage of liquid capital, which, when aggravated by the need to concentrate on a few staples, the pervasive anti-industrial and anti-urban ideology, and the reduction of southern banking, led to a South dependent on export trade. In contrast to the economies of the North and West, which relied primarily on their own domestic markets, because the southern domestic market consisted primarily of plantations, southern states imported sustenance commodities from the West and manufactured goods from the North. This imbalance of imports and exports has been seen as an economic exploitation of the exporting South where the antebellum economic growth of the North came at the expense of the South.

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 usage of crude labor that was both abundant and cheap.

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

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