Chapter 13: Meanwhile, Slavery Becomes Essential in the South

As South Carolina’s Rawlins Lowndes says in Philadelphia: “Without negroes, this state is one of the most contemptible in the Union. Negroes are our wealth, our only natural resource.”

The South comes to count on slave labor to deliver the four cash crops that fuel their state governments.

Tobacco is crucial in Virginia and the Upper South; rice along South Carolina and Georgia; sugar around Louisiana; and cotton which becomes omnipresent once Ely Whitney’s cotton “gin” makes harvesting the short grain variety profitable.

In addition there is the South’s “other high value crop” in the form of bred slaves for sale at auctions.