322 Chapter 12 The Sections Go Their Own Ways
benefited from the improvements in international
transportation and trade. By the 1850s the nation
remained divided—chiefly between the slave econ-
omy of the South and the nominally “free” labor of
the North. But as the nation was knit together more
tightly, the incompatibility of those diverse economic
systems could no longer be ignored. ■
The South
The South was less affected than other sections by
urbanization, European immigration, the transportation
revolution, and industrialization. The region remained
predominantly agricultural; cotton was still king, slavery
the most distinctive southern institution. But important
changes were occurring. Cotton continued to march
westward, until by 1859 fully 1.3 million of the 4.3 mil-
lion bales grown in the United States came from beyond
the Mississippi. In the upper South, Virginia held its
place as the leading tobacco producer, but states beyond
the Appalachians were raising more than half the crop.
The introduction of Bright Yellow, a mild variety of
tobacco that (miraculously) grew best in poor soil, gave
a great stimulus to production. The older sections of
Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina shifted to the
kind of diversified farming usually associated with the
Northeast. By 1849 the wheat crop of Virginia was
worth twice as much as the tobacco crop.
In the time of Washington and Jefferson, progres-
sive Virginia planters had experimented with crop rota-
tion and fertilizers. In the mid-nineteenth century,
Edmund Ruffin introduced the use of marl, an earth
rich in calcium, to counteract the acidity of worn-out
tobacco fields. Ruffin discovered that dressings of marl,
combined with the use of fertilizers and with proper
drainage and plowing methods, doubled and even
tripled the yield of corn and wheat. In the 1840s some
Southerners began to import Peruvian guano, a high-
nitrogen fertilizer of bird droppings, which increased
yields. Others experimented with contour plowing to
control erosion and with improved breeds of livestock,
new types of plows, and agricultural machinery.
The Economics of Slavery
The increased importance of cotton in the South
strengthened the hold of slavery on the region. The
price of slaves rose until by the 1850s a prime field hand
was worth as much as $1,800, roughly three times the
cost in the 1820s. While the prestige value of owning
this kind of property affected prices, the rise chiefly
reflected the increasing value of the South’s agricultural
output. “Crop value per slave” jumped from less than
$15 early in the century to more than $125 in 1859.
In the cotton fields of the Deep South slaves
brought several hundred dollars per head more than
in the older regions; thus the tendency to sell them
“down the river” continued. Mississippi took in some
10,000 slaves a year throughout the period; by 1830
the black population of the state exceeded the white.
The westward shift of cotton cultivation was accom-
panied by the forcible transfer of more than a million
African American slaves from the seaboard states to
the dark, rich soil of regions watered by the
Mississippi and Arkansas rivers and their tributaries.
This “second great migration” of blacks far surpassed
the original uprooting of blacks from Africa to the
United States.
Slave trading became a big business. In the 1850s
there were about fifty dealers in Charleston and 200
in New Orleans. The largest traders were Isaac
Franklin and John Armfield, who collected slaves
from Virginia and Maryland at their “model jail” in
Alexandria and shipped them by land and sea to a
depot near Natchez. Each of the partners cleared half
a million dollars before retiring, and some smaller
operators did proportionately well.
The impact of the trade on the slaves was frequently
disastrous. Husbands were often separated from wives,
and parents from children. This was somewhat less
likely to happen on large, well-managed plantationsA woman in a net on a Congo shore. Although the importation of
slaves was illegal after 1807, historians William Cooper and Thomas
Terrill estimate in The American South(2009) that 50,000 were
smuggled into the United States between 1808 and 1860.