Why did the South become so distinctly different from the North?

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Figure false: Steamboats and Cotton in New Orleans, circa 1858
Figure false: Smokestacks of dozens of steamboats overlook hundreds of bales of cotton at the foot of Canal Street. This photograph by Jay Dearborn Edwards captures something of the magnitude of the cotton trade in the South’s largest city and major port. Few Southerners doubted that cotton was king. Historic New Orleans Collection.

FROM THE EARLIEST SETTLEMENTS, inhabitants of the southern colonies had shared a great deal with northern colonists. Most whites in both sections were British and Protestant, spoke a common language, and celebrated their victorious revolution against British rule. The creation of the new nation under the Constitution in 1789 forged political ties that bound all Americans. The beginnings of a national economy fostered economic interdependence and communication across regional boundaries. White Americans everywhere praised the prosperous young nation, and they looked forward to its seemingly boundless future.

Despite these national similarities, Southerners and Northerners grew increasingly different. The French political observer Alexis de Tocqueville believed he knew why. “I could easily prove,” he asserted in 1831, “that almost all the differences which may be noticed between the character of the Americans in the Southern and Northern states have originated in slavery.” Slavery made the South different, and it was the differences between the North and South, not the similarities, that increasingly shaped antebellum American history.

CHRONOLOGY

1808

  • External slave trade is outlawed.

1820s–1830s

  • Southern legislatures enact slave codes.
  • Southern intellectuals fashion a systematic defense of slavery.

1830

  • Southern slaves number approximately two million.

1836

  • Arkansas is admitted to Union as slave state.

1840

  • Cotton accounts for more than 60 percent of nation’s exports.

1845

  • Texas and Florida are admitted to Union as slave states.

1860

  • Southern slaves number nearly four million, one-third of South’s population.

CHAPTER LOCATOR

Why did the South become so distinctly different from the North?

What was plantation life like for masters and mistresses?

What was plantation life like for slaves?

How did nonslaveholding southern whites work and live?

What place did free blacks occupy in the South?

How did slavery shape southern politics?

Conclusion: How did slavery come to define the South?

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