Peculiar Instituion

The South’s economic base was highly dependent on the use of slaves; as it was almost their complete labor force. One of the most crucial parts to the South’s success was Eli Whitney’s cotton gin. Made in 1793, it allowed cotton to become the dominant Southern crop, and had more profits than other previous crops like rice, sugar, and tobacco. Due to cotton’s huge profitability it caused planters to buy more slave and more land to take advantages of this highly potential crop. In 1800, 18 million pounds of cotton were export, which was 7 percent of total exports. This however would change as in 1830, 300 million pounds of cotton were exported which was 41% of the total exports. This number would increase again by 1860 as in reach 1.7 billion pounds of cotton exported; 57% of total exports. Cotton was the underlying crop in the south as 80% of the world’s cotton came from the South in 1860; as they went to factories in England. (Yetman, 101)

For the 3.9 million African American slaves counted in the census of 1860, life was brutal. Each day promised ceaseless toil, threats or punishment, and the looming, nightmarish possibility of being sold away from beloved family members and friends. Even those slaves who accepted their situation without complaint, who had kind owners, or who were given lighter work duties suffered from the absence of self-determination, the possibility of freely choosing the course of their own lives.

The South felt their peculiar institution was their very means of survival, and it was their backbone economically and socially. Their defenses for their continual of slavery was that slavery was ordained by God, Greek and Roman cultures featured slavery, essential to Southern economy, preferable to giving wages to slaves in the North, and it was beneficial to the blacks who had traded barbarism for Christianity

Some topics in this essay:
Man” Enlightenment, Eli Whitney’s, South Basically, African American, , Underground Railroad, Appalachian Mountains, Theodore Weld, Lloyd Garrison, Deep South, peculiar institution, slave owners, pounds cotton, total exports, poor whites, pounds cotton exported, owned slaves, free blacks, cotton exported, labor force,