“The Old South” Those words call to mind cotton and slaves, masters and mansions, heat and humidity, plantations and lashes. Only in the southernmost Old South, and only during the final quarter of slavery's U.S. history.
During the eighteenth century, slavery's North American center laid hundreds of miles north of its future Lower South home base. The institution dominated the upper two-thirds of the South and peppered northern areas that would eventually contain only free laborers. Then at the end of the century, Eli Whitney and others perfected a cotton gin, and the land seemed to tilt toward the upstart Cotton Kingdom. Slaves drained north to south, with the institution eliminated from the North and diluted in the northernmost South. As the southernmost South belatedly became the Old South, our Old South, the northernmost South became ambiguously southern. That ambiguity created the potential, still latent in prewar times, for a war of Southerners against Southerners. (Bruce S. Allardice, Ed Gleeson, Michael White, 2002)
In the colonial New World, Europeans faced a non-European problem: too few laborers, too many resources. Throughout Europe's colonies, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century capitalists used slavery to ease labor shortages. In 1790, future free labor states contained 10 percent of North American serviles. A little farther south, 69 percent of the thirteen colonies' slaves toiled in tobacco-dominated Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland, and Delaware. Deepest in North America, only 20 percent of U.S. serviles endured the South Carolina/Georgia rice-producing swamps. That sliver of land lay within thirty miles of the Atlantic coast. West of this first Lower South, only .5 percent of North American slaves labored, for the habitat was too steamy for tobacco, too cool for coffee, and too dry for rice. How could slavery thrive in North America's lush, empty tropics? (Frederick Seward, 1996)..............
