The South

     The region of the South was made up of the states south of the Mason-Dixon line . This region, before the civil war, was a society that was heavily reliant on its cotton and on its slave labor more than the other southern state. This reliance on the commodity raised wealth for the south and gave them some sway overseas, especially in Britain where a lot of the cotton was sent for manufacturing.  The reliance caused many problems in the southern system. It relied too heavily on cotton making it prone to swings in the price of cotton. It also caused vast disparities in wealth and power between Plantation owners and the small time farmers.

      With the plantation owners on top of the social ladder with their vast amounts of land and slave labor made the society an oligarchy. The plantation owners modeled their life styles similarly to that of feudal lords of the old world. However, they made up little of the actual population of the south.  Below the plantation owners were the people who did not own slaves or large tracts of land. These "Plain Folk" made up most of the southern population and scratched out a living by growing more diverse crops. Though they had no slaves, they were the stoutest defenders of the system for a couple of reasons. One of the first was of social mobility, if they could eventually buy a slave to get from rags to riches and head to the top of the power pyramid on the back of their slaves. The other belief was in their presumed racial superiority, because some of the whites were extremely poor, they took solace that they outranked someone on the social ladder.

      At the very bottom of the pyramid were the slaves. The slaves worked from dawn to dusk and floggings were common as a disincentive and a symbol of a planter’s power over them. They lacked basic civil and political rights and got minimal protection from murder and unusual punishment. Many slaves were separated from family and close friends when sold in the internal slave trade. The Import of slaves from other countries had been ended in the year 1808, though the smuggling of slaves continued in some places, so the enslaved population continued through internal trading and natural population growth. Many slaves grew weary of living under bondage and tried many ways to make it hard for the system. They sabotaged machinery, worked at the slowest rate, pilfered food and sometimes poisoned food of their masters. These small actions only ever slowed the system slightly and a rebellion would mean death. Two Slave rebellions in the South meant disaster as they were swiftly meant and always bloody.

       These injustices to the enslaved people led many in the north to form abolitionists societies dedicated to the eradication of slavery. One peculiar Society was the American colonization society, whose plan involved transporting blacks back to Africa. The famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was involved in the society for a time but later quit and regretted joining them as they did nothing to get rid of the problem of slavery. The abolitionist cause had a way of agitating the South, they would retort at the north about wage slaves, but many societies had moved away from slavery making the South one of its last bastions in the western world. This made the South a Backwards region as compared to the north when the world began to change and it would eventually explode into the civil war.