Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Surrender at Appomattox.

In the decades leading up to the War of Secession cotton production became to increasingly dominate the economy of the South, enormous acreages being turned over to its production.

Unfortunately, the perceived necessity for slaves to do the actual labor of producing this crop had the effect of further entrenching the institution of "African slavery" (to use a Southern term) as an indispensable component of Southern society, to the extent that slaves actually outnumbered the free population in South Carolina and Mississippi, and rivaled it in others.

As I said in that other thread, the South's dependence upon cotton exports was comparable to the Saudis' dependence upon oil exports today. ALL of the de-facto Southern Aristocracy, and ALL of its leaders owed their fortunes to slave-produced cotton.

The idea of secession was nothing new in '61, it had been bandied about for decades, and national politics had been for at least that long all about accommodating the disparate goals of North and South with respect to the expansion of that slavery.

In their own words, a primary concern of the Southern States at the time of secession was that population growth and demographic shifts would reach a point wherein the Northern States might legally impose abolition upon the South.

No accident then that the Confederate Constitution when it was written specifically enshrined and protected the institution of chattel slavery in perpetuity.

Birdwatcher