Only 2% (more or less) of Southerners owned slaves..
A fact which speaks reams about the antebellum Southern economy and society, not much of it good.
The cotton gin and the steam engine ruined the South, the first by making cotton an economically viable crop and the second by powering British textile mills that were cranking out this new miracle product - inexpensive cotton fabric produced by steam-powered machinery, by the millions of yards.
After centuries of homespun, the whole world wanted this cheap and abundant cotton fabric, and England had the Empire to give it to them. 80% of this cotton came from the American South.
By 1820 the fastest way to a million dollars in the South was a cotton plantation, nailing down chattel slavery as, in their own words, the “Cornerstone” of the Southern economy. By 1860 King Cotton was 80% of the Southern economy, in the hands of 2% of the population, who claimed ownership of 25% of the population.
Slavery was more than just hopefully benevolent imprisonment and a lifetime of stolen labor. A slave did not even own their own body, had no claim to their wife or husband, had no claim to even their own children, from the moment of birth.
In our society our leaders come from among our wealthiest men, by 1860 the South had been governed by the Planter Class Aristocracy for forty years.
These men made decisions for and about cotton, which is why the South was so poorly equipped for war when war came. Cotton smothered all else, it smothered industry, it smothered innovation, it smothered education, it smothered transportation and it smothered all other crops.
It also smothered immigration, nobody could compete with slave labor. Balance Free and Slave States all ya want, Congress is based on population, and every election cycle there were more and more Yankee Congressmen in the House, the South becoming more and more a minority in their own Nation.
Lincoln had been a thorn in the side of the South since Congressman Abraham Lincoln’s staunch opposition to the Mexican War fourteen years earlier. When THAT guy became President, South Carolina, so cotton that the majority of people in it were slaves, was the first to pull the plug on the Union. South Carolina said it was about slavery, so did half the States in the Confederacy.
That same Planter Class were the same group who were dumb and short-sighted enough to actually try and blackmail the British Empire into recognition by threatening to NOT sell ‘em cotton, the South’s only real income. In response the Brits merely started growing their own in Egypt and India, ruining the Post War South.
JMHO
