Chapter 11 of Boles

The eleventh chapter of the Boles book, "An Agricultural Economy", deals with the growth of the Antebellum South's cash crops, and how those crops shaped the Southern way of life.

Cotton, of course, was the crop of choice for many Southerners, both wealthy planters and small scale farmers. Cotton, unlike tobacco or rice, was not limited to one location due to type of soil or weather. Unlike rice, it didn't have to be grown just on the coast, and unlike tobacco, it did not do nearly as much damage to the soil.

Cotton also gave many white southerners the chance to make some sort of fortune, no matter how small. At the beginning of the 19th century, many farmers moved to what was then the Southwest, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, in hopes of cultivating the millions of acres of land that had not yet been touched by Southerners. Once there, many of them manage to create farms, some of whom were very dependent on cotton. Cotton, being grown by many types of farmers and planters, had a way of democratizing the South. Planters and small farmers could speak to each other on a common level, due to their common ties to cotton.

Cotton also effected the Southern economy by, for all intents and purposes, controlling it. It explained the growth of the hemp crop in Kentucky, and also led to booms for the coastal port cities, especially New York. It gave small scale white farmers the chance to make extra money, next to the food crops they grew for survival. With the rapid success of cotton, and the fact that not as much land was needed to grow it as for other crops, many farms could also grow food, so that the South, contrary to popular belief, could be mostly self sufficient when it came to foodstuffs. Only Louisiana, with its maximizing of sugar cane, would import great amounts of foodstuffs. The economy, as well as white supremacy over blacks, united Southern whites that otherwise, had very little in common.