U.S. History: Western Expansion- Growth of a Slave Economy

The antebellum American economy thrived on the production of cotton. Southern plantation owners amassed fortunes planting, harvesting, and selling bales of cotton fiber, and Northerners designed America’s first industrial towns in an attempt to convert the cotton fiber into thread, fabric, and finished clothes. Cotton was king, and the production and price of cotton affected a southern slave as well as a northern mill hand. This lesson explores the cotton cycle, the step-bystep process from cotton seed to finished shirt. In an optional extension activity, it also examines how the cotton cycle influenced national politics. The Missouri Compromise of 1820, which admitted Missouri into the Union as a slave state and Maine as a free state and halted the expansion of slavery above the 36°30’ parallel, is often viewed as a purely political decision; however, it was rooted in economics. Southern soil and northern streams combined to make the South agricultural and the North industrial. The differences between agriculturalists and industrialists in regards to the market, government tariffs, and workers’ wages caused much of the division that split North and South in 1820 and eventually in the Civil War.