Американың Оңтүстігіндегі соғысқа дейінгі кезең

Historical period in the Southern United States from 1815 to 1861

The Antebellum South era (from ante bellum) was a period in the history of the Southern United States that extended from the conclusion of the War of 1812 to the start of the American Civil War in 1861. This era was marked by the prevalent practice of slavery and the associated societal norms it cultivated. Over the course of this period, Southern leaders underwent a transformation in their perspective on slavery. Initially regarded as an awkward and temporary institution, it gradually evolved into a defended concept, with proponents arguing for its positive merits, while simultaneously vehemently opposing the burgeoning abolitionist movement. Society was stratified, inegalitarian, and perceived by immigrants as lacking in opportunities. Consequently, the manufacturing base lagged behind that of the non slave states. Wealth inequality grew as the larger landholders took the greater share of the profits generated by slaves, which also helped to entrench their power as a political class. As the country expanded westward, slavery's propagation became a major issue in national politics, eventually boiling over into the Civil War. In the years that followed the Civil War, the war was romanticized by historical revisionists to protect three central assertions: that the Confederate cause was heroic, that enslaved people were happy and satisfied, and that slavery was not the primary cause of the war. This phenomenon has continued to the present day to contribute to racism, gender roles, and religious attitudes in the South, and to a lesser extent the rest of the country.

In the 18th century, the Atlantic slave trade brought enslaved Africans to the South during the colonial period as a source of labor for the harvesting of crops. There were almost 700,000 enslaved persons in the U. S. in 1790, which equated to approximately 18 percent of the total population or roughly one in every six people. This would persist through the 17th and 18th centuries, but it was not until the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in the 1790s, that slavery grew very profitable and that the large plantation system developed. In the 15 years between the invention of the cotton gin and the passage of the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, an increase in the slave trade occurred, furthering the slave system in the United States.

The Antebellum South saw large expansions in agriculture, while manufacturing growth remained relatively slow. The Southern economy was characterized by a low level of capital accumulation (largely slave labor based) and a shortage of liquid capital, which, when aggravated by the need to concentrate on a few staples, the pervasive anti industrial and anti urban ideology, and the reduction of Southern banking, led to a South dependent on export trade. This was in contrast to the economies of the Northern and Western U. S., which relied primarily on their own domestic markets. Since the Southern domestic market consisted primarily of plantations, Southern states imported sustenance commodities from the West and manufactured goods from England and the North. The plantation system can be seen as the factory system applied to agriculture, with a concentration of labor under skilled management. But while the industrial manufacturing based labor economy of the North was driven by growing demand, maintenance of the plantation economic system depended upon slave labor, which was abundant and cheap. The five major commodities of the Southern agricultural economy were cotton, grain, tobacco, sugar, and rice, with the production of the leading cash crop, cotton, which were concentrated in the Deep South (Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana).

The leading historian of the era was Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, who studied slavery not so much as a political issue between North and South, but as a social and economic system. He focused on the large plantations that dominated the South. Phillips addressed the unprofitability of slave labor and slavery's ill effects on the Southern economy. An example of pioneering comparative work was A Jamaica Slave Plantation (1914). His methods inspired the "Phillips school" of slavery studies, between 1900 and 1950. Phillips argued that large scale plantation slavery was inefficient and not progressive. It had reached its geographical limits by 1860 or so, and therefore eventually had to fade away (as happened in Brazil). In The Decadence of the Plantation System (1910), he argued that slavery was an unprofitable relic that persisted because it produced social status, honor, and political power. "Most farmers in the South had small to medium sized farms with few slaves, but the large plantation owner's wealth, often reflected in the number of slaves they owned, afforded them considerable prestige and political power." Phillips contended that masters treated enslaved persons relatively well; his views on that issue were later sharply rejected by Kenneth M. Stampp. His conclusions about the economic decline of slavery were challenged in 1958 by Alfred H. Conrad and John R. Meyer in a landmark study published in the Journal of Political Economy. Their arguments were further developed by Robert Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, who argued in their 1974 book, Time on the Cross, that slavery was both efficient and profitable, as long as the price of cotton was high enough. In turn, Fogel and Engerman came under attack from other historians of slavery.

As slavery began to displace indentured servitude as the principal supply of labor in the plantation systems of the South, the economic nature of the institution of slavery aided in the increased inequality of wealth seen in the antebellum South. The demand for slave labor and the U. S. ban on importing more slaves from Africa drove up prices for slaves, making it profitable for smaller farms in older settled areas such as Virginia to sell their slaves further south and west.

The plantation system created an environment for the South to experience an economic boom in the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries. However, reliance on both the plantation system and more widespread slave labor, left the South in a precarious economic situation. Following the end of the Civil War and into Reconstruction era (1863–1877), the South experienced economic devastation. Some states that relied less heavily on the plantation system managed to fare better following its downfall Ulrich Bonnell Phillips contends that the plantation "sadly restricted the opportunity of such men as were of better industrial quality than was required for the field gangs." Essentially, men who would have been otherwise capable of performing other skilled jobs were nonetheless relegated to field work because of the nature of the system. While the South still attracted immigrants from Europe, the North attracted far more during the early to mid 1800s, such that by the time of the American Civil War, the population of the North far exceeded the non enslaved population of the South per the 1860 United States census. Colin Woodard argued in his 2011 book American Nations that the South was relatively less successful in attracting immigrants due to the South's reputation as a more stratified society. Striving immigrants who sought economic advancement thus tended to favor the more egalitarian North, compared to the more aristocratic South, where there were fewer perceived opportunities for advancement.