Making the Deep South "Southern"

Abstract

Adam Rothman has written an important and suggestive book on the expansion of slavery into the Old Southwest. More than any other single factor, the rapid and wholesale expansion of slavery into the geographic area that became Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana created the entity modern historians call the Cotton South (as well as the much-smaller Sugar Country along the lower Mississippi). The development of large-scale, slave-based staple agriculture in these regions did much to sectionalize slavery, and hence the politics of slavery, and created the sectional dynamics that eventually produced the American Civil War. Prior to the making of what Rothman terms the Slave Country, slavery had flourished chiefly in tidewater and alluvial enclaves like the Chesapeake region of Virginia and Maryland and the Lowcountry region of South Carolina and Georgia, where the geographic limitations and specific crops (tobacco and rice respectively) effectively slowed the expansion of local slaveholding and slave cultures into other parts of the South. With the rise of short staple cotton as a major cash crop between 1790 and 1820, however, staple agriculture based on slave labor flowed over, around, and through its figurative tidewater levees and flooded across the lower South, creating new cadres of slaveholders who brought more and more slaves into the region through forced migration and purchase. To a lesser degree, the disruption of the Caribbean sugar economy by slave unrest and the migration of sugargrowing expertise to the Orleans territory in southern Louisiana created a sugar bowl where the white wealth and the concentration of slaves rivaled that of South Carolina's rice coast.