While tobacco and rice were the early favorite crops among southern growers across the South, it was cotton that would reign supreme, a development facilitated by the invention of the cotton gin in the late eighteenth century. By the time of the Civil War, in fact, cotton was the most important crop and became the bedrock of the economy of the American South. More than those other crops, cotton could be produced cheaply and efficiently, and Southern plantation owners grew wealthy selling it both domestically and, of increasing importance, internationally. Cotton, in short, was the Southern economy. With the expansion in the United States and in Great Britain of textile industries, which employed innumerable people, the demand for cotton increased, further fueling both Southern coffers and, of enormous significance, the South’s determination to preserve another side of the economic equation on which the competitiveness of Southern-produced cotton depended, cheap labor.
The importance of cheap labor for the cotton farmers was substantial. The cheapest labor pool available was the vast market in slaves forcibly brought across the Atlantic Ocean from West Africa. The American South, then, became overly dependent on both cotton and slaves to work in the fields. The two commodities—one agricultural and the other human—contributed to the growth of the Southern economy and to the development of that region’s social structure and culture. Plantation owners lived ostentatiously on large estates, with slaves exploited for household chores as well as for working in the cotton fields.
As not all white Southerners were wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, the fact of slavery further exacerbated their (the poor white people's) plight. Small farms operated by these poorer white people could not hope to compete with the large plantation owners and the latter’s slave labor. A class of white people emerged, therefore, that fell not quite between the plantation owners and their slaves but kind of parallel to that of the slaves. The desperately poor communities of Southern regions like the Appalachians, therefore, remain a legacy of this dysfunctional social system.
A final legacy of the cotton/slave economy that emerged following the Civil War and the era of Reconstruction involved mass migrations of newly-freed slaves to northern states—a development that served to shift the labor market away from agriculture and toward the more industrialized North. Southern society as the wealthy plantation owners had known it for generations was gone and would not come back.
https://www.history.com/news/slavery-profitable-southern-economy
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/why-was-cotton-king/
https://www.ushistory.org/us/22b.asp
Cotton was very important to the South; before the Civil War, the South had more millionaires than the rest of the nation. Cotton was one of the major exports of the United States and American cotton fueled textile mills in the Northeast as well as Europe. A great deal of Southern planter wealth was not only in cotton—much of it was in the form of the slaves who worked the fields. These slaves faced discrimination from those who owned them. While some owners were famously cruel, many more took a paternalistic attitude towards their slaves as they tried to overlook the American contradiction of a human owning another human. Poor whites did not like the slaves as the slaves took jobs away from a potential pool of paid workers who might own land and their own plantation one day.
Cotton, though it gave the South a great deal of wealth, was actually a hindrance to the region's growth. The region did not have a need to diversify as the slave-driven labor provided all the money needed for the planter class. The planter class sent their children to prestigious boarding schools; they saw no need to invest in public education thus create an educated workforce out of the thousands of poor white Southerners. There were even laws that made it a crime to teach slaves how to read. The region did not invest in infrastructure such as railroads to the extent that the Northern states did. This would be disastrous during the Civil War as the South had little means to move goods from one point to another. The lack of industrial growth and upward mobility led to many immigrants deciding to stay in Northern cities rather than move South.
Cotton production was critical to the economic success of the South, and slavery was a crucial (albeit horrific and inhumane) means of meeting the high demands of that industry.
The American South evolved as an agrarian society in which crops like tobacco, sugar, rice, wheat, hemp, and, of course, cotton supported the economy. Cotton, in particular, was in huge demand in the nineteenth century. It was largely responsible for the boom in the production of textiles overseas.
In fact, cotton served as the leading American export from 1803 to 1937 and was foundational to the Industrial Revolution; 77 percent of the 800 million pounds of cotton being used in Great Britain were directly produced in the South. The invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney expedited this process, but it was truly slavery that made it possible in the first place.
Karl Marx once commented, "Without slavery, you have no cotton."
In order to keep up with the European demand for cotton, the transatlantic slave trade provided forced laborers directly from Africa. In addition to this tragic violation of human rights and life, over a million African Americans living in the Upper South were sold off to the Deep South to feed "King Cotton."
Socially speaking, it is clear that the demand for cotton prolonged slavery and, in doing so, arguably contributed to causing the Civil War. However, it also kept America in good standing with Europe because of the European market's dependency on cotton exports.
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