The Dominating Reality in Southern Life

Following the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1793 cotton had become king and was the most ludicrously lucrative cash crop, stimulating the South's economy as well as the North's through its manufacturing and trading. In order to maintain the labor force required to efficiently produce large amounts of cotton and increase profits, slaves were a necessity. The large number of slaves allowed for extremely high profits. However cotton is a crop that destroys the Earth sucking the nutrients from the ground causing land used for cotton farming to be uncultivable. This sparked another desire for westward expansion and manifest destiny as arable farmland was needed to maintain the profits of cotton farming. Slavery was paramount to sustaining the South's economy, but had caused much political controversy due to abolitionists gaining support and going against the southerners that relied on slavery to maintain their economy. A highly controversial practice both ethically and morally, slavery caused a rift in the Union pitting the relatively anti-slavery North against the pro-slavery South. The fight for slave states versus free states as well divided Americans politically with abolitionists in the North and white southerners who had grown up with a sense of racial superiority and had gained wealth from slavery ready to defend a system so integral to their way of life. Events such as the admission of California into the Union, the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas Nebraska scheme further pushed apart the northerners and the southerners eventually leading up to the Civil war, the bloodiest war in American history.

Slavery has been and always will be an integral part of American history. It allowed the United States to become the powerhouse it is today by providing a strong economic foundation for the growth of a newborn country. However this practice was seen as morally and ethically wrong. Though at first anti-slavery advocates were ignored since the economic growth due to slavery was so substantial, but eventually abolitionists in the free North gained support. The northerners disliked individual African-Americans, but liked the race as a whole. Southerners liked the individual slaves they owned since they brought them profits and were beneficial to them, but disliked and felt superior to the race as a whole. When the cotton and textile industry boomed after Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, the phrase "Cotton was King!" practically summed up the southern economy. This crop had