Ante-Bellum South

The Ante-Bellum South comprised the slave states before the American Civil War.

The economy was dominated by plantations owned by rich white families and using slave labor. Historians define a plantation as having 20 or more slaves (of all ages). Cotton was the main crop in a broad swath (called the "Black Belt") that included most of the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas. Other plantations grew tobacco (in Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina and Kentucky), hemp (Kentucky and Missouri), rice (South Carolina) or sugar (Louisiana). Most slaves were owned by plantations, and slave culture has been extensively studied. The great majority of whites did NOT live on plantations, and farmed on a smaller scale or on a subsistence scale. The plantation South had few large cities; the most notable were Charleston, SC, and Natchez, Mississippi.

In general the plantation owners invested all their profits in new lands and new slaves. The system survived the Civil War, as the emanciapted Freedmen continued to work on plantation land, as hired hands, tenents or sharecroppers. Virts (2006) examines county-level census data in the principal cotton states for 1910 and 1945. The analysis reveals that, while the percentage of land in tenant plantations decreased as a whole, it increased in some counties, principally in areas of Mississippi and Louisiana. In such areas cotton production also increased while it declined elsewhere, suggesting that in some circumstances large-scale agriculture had an advantage over small farms.

The system of cotoon plantations collapsed in the 1940s as cotton picking machines drastically reduced the need for labor.

Historiography

The leading historian 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 doiminated the South.

Phillips's addressed the unprofitability of slave labor and slavery's ill effects on the southern economy. Phillips systematically hunted down and opened plantation and other southern manuscript sources. 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 1910, he argued in "The Decadence of the Plantation System" that slavery was an unprofitable relic that persisted because it produced social status, honor, and political power, that is, Slave Power).

Phillips' economic conclusions about the decline of slavery were challenged by Robert Fogel in the 1960s, who argued that slavery was both efficient and profitable as long as the price of cotton was high enough. In turn Fogel came under attack.

Phillips contended that masters treated slaves relatively well and his views were rejected most sharply by Kenneth M. Stampp.

References

• Genovese, Eugene, Roll, Jordan Roll (1975), the most important recent study.
• Phillips, Ulrich B. American Negro Slavery; a Survey of the Supply, Employment, and Control of Negro Labor, as Determined by the Plantation Regime. (1918; reprint 1966)online at Project Gutenberg
• Phillips, Ulrich B. Life and Labor in the Old South. (1929).
• Phillips, Ulrich B. ed. Plantation and Frontier Documents, 1649-1863; Illustrative of Industrial History in the Colonial and Antebellum South: Collected from MSS. and Other Rare Sources. 2 Volumes. (1909).
• Phillips, Ulrich B. "The Economic Cost of Slaveholding in the Cotton Belt," Political Science Quarterly 20#2 (Jun., 1905), pp. 257-275 in JSTOR
• Phillips, Ulrich B. "The Origin and Growth of the Southern Black Belts." American Historical Review, 11 (July, 1906): 798-816. in JSTOR
• Phillips, Ulrich B. "The Decadence of the Plantation System." Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, 35 (January, 1910): 37-41. in JSTOR
• Kenneth M. Stampp. The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-bellum South (1956)
• Virts, Nancy. "Change in the Plantation System: American South, 1910-1945." Explorations in Economic History 2006 43(1): 153-176. Issn: 0014-4983

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