The Southern Economy

1846 - James B. D. De Bow starts publishing De Bow's Review in New Orleans.  For over a decade, De Bow promoted industrialization and modernization of the South.  A couple years before the Civil War, De Bow promotes secession.



The South is behind the north in 1850:

During the 1840s, 3 times as many southerners migrate to the north than vice versa.

Most foreigners immigrate to the North because of more job opportunities.

The north far outpaced the south in new train tracks in the 1840s.

 Southern industry was only 18% of U.S. industry and 1/2 of that was in the 4 border states, not in the 11 soon-to-be Confederate states.

Cotton is at an all-time high in 1850 (11 cents / pound).  The South exports 70% to Europe and 25% to northern mills, keeping only 5% to make their own goods.  Northerners and the British make money not only making cloth goods, but also by financing (loaning planters money to plant) and shipping cotton on northern-built ships. 

Progressive southerners met annually at conferences to promote modernization.  Besides businesses, industrialization, and more railroads, they wanted public schools, more southern universities with  southern professors, writers and newspaper editors.

The South made advances in railroads in the 1850s but did not come close to matching the North's rail system.  Textile mills barely increased; by 1860 the slave states produced only 10% of the total U.S. output.

The South's inability to compete with the North was most probably because the wealthiest southerners, the planters, were cash-poor, investing all the cash they had in land and slaves because slavery was so profitable.

Another factor was the South's unwillingness to urbanize.  They considered northern cities dirty and full of vice.  They considered the work of northern businessmen and craftsmen to be trite and unworthy of "gentlemen."  

By the late 1850s, southern intellectuals were denouncing northern business and industry and its "free labor" culture.  Their main interest was expanding slavery into central America, trying to purchase Cuba and it half million slaves, and re-opening the Atlantic slave trade (although many planters resisted the last project for fear it would drop slave prices).