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What contributed to the growth of slavery in the South during the antebellum era? Ships began to import enslaved workers to the South after 1807. Plantation owners needed more workers to grow labor-intensive crops. More plantations in the Appalachian Mountains began to grow rice and cotton.

The biggest splash in the antebellum economy was the rise of manufacturing. From the barest of beginnings before 1815, manufacturing output grew to more than 30% of national commodity output by 1859 according to Gallman (1966), roughly 20% of GDP.

Picking Cotton Freed blacks often commented that slaves who did not meet an established quota were commonly whipped. Almost all of the sugar grown in the United States during the antebellum period came from Louisiana. Louisiana produced from one-quarter to one-half of all sugar consumed in the United States.

Sugar drove the forced migration and even enslavement of many Africans which made an impact across the entire world. With the rise of the sugar demand to slavery, this good led to the trading of slaves which had its own trade and economical impact in and of itself.

When the cane was ripe, the enslaved workers cut the sugar cane by hand with broad curved machetes and loaded the stems onto carts. Mills were slow and inefficient so during the harvesting season the slaves worked in the mill and boiling house 24 hours a day to process the crop.

In 1858, when a United States senator, Hammond made a famous speech entitled “Cotton is King,” in which he said that the southern states could do very well without the northern states, but the north would collapse without the south.

Hammond

Cotton diplomacy refers to the diplomatic methods employed by the Confederacy during the American Civil War to coerce the United Kingdom and France to support the Confederate war effort by implementing a cotton trade embargo against the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe.

While some of these weapons were seized by the Union Navy in the blockade, a slight majority made it through, with 40.9 percent of all privateers being caught in 1862. The South acquired raw minerals through trade with Mexico, most notably sulphur, copper, powder, and niter.

Richmond

The Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 freed African Americans in rebel states, and after the Civil War, the Thirteenth Amendment emancipated all U.S. slaves wherever they were.