Interesting, @240B Didn't realize that. Thought cotton was a much more dramatic product back in the mid 1800's.
Large operations could support large numbers of slaves. Smaller farms had few, if any, as the investment was substantial. Gold was only about $20 an ounce, and slaves were hundreds of even thousands of dollars each, in gold. DO the math in today's dollars: $500 was 25 ounces of gold, today roughly $50,000 Each bought slave was the price of a new car or more.
Poorer families did what poor families in labor intensive economies do: they had lots of kids. Compounded by problems with childbirth and sanitation, babies had fairly high mortality rates, and infections and sepsis were killers (no antibiotics).
But most folks couldn't afford slaves because their farms were not big enough because they did not have the labor. Kind of a circular problem. BTW ten acres of tobacco was a lot. Still is, because there is no machine to harvest the plants. Cotton didn't just support farmers, though, the crop supported shipping companies, mills, gins to remove seeds, and even though the North set up the laws so the machinery to build a textile industry in the south almost had to be purchased from northerners or foreigners who wanted to keep the markup between raw cotton or wool and finished fabrics and products, the South still had a budding textile industry at the onset of hostilities. While slavery has been given top billing as a
casus belli by northern historians, tariffs which affected the south's ability to industrialize were another factor. One of the reasons for the Anaconda Plan was to cut off trade between the South and virtually anywhere else, which only established a rollicking and overpriced black market in virtually anything the South could not produce for itself, not to mention commerce raiders (
CSS Alabama, for instance) and blockade runners. That also led to the development of the first purpose built submarine to sink an enemy vessel and the ironclad ram
CSS Virginia, built on the hull of the
Merrimac.
You can believe the Fable, or really dig in and realize the situation was complicated. One thing led to another, sometimes seemingly unrelated. As a side note, about the time the Confederacy ran out of gold and silver for the black markets (to obtain supplies), things got really tough and the war ended soon after. Ever wonder who got rich off of that trade? (me, too)
