The South is a place. East, west, and north are nothing but directions.
Letter to the editor, Richmond Times-Dispatch, 1995, as quoted in Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic, (Pantheon Books, New York, 1998), 18.
Objectives
A thorough study of Chapter Eleven should enable the student to understand:
1. The significance of the shift of economic power from the "upper South" to the "lower South."
2. How cotton became "king," and the role it played in shaping the "southern way of life."
3. How trade and industry functioned under the southern agricultural system.
4. The structure of southern society, and the role of an enslaved people in that society.
5. The place of the South, with its increasing reliance on King Cotton, in the nation's economy.
6. The continuing historical debate over the South, its "peculiar institution," and the effects of enslavement on the blacks.
Glossary
1. manumission: The act of freeing a slave.
2. planter: A term used to identify one of those southerners whose combination of land and slaves was such that they stood out as the prominent staple producers in their area. A social as well as an economic designation, it was used to identify the agricultural elite in the South.