![]() Old-growth forests and cypress swamps were cleared by slaves and readied for plowing and planting. Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian vision of white yeoman farmers settling the West by single-handedly carving out small independent farms ironically proved quite different in the South. The slaves forced to build James Hammond’s cotton kingdom with their labor started by clearing the land. The phrase “to be sold down the river,” used by Harriet Beecher Stowe in her 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, refers to this forced migration from the upper southern states to the Deep South, lower on the Mississippi, to grow cotton. Whenever new slave states entered the Union, white slaveholders sent armies of slaves to clear land to grow the lucrative crop. The crop grown in the South was a hybrid known as Petit Gulf cotton that grew extremely well in the Mississippi River Valley as well as in other states like Texas. By the time of the Civil War, South Carolina politician James Hammond confidently proclaimed that the North could never threaten the South because “cotton is king.” American cotton made up two-thirds of the global supply, and production continued to increase. By 1850, 1.8 million of the 3.2 million slaves in the country’s fifteen slave states produced cotton and by 1860, slave labor produced over two billion pounds of cotton annually. Following the War of 1812, cotton became the key cash crop of the southern economy and the most important American commodity. ![]() Almost no cotton was grown in the United States in 1790 when the first U.S. ![]()
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