The industrial organization of southern society before the Civil War presents certain distinctive features. The early settlement of the southern colonies was almost entirely rural. The land was held in large tracts of several hundred acres and cultivated by slave labor. The economic effects of slave labor are apparent. It compelled the South to remain an agricultural section, and at the same time carry on its agriculture at the expense of a great waste of resources.
The plantation was the industrial unit. Ordinarily all of the various things necessary for the family and slaves of the planter, aside from a few imported luxuries, were produced on the plantation. Not only were the raw materials for clothing—wool, leather, and cotton—produced, but these raw products were worked up into the completed form for consumption on the same plantation. The food products—grain, corn, meat, and vegetables—were also supplied by home labor. Thus to a large extent the plantation was a small community, in some ways comparable to the English feudal estate—a community in which the labor of the members of the group supplied the wants of the group. As a result of this "domestic system of production," the circle of the market for southern products before 1860—barring rice, sugar, tobacco, and cotton—was limited.
Outside the slave-owning class was a large population known as the "poor whites." Unwilling to work beside colored slave labor, they lived by cultivating waste land or by charity. "They belonged neither to the ruling class nor to the slave class."[1]
The towns and cities assumed comparatively slight importance. The South had little export trade of manufactured articles. Its cotton went to England and New England cotton-mills. It had not reached the point of working up its raw products for commercial purposes. Hence as a distinctively manufacturing center the city was quite unknown, and with the majority of the population engaged in agriculture the town exerted no dominant influence. The sentiments that characterized the rural population permeated the towns and formed public opinion in the South.
It is due to this original structure of southern society that
- ↑ Woodrow Wilson, Division and Union, p. 128.
