homes and business enterprises for a white, southern elite. They were the largest, the most commercialized, and on the whole, the most efficient and specialized agricultural enterprises of their day, producing the bulk of the South's staple crops of tobacco, cotton, sugar, rice, and hemp. Their proprietors aspired to and sometimes, after a generation or two, achieved the status of a cultivated landed aristocracy. Many distinguished themselves not only in agriculture but in the professions, in the military, in government service, and in scientific and cultural endeavors (Levine, Foner, 37 ).
Throughout the early part of the 19th Century, planters ambitious to augment their wealth, together with their black slaves, were an important driving force in the economic and political development of new territories and states in the Old Southwest. Their commodities accounted for more than half the nation's exports, and the plantations themselves were important markets for the products of northern industry (Morrison, 89).
In the 1840's and 1850's the South was a great deal richer than the North, primarily due to the exports of cotton, tobacco, rice, sugar, corn, wheat, and indigo. Living agriculturally, they depended on slave labor to work the fields. Good prices could be obtained by the export of these products, especially cotton that was produced inexpensively due to the invention of the cotton gin, and profits were high. The South believed that without the institution of slavery, the great staple products of the region would cease to be grown, and the immense annual results which gave
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