Most of the opposition to the Tariff of Abominations came from cotton-growing regions—and thus, those dependent on slavery. Slavery had long existed in North America, but by the time of the Revolution the growth of the "peculiar institution" appeared to have been checked. Yet as the eighteenth century drew to a close, a boom in cotton cultivation in the South increased the demand for cheap labor and precipitated slavery's resurgence. In 1793 only 3,000 bales of cotton were produced in the United States. In 1800 output reached
100,000 bales, roughly 500 million pounds; then, there were
Fewer than a million slaves in the United States, and by the 1820s annual production was averaging more than
400,000 bales. This was only the beginning. Output exceeded 1 million bales in the mid-1830s and nearly 4 million by 1860.
This growth required a huge expansion of the area where cotton was grown. First, cotton took over the fertile Appalachian Piedmont in a band running from southern Virginia into Georgia. Then it spread westward across central Alabama and Mississippi and into the rich alluvial soil of the banks of the Mississippi River, in a broad band from Tennessee and Arkansas to southern Louisiana. Finally, in the 1840s and 1850s, the crop spread into the eastern sections of Texas.
The westward expansion of cotton cultivation served to exacerbate an inherently bad institution. Planters in the upper South increasingly sold their "surplus"slaves to the more fertile lands in the Mississippi delta, Alabama, and East Texas.
World History
