The Cotton Route: North, South and Slavery in the 1850s

One Bale, Two Economies

1In the 1850s, the North and the South had very different economies, but one crop tied them together: cotton. This passage follows a bale of cotton along the route on the map, from a plantation near Natchez to the mills where it became cloth.

2The journey began with forced labor. On the plantation, enslaved men, women and children planted, weeded and picked the cotton under the watch of overseers. They were not paid, and they could be bought and sold, which meant families could be separated at any time. By 1860 nearly 4 million people were enslaved in the United States, most of them in the states that later formed the Confederacy. About three of every four white Southern families did not enslave anyone, but planters who held many people owned much of the South's best land and wealth.

3After picking, the cotton went through a cotton gin, a machine that pulls out the seeds. Eli Whitney's gin, built in 1793, made cleaning cotton much faster. Planters soon spread cotton growing west into Alabama, Mississippi and Texas, wherever the long, hot growing season allowed. Historians estimate that about one million enslaved people were forced to move from older states such as Virginia to these new cotton lands between 1790 and 1860. Workers pressed the cleaned cotton into bales of roughly 400 pounds each.

4Steamboats carried the bales down the Mississippi River to New Orleans, the South's busiest port. There, merchants sold the cotton to buyers. Many of those merchants borrowed money from banks in New York, and ships owned in Northern ports often carried the cotton away. Much of the crop crossed the Atlantic to Liverpool, where it fed Britain's huge textile mills. By 1860, cotton made up more than half of the value of everything the United States sold to other countries.

5Other bales went to New York City and then to mill towns in New England, such as Fall River. There, water- and steam-powered machines spun and wove the cotton into cloth. Mill workers, many of them young women and immigrants from Ireland, earned wages, often low ones, and could quit to look for other work. Northern factories also made shoes, tools, plows and clocks. Some of this cloth and these goods were shipped south and sold to planters, including rough cloth used to clothe enslaved workers.

6The North still had many farms. Most Northerners in 1860 lived in the countryside, and farm families in states such as Ohio and Illinois sold wheat, corn and pork to growing cities. But the North had far more factories, railroads and large cities than the South. Many Southern planters put their profits into more land and more enslaved workers rather than into factories, and many Southern leaders argued that cotton made the South strong. Meanwhile, Northern merchants, bankers and mill owners also earned money from cotton grown by enslaved people.