I think equating factories with plantations and industrial capital with slaves is what we call a “category error.” They are different economic units. The more useful comparisons would be of Northern vs. Southern farms and Northern vs. Southern factories. Compare output, productivity of capital and labor inputs, production diversity, etc.
I wasn’t trying to equate the northern and southern economies. Your points are well taken in the comparison of slave vs. non-slave economics. My point was rather that there were incidental factors that contributed to the lack of industrial progress of the south. In comparison to the north, the south languished economically long after the abolition of slavery. One of the factors was climate; it was just too hot and muggy.
Before and during World War 2, the south was a reservoir of labor for northern industrial plants. That reservoir migrated north, and was both blacks and whites. While you have the black migration recently celebrated in books such as “Warmth of Other Suns,” white migration was just as important. For example, Firestone built a war plant in one of our local communities. The labor force was largely obtained by shipping people here from one rural Virginia county along the Kentucky border. Those people gave the community much of its hillbilly character. There is a reason they built the factory here in Indiana instead of where the labor was.
Develop widespread air conditioning in the 1970s, and voila! You have economic and industrial activity in the south.
Sure, but the claim is made, erroneously, that in 1860 the US South was some kind of "backwater", less advanced, less industrious and less prosperous than Northerners.
I'm here to argue that simply is not the case.
In fact, by 1860 Southerners had simply responded for decades to the most compelling economic opportunities available to them: producing cotton, tobacco, rice, sugar and other agricultural products for global export, including "export" to Northern states.
These exports were hugely significant to not only the Southern economy, but also the entire US economy.
That's because they paid for the imports on which our Federal Government collected tariffs, which tariffs were over 90% of its income at the time.
So exports helped make Southerners, especially Deep South cotton producers, the most prosperous people on earth at the time, measurably better off than their average Northern cousins -- if you consider their huge investments in slaves.
Let me suggest, if you fail to grasp the significance of antebellum Southern prosperity, then you have no clue as to why they were so, so adamant to protect, defend and expand it.
I know the following is still a few years in the future, but perfectly expresses how most Deep South Southerners felt throughout the antebellum period: