No one seriously doubts that the enormous economic stake the South had in its slave labor force was a major factor in the sectional disputes that erupted in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Thanks.
Recently toured a state park antebellum mansion here in FL. Prior to the war it was a not very successful sugar plantation.
I wish I could remember the numbers, but one fact stuck in my mind. The value of the 100 or so slaves was about 10x the combined value of the land, the (very large) plantation house, the sugar mill and machinery, etc.
Extrapolate that out across the South, and you find the value of the slaves was equivalent to or perhaps larger than all other capital assets in the South combined.
The South had spent decades sinking its capital investment into slaves in preference to all other investments. Up through 1860 this made excellent financial sense. But during the war all that capital just vanished, which was quite beside all the physical destruction wreaked and the drop in value of land and other assets suddenly without a dedicated labor force to work it.
Our present financial tailspin represents something like a 10% drop in value of all American capital investment. What do you think would happen with a similar drop of 50% to 75%?
I don’t know what the actual numbers were, but they were horrific. The South went from a per capita (white) income of about 2x the rest of the country to an economic basket case, from which status it has climbed only in recent decades. It still lags behind much of the country in many economic indicators.