Interesting.
Assuming the numbers are more or less accurate, the value of the slaves alone (not counting the value of their production) was 3x the capital invested in the overpoweringly dominant industrial sector located largely in the North.
/s
The South was indeed oppressed and exploited after the War, and I believe people tend to move this oppression back in time and assume it was the same before the War.
But the truth is, as has been pointed out on this thread several times, that the South was actually dominant and rebelled because of seeing the writing on the wall that this dominance was ending, not because of intolerable oppression.
I am always amused by those who repeat the canard that the South seceded to resist expansion of federal power, when the actual issue that broke apart the Democratic Party, the last institution joining the sections, was a demand for expansion of federal power.
The southern delegates demanded that the Party add to its platform planks insisting that northern state laws giving fugitive slaves something resembling due process be repealed, and that a federal slave code impose slavery throughout the territories, using federal troops to protect the institution against the wishes of the inhabitants if necessary.
Hmmmmm.... I had not read that, do you have a source?
Surely what those "fire eaters" wanted -- who walked out of the first Democrat convention in Charleston, in April 1860 -- they got in their platform, in the rump Democrat convention, in Richmond in June?
Did Breckenridge's platform include the planks you just mentioned?