[BroJoeK]

dangus: "I find this assertion about prices flatly contradicted by the data I can find.
While production increased sharply, prices were very stagnant, having collapsed prior to 1830 and remaining quite low until the Civil War created a shortage."

I plead guilty to quoting numbers from memory, never a good practice, so don't anybody else do it. ;-)

But since you asked, I'll quote you the actual numbers from page 21 of the book referenced above:

speaking of the South's constant struggle to make economic ends meet -- "...at midcentury [circa 1850], struggle largely vanished.
Cotton prices, sugar prices, tobacco prices shot up, despite extravagant increases in crop production..
The big southern cash crop, short-staple cotton, which had sold for some $74,000,000 a year in the 1840s, sold for some $169,000,000 yearly in the 1850s.
In the four years before the Civil War, the crop yearly averaged some $207,000,000 in value, almost three times more than the average figure a decade earlier.

"So too, in the 1850s compared to the 1840s, the Sea Island cotton crop increased 200 percent in value, the sugar crop 150 percent, and the tobacco crop 67 percent.
In comfortable contrast, the southern cost of living during the 1850s eased up less than 33 percent.

"Only those politically crucial gentlemen, South Carolina rice planters, still suffered under dreary economic skies.
These squire's debts had multiplied faster than their assets even in the 1820s, when rice yields and prices had remained more immune than cotton figures from the worldwide economic downturn.
In the 1850s, rice planters' immunity from market caprices and soil exhaustion ended...

"...Southerners developed almost 30,000,000 previously untouched acres during the 1850s, increasing the land under cultivation by over a third.
Southern farmland doubled in value during the decade, southern railroad lines more than tripled in length, and southern industrial receipts swelled 67 percent.
[Yes] Compared to the North, the South remained poorly developed industrially and ill connected by railroads.
But in the late 1850s, the rate of new development in Dixie surpassed Yankee standards.

"In one area, the South set records than Yankees scorned.
The price of slaves took off in the 1850s.
The average price for a Lower South slave, after hovering around $925 from 1830 to 1850, averaged $1,240 in 1851-55 and $1,658 in 1856-60, a 79 percent rise in the South's largest capital investment.

"After the national Panic of 1857, when the North fell into prolonged depression and the South quickly recovered, Southerners gloated about getting rich quicker than money-mad Yankees."

So, quoting those figures from memory, I don't think I did so badly, certainly getting the gist it correct -- in 1860 the Deep South was booming economically like never before, or since.
This is reflected in every important economic number from that period.

[dangus]

The Panic of 1857 is called a panic precisely because it was driven by finances, not macroeconomic trends; it's not that the South snapped back faster; it's that it wasn't directly affected.

Yeah, there's a modest increase in the 1850s, but nothing near enough to bring it up to previous historical norms. Calling that a 50% increase is misleading through cherry-picking data; it's true if you cherry-pick 1851 (7.4), but why not pick 1850 (11.7) or 1856(12.4)? So what's your source's agenda is cherry-picking data?