[fso301]

plantations, organized in a business-like fashion with their “gang system,” had an assembly line-like efficiency. Hence Southern slavery was fantastically profitable.

Which meant in agriculture, you were either a slave owner, or a poor subsistence farmer unable to do much more than feed the family. This fundamental inequality IMO had much to do with the deterioration in race relations over the ~200 years that slavery had been legal.

The devastation throughout the South the carnage of the Civil War caused many of the same whites to mistakenly regard blacks as the cause of their suffering rather than the immorality of the antebellum system.

[Elsie]

Which meant in agriculture, you were either a slave owner, or a poor subsistence farmer unable to do much more than feed the family.

Oh?

How is it that El Norte managed to have farmers who did much better than this??