Thanks for the graphic. very instructional. I do not believe that it proves your argument. Consider this, how much of the cotton growing area east of west Texas was actually planted in cotton. Just because cotton will grow in an area does not mean that cotton is being grown there. Some of the land just could not be used, swamps, bayous etc. Someone had to grow food, and that takes land. Some of the cotton growing area had been under cultivation for decades. What condition were the fields in those area, soil depletion would reduce the output and at some time the fields may be abandoned. Edwin Ruffin was experimenting with crop rotation at his plantation on the James River. Some of the things that he learned could help revitalize those worn out depleted fields. Obliviously the cotton growing region in West Texas would not be available for some years. The Confederate Army had to force the Kiowa and Comanche’s to abandon the area. Then fairly lengthy roads or railroads had to be built to get the cotton to the Gulf Coast or to the closest rivers connecting to the Mississippi. I could easily see another twenty or more years where cotton would be the premier crop in the South. So for that period of time, little of that money available would have gone to industrialization. That shift would have started the output of cotton started to drop and the value of the exports dropped due to completion from India, Egypt and Brazil. You are substantially correct when you say that cotton agriculture would be replaced as the South/s economic base. The question is how long would the planters hold on to the past and embrace a future that was not based on the production of cotton. In my opinion Cotton would remain king in the South for another twenty years
I have not shown this to you before? I've used that map countless times, and I thought you had seen it.
I do not believe that it proves your argument.
Maybe not conclusively, but it certainly tends to move the "burden of proof" over to the side that argues plantation slavery was a threat to the territories.
I was going to compare modern crop prices in Kansas, but after looking at the data, I decided that was going to be too much work to get it right. Corn would have to be excluded, because it's value is skewed due to Federal mandates for Ethanol.
I would think Farmers will grow what is easiest and most profitable, and they just don't grow much cotton in Kansas, and none in any state above it.
Some of the cotton growing area had been under cultivation for decades.
The Confederate states are still growing it in the same places they have been growing it for centuries. The most valuable crop in Georgia still appears to be Cotton. Same thing in Texas and Alabama.
The question is how long would the planters hold on to the past and embrace a future that was not based on the production of cotton. In my opinion Cotton would remain king in the South for another twenty years
I have been estimating between 20 and 80 years longer, based on the appearance of the first practical cotton picking machine. The social pressure would have never abated, and so practicality might have eventually taken a back seat.
There really are too many factors for the human mind to juggle easily. The period at which they would have given it up would be the conjunction of "comfort wealth" achieved, and the level of social opprobrium tolerable.
My theory on rich people is that they like to hob nob with those whom they consider their peers, and the High Society of New York and Washington would have always been the "in" crowd in whose circles the Southern "Aristocrats" would have wanted to mingle.
Charles Dickens comments in his book, "American Notes", that many of the younger high society class in the South wanted out of Slavery, and were quite embarrassed about having inherited it, but they were also faced with the economic reality, and thus a conundrum. Dickens shows them little sympathy and extols them to simply make an end of it.
This discontent and the social pariah condition would have worked on them over time, and it would have been a steady pressure bothering them away from Slavery.
I've studied the very beginnings of the Abolition movement, and I am quite certain that Thomas Jefferson is most responsible for giving it a massive boost. If you track the geography of abolition, you realize it is a growth pattern over time, encountering resistance where practical economics pushed back more strongly against the moral pressure.
But extrapolation indicates that it would have eventually marched through the whole system.