[central_va]

You’ve seen “Gone With The Wind” to many times....

[BroJoeK]

central_va: "You’ve seen “Gone With The Wind” to many times...."

Hardly, but it turns out that in some (not all) parts of the South, the movie was not completely inaccurate.

My main source here is James Huston's 2003 book "Calculating the Value of Union -- Slavery, Property Rights and the Economic Origins of the Civil War".

Huston presents data from the 1860 census and makes the case that Southerners generally, and the Deep South especially, were far better off economically than is usually understood.
Indeed, they were better off, on average, than their Northern cousins.

Reasons include the two most important economic aspects of slavery:

1. Slaves produced huge incomes from cash crops like cotton and tobacco exported internationally, and

2. Values for slaves themselves rose correspondingly over all those years -- such that by 1860 slaves represented nearly half of all Southern wealth (second only to the land itself).
   Those rising slave values meant, just like rising home prices today, that owners could take out "slave-equity" loans, just as we might take out "home-equity" loans.

So slave-equity owners could afford to live well, just so long as economic demand for slaves increased and slave prices continued to rise.
But any threat against the South's economy would cause its whole house to come tumbling down, and that, truly, is what motivated Deep South slave-holders' secession in 1860.