North and South: two societies by 1840

Overview

What was meant by the phrase King Cotton and what free labour ideology meant to northerners.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   Describe the basis of the southern economy in the decades before the Civil War.

   Model answer

   It rested on commercial agriculture worked by enslaved labour, above all cotton, with tobacco, rice and sugar in older or coastal districts.

2. 2

   Why did cotton come to dominate the South after 1793?

   Model answer

   The cotton gin made it quick to separate the seed from short-staple cotton, so the crop could be grown profitably across the whole inland South and demand from British mills seemed limitless.

3. 3

   Roughly what share of American export earnings came from raw cotton by 1860?

   Model answer

   More than half, which is why southern leaders believed the world economy depended on them.

4. 4

   Explain what was meant by the phrase King Cotton.

   Model answer

   The southern claim that cotton was so essential to British and French industry that no great power would dare to act against the states that grew it.

5. 5

   How did the northern economy differ from the southern by the 1840s?

   Model answer

   The North combined family farming with factories, banking, shipping and a growing commercial network, so wage labour rather than slave labour was its normal form of work.

6. 6

   Explain what free labour ideology meant to northerners.

   Model answer

   The belief that a man who worked for wages could save, buy land or set up on his own account, so that labour led to independence rather than to permanent servitude.

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