1845 the price started on a steady rise, which, except for the checks suffered during the continental revolutions and the Crimean War, continued until 1860.[4] The steady increase in the production of cotton explains the fall in price down to 1845.  In 1822 the crop was a half-million bales; in 1831, a million; in 1838, a million and a half; and in 1840-1843, two million.  By this time the world’s consumption of cotton goods began to increase so rapidly that, in spite of the increase in Southern crops, the price kept rising.  Three million bales were gathered in 1852, three and a half million in 1856, and the remarkable crop of five million bales in 1860.[5]

Here we have data to explain largely the economic development of the South.  By 1822 the large-plantation slave system had gained footing; in 1838-1839 it was able to show its power in the cotton “corner;” by the end of the next decade it had not only gained a solid economic foundation, but it had built a closed oligarchy with a political policy.  The changes in price during the next few years drove out of competition many survivors of the small-farming free-labor system, and put the slave regime in position to dictate the policy of the nation.  The zenith of the system and the first inevitable signs of decay came in the years 1850-1860, when the rising price of cotton threw the whole economic energy of the South into its cultivation, leading to a terrible consumption of soil and slaves, to a great increase in the size of plantations, and to increasing power and effrontery on the part of the slave barons.  Finally, when a rising moral crusade conjoined with threatened economic disaster, the oligarchy, encouraged by the state of the cotton market, risked all on a political coup-d’etat, which failed in the war of 1861-1865.[6]

75. The Attitude of the South. The attitude of the South toward the slave-trade changed pari passu with this development of the cotton trade.  From 1808 to 1820 the South half wished to get rid of a troublesome and abnormal institution, and yet saw no way to do so.  The fear of insurrection and of the further spread of the disagreeable system led her to consent to the partial prohibition of the trade by severe national enactments.  Nevertheless, she had in the matter no settled policy:  she refused to support vigorously the execution of the laws she had helped to make, and at the same time she acknowledged the theoretical necessity of these laws.  After 1820, however, there came a gradual change.  The South found herself supplied with a body of slave laborers, whose number had been augmented by large illicit importations, with an abundance of rich land, and with all other natural facilities for raising a crop which was in large demand and peculiarly adapted to slave labor.  The increasing crop caused a new demand for slaves, and an interstate slave-traffic arose between the Border and the Gulf States, which turned the former into slave-breeding districts, and bound them to the slave States by ties of strong economic interest.