<p>No. an author. This material is published in one of my books:</p>
<p>"The situation in the southern part of what was to become the United States was quite different from that in the North, in many ways having more in common with the West Indies than with the northern colonies. (In fact, South Carolina was founded by English slave-planter colonists from Barbados.) Their economies were similar to what would have been found in Third World countries in the last century. Imports consisted mainly of slaves and luxury goods for the owners of the plantations, who performed no useful labor themselves. In contrast to the northern colonies and states, exports consisted entirely of raw agricultural commodities, primarily tobacco, indigo, rice, and cotton. Children were sent away to school, if they were to be educated at all.</p>
<p>Wealth was a product of three factors: fertility of the land, the ability to extract wealth at the lowest possible cost in labor, and the prices paid for agricultural commodities in foreign markets (including the newly mechanized, highly efficient, and very profitable weaving mills, producing what was often called Negro cloth, in the North.) Again, in contrast with the North, virtually no industry of any real consequence existed in the southern colonies (and, later, states) until the Civil War. Technology was a double-edged sword: the invention of the cotton gin made it possible to process raw cotton more quickly and with less labor, but it did not enhance acreage yields, and so more acreage might now be devoted to cotton production, but at the risk of depressing prices. The main beneficiaries were the cloth industries and merchants of the North, who had the options of maintaining the cost of finished goods, or flooding markets with cheaper ones.</p>
<p>In the meantime, the land itself began to give out. Charles Ball, the African-American author of the longest and most detailed slave narrative of the antebellum South , notes that as he was driven south from Maryland in 1805 (finally to arrive in Georgia, from where he twice escaped), he saw whole areas of Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina exhausted and depopulated, with large old family mansions, of weather-beaten and neglected appearance, standing in the middle of vast fields of many hundred acres, the fences of which have rotted away. He indicates that once-proud tobacco and indigo plantations of 200 slaves were reduced to ruins, with all that was left being the owners and seven or eight slaves. The owners were now in as poor a state as the slaves themselves, until the later were sold for the subsistence of the former, and the owners fled to Kentucky or Alabama to play out the sordid ecological drama again. I am convinced, Ball writes, that in nine cases in ten, the hardships and sufferings of the coloured population of lower Virginia is attributable to the poverty and distress of its owners. In short, an economy dependent upon slaveholding could and did leave slave owners destitute, as Jefferson himself a renowned spendthrift – was so painfully to find out. The third President died a pauper, with huge, unpaid debts for which all but five of his remaining 105 slaves were sold off, even while northern banks and merchants continued to benefit from low agricultural prices made possible by slave labor. </p>
<p>After the traffic in foreign slaves was outlawed in 1807, approximately one million slaves from states that produced less cotton (Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas) were sold or kidnapped to states that produced more (Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas). As the fertility of the land continued to decline, the value of slaves soared as they were the only mechanism by which more could be gotten out of the land. By 1860, the capital investment in the four million slaves in the South exceeded the value of all other capital worth in the southern states, including the land itself."</p>