in 1790, which equated to approximately 18 percent of the total population, or roughly one in every six people. There were almost 700,000 enslaved persons in the U.S. In the 18th century, the Atlantic slave trade brought enslaved Africans to the South during the colonial period as a source of labor for the harvesting of crops. This phenomenon has continued to influence racism, gender roles, and religious attitudes in the South, and to a lesser extent the rest of the country, to the present day. In the years that followed, this period was romanticized by historical revisionists to protect three central assertions: that the Confederate cause was heroic, that enslaved people were happy and satisfied, and that slavery was not the primary cause of the war. Wealth inequality grew as the larger landholders took the greater share of the profits generated by slaves, which also helped to entrench their power as a political class.Īs the country expanded westward, slavery's propagation became a major issue in national politics, eventually boiling over into the Civil War.
Consequently the manufacturing base lagged behind the non-slave states. Society was stratified, inegalitarian, and perceived by immigrants as lacking in opportunities. The economy was largely plantation based, and dependent on exports. As the era proceeded, Southern leaders gradually shifted from portraying slavery as an embarrassing and temporary system, to a defense of slavery as a positive good, and harshly criticized the nascent abolitionist movement. The Antebellum South was characterized by the use of slavery and the culture it fostered. In the history of the Southern United States, the Antebellum Period (from Latin: ante bellum, lit.' before the war') spanned the end of the War of 1812 to the start of the American Civil War in 1861.
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