Initially regarded as an awkward and temporary institution, it gradually evolved into a defended concept, with proponents arguing for its positive merits, while simultaneously vehemently opposing the burgeoning abolitionist movement.

Wealth inequality grew as the larger landholders took the greater share of the profits generated by enslaved persons, which also helped to entrench their power as a political class.

As the country expanded westward, slavery's propagation became a major issue in national politics, eventually boiling over into the Civil War.

[3] This phenomenon has continued to the present day to contribute to racism, gender roles, and religious attitudes in the South, and to a lesser extent the rest of the country.

[4][5] 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.

Suddenly, cotton could be processed more cheaply and efficiently, resulting in slavery becoming very profitable and a large plantation system developing to support the expanding industry.

[7] The Antebellum South saw large expansions in agriculture during the early 19th century, spurred on by increased demand for cotton for the new textile factories of the industrial North.

The leading historian of the era was Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, who studied slavery not so much as a political issue between North and South, but as a social and economic system.

In The Decadence of the Plantation System (1910), he argued that slavery was an unprofitable relic that persisted because it produced social status, honor, and political power.

[12] His conclusions about the economic decline of slavery were challenged in 1958 by Alfred H. Conrad and John R. Meyer in a landmark study published in the Journal of Political Economy.

[13] Their arguments were further developed by Robert Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, who argued in their 1974 book, Time on the Cross, that slavery was both efficient and profitable, as long as the price of cotton was high enough.

With the exception of New Orleans, Charleston, and Richmond the slave states had no large cities, and the urban population of the South could not compare to that of the Northeast, or even that of the agrarian West.

In the 16th and 17th centuries under mercantilism, rulers of nations believed that the accumulation of wealth through a favorable balance of trade was the best way to ensure power.

As Russell Menard puts it, Britain's capitalizing on increased European demand for these crops "fueled the expansion of the American plantation colonies, transformed the Atlantic into an English inland sea, and led to the creation of the first British Empire."

[16] Ulrich Bonnell Phillips contends that the plantation "sadly restricted the opportunity of such men as were of better industrial quality than was required for the field gangs."