USA HISTORY

Detailed explanation-1: -With cash crops of tobacco, cotton and sugar cane, America’s southern states became the economic engine of the burgeoning nation. Their fuel of choice? Human slavery. If the Confederacy had been a separate nation, it would have ranked as the fourth richest in the world at the start of the Civil War.

Detailed explanation-2: -The northern economy relied on manufacturing and the agricultural southern economy depended on the production of cotton. The desire of southerners for unpaid workers to pick the valuable cotton strengthened their need for slavery.

Detailed explanation-3: -Plantation economies rely on the export of cash crops as a source of income. Prominent crops included cotton, rubber, sugar cane, tobacco, figs, rice, kapok, sisal, and species in the genus Indigofera, used to produce indigo dye.

Detailed explanation-4: -By the early 1800s, cotton emerged as the South’s major cash crop-a good produced for commercial value instead of for use by the owner. Cotton quickly eclipsed tobacco, rice, and sugar in economic importance.