Assignment task: Cotton and Slavery
Instructions:
In the decades following the War of Independence, many Americans, in both the North and the South, assumed that slavery in the United States would slowly die out. It was already clear that slavery was becoming economically less viable parts of the South, and that trend was expected to continue. The advent of large-scale cotton cultivation in the early nineteenth century, however, changed everything. Assess the impact of large-scale cotton cultivation on the institution of slavery. What connections can you draw between cotton and the expansion of slavery? Between cotton and the territorial expansion of the United States?