The Peculiar Institution

Peculiar Institution

The South and its Peculiar Institution

American history is at points the product of converging innovation and exploitation. In many instances, the growth and development of the American power as it stands today would occur at the expense of its participants. Examples of this are recurrent in the text by Maier et al. (2006), which reflects at numerous instances on the relationship between invention, expansion and, for many, oppression. This dynamic would most certainly serve to characterize the 'peculiar institution' known as slavery. For centuries, in fact, this would be the lifeblood of the southern economy, with plantation owners and farm operators laying claim to a labor economy without wage expenses.

How this system came to be, Maier et al. assert, is a complex matter owing to the international slave trade and the differing cultural development of the North and South United States. First and foremost, while the Northern New England states often played the role of broker in the slave triangle, the preponderance of plantations in the emergent southern colonies would make this the primary destination of those exported from Africa and the West Indies. Warmer climates and rainier seasons along with a great volume of arable terrain made the south inherently better suited to the rural development which the slave trade ultimately helped to facilitate.

And because the text by Maier et al. is contextualized by the impact of invention on the history of America, it bears noting that several play a direct role in the growth and continuity of this peculiar institution. First and foremost would be the methods of stationary farming which would evolve first with Native Americans and thereafter with the first settlers in the United States. Finding ways to use farmlands that were sustainable would drive economic growth for the first centuries of colonization. Therefore, the litany of contributions which Maier et al. describe as leading to the major cash crop plantation operations of the 18th and 19th centuries help to explain the early origins of a racialist slave labor system in the South.

This tract would be solidified, however, with the early 19th century invention of the cotton gin. As the text by Maier et al. assert, Eli Whitney's simple invention would have dramatic and transformative effects on American society. As the urban centers of the North turned increasingly to factory operations in the face of immigrant labor and the industrial revolution, the south coalesced around its agricultural identity. More particularly, the cotton gin had an exponential impact on the growth of the American South in world agricultural. In addition to tobacco, wheat and corn, it was now the world's leading provider of cotton. With the growth of demand by substantial marks in a decidedly short span of time, the Southern cotton boom directly paralleled a boom in the global slave trade.