Reply #124: King Cotton.

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Though agrarian, the Southern slave economy boomed in the years between independence and civil war, pushing the slave population from around 300,000 in the 1780s to 4 million on the eve of the Civil War.

King Cotton is a great example of how capitalism can accommodate slave labor along side wage labor. Cotton was the essential raw material for the quintessentially capitalist commodity of the time: textiles produced in British factories for the world market.

Yet as you say when it came to war, the South was not ideally suited. The industrial base of the North gave the Federals a decisive edge.

But if the British and French had recognized the Confederacy and agreed to challenge the Federal blockade to get armaments to the South, then perhaps things would have been different. If the South's brilliant generals had had access to the proper war materials, the Confederacy would have probably gained its independence.