Chapter 12: Cotton is King: The Antebellum South, 1800–1860
Key Terms
- antebellum
- a term meaning “before the war” and used to describe the decades before the American Civil War began in 1861
- cash crop
- a crop grown to be sold for profit instead of consumption by the farmer’s family
- concurrent majority
- a majority of a separate region (that would otherwise be in the minority of the nation) with the power to veto or disallow legislation put forward by a hostile majority
- cotton boom
- the upswing in American cotton production during the nineteenth century
- cotton gin
- a device, patented by Eli Whitney in 1794, that separated the seeds from raw cotton quickly and easily
- domestic slave trade
- the trading of enslaved people within the borders of the United States
- Ostend Manifesto
- the secret diplomatic memo stating that if Spain refused to sell Cuba to the United States, the United States was justified in taking the island as a national security measure
- paternalism
- the premise that southern White slaveholders acted in the best interests of those they enslaved
- polygenism
- the idea that Black and White people come from different origins
- second middle passage
- the internal forced migration of enslaved people to the South and West in the United States
