When the international slave trade was outlawed in 1808, the domestic slave trade exploded, providing economic opportunities for White people involved in many aspects of the trade and increasing the possibility of… Slave labor in the antebellum South generated great wealth for plantation owners.

In the years before the Civil War, the South produced the bulk of the world’s supply of cotton. The Mississippi River Valley slave states became the epicenter of cotton production, an area of frantic economic activity where the landscape changed dramatically as land was transformed from pinewoods and swamps into…

antebellum — a term meaning “before the war” and used to describe the decades before the American Civil War began in 1861. domestic slave trade — the trading of enslaved people within the borders of the United States. 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. 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.