Differences Between The Upper South And Lower South

During the early to mid-19th century, the Upper South and Lower South are similar in the ways that they depend on slave labor for economic reasons. However, they differ through the environments they are located in, and the way they deal with the ideology of racism. Therefore, the Upper South and the Lower South are more different than they are similar, but the ideology of racism transformed the Antebellum South as a whole.
Both the Upper South and the Lower South were undeniably dependent on slave labor to make profits. Even though the Upper South’s crop changed from Tobacco - which needed heavy slave labor all the time- to grains, they continued to rely on slavery during the planting and harvest season. In the Lower South, the Cotton Revolution led to a change in how a person’s economic status was made/changed. This change depended on the amount of cotton produced by slave labor. That meant that the more slaves a person had, the more cotton they could process and sell, and the more wealth that person gained. Thus, the Upper South and Lower South were similar in the ways/reasons why they depended on slavery in their lives. …show more content…
The Upper South was mountainous, which is why their main crops were grains and why that led them to depend on slavery comparably less than the other region. The Lower South was mostly a tidewater region with “black and brown loam soils[,] .... lush river valleys… [and] red clay upland portions” (Ford). Because of this kind of terrain, cotton was the main cash crop and it became the crop that was spread to the frontier too. These environmental reasons led to many more differences like the difference in cash crops produced in the two regions. That is why the environments of the Upper and Lower South support the fact that the two regions are more different than similar to each