Slavery and Northeastern Industrialization

From the 1820s through the 1850s, parts of New England began industrializing. Over the same period, slavery expanded in the southern states in terms of the number enslaved, the geography it encompassed, and the amount each enslaved worker produced. While many scholars have looked at the connections between northern industrialization and southern slavery, it is our aim in this paper to better identify the links between these two crucial developments in our nation’s history by estimating the importance of the southern market for northern textiles – the key manufacturing industry during the early antebellum period. As we will see, the South was a crucial market for cotton textiles produced in America’s first factories.