That I completely believe. That makes perfect sense and dovetails with my understanding of the era. The only thing surprising is that they are only 3 times more wealthy. I would have thought it would have been much more than that.
Yes, the Southern plantation owners viewed themselves as a wealthy "Aristocracy", and they tended to act like it too. (Arrogant)
So when our FRiends DiogenesLamp and jeffersondem argue that Civil War was all about economics, there are such numbers to point at.
How do these numbers rebut my point? The North stood to lose the bulk of European trade to an Independent South. This means the direct loss of the existing trade (something like 250 million dollars per year) and potential economic competition with the South in supplying the Midwestern states with goods and services.
The potential losses to the North were huge, and that doesn't speak to the other threat of additional states being lured into the Confederacy by economic benefits derived from association with it.
Remember, this compares averages to averages, and those include non-slave-holding Southerners.
In states like South Carolina & Mississippi about half of families owned slaves and the vast majority of them fewer than five.
But all participated in the general prosperity, in which slaves themselves were claimed to be better off than Northern industrial workers.
And at the top were large plantation owners with hundreds of slaves & thousands of acres in cotton.
Yes, they were relatively few, however their wealth increased not just the averages, but also living standards for non-plantation owners.
DiogenesLamp: "How do these numbers rebut my point?
North stood to lose the bulk of European trade...
These numbers demonstrate that any suggestion the South was "oppressed" or "impoverished" by tyrannical Northern government is just nonsense.
In fact, 1860 whites in the Deep South especially were better off, on average, than any other people in history to that that time.
For today's analogy, think Saudi Arabia or Emirates.
DiogenesLamp: "... potential economic competition with the South in supplying the Midwestern states with goods and services.
The potential losses to the North were huge, and that doesn't speak to the other threat of additional states being lured into the Confederacy by economic benefits derived from association with it."
Because the Confederate Constitution mandated slavery, there was no possibility non-slave states would ever join.
That leaves Border slave-states (Delaware, Maryland, western Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri) and they all voted against secession.
During the war all supplied troops to both sides but on the order of two or three Union for every one Confederate.
So slavery was not popular in Border slave-states.
Bottom line, that means without Civil War the Confederacy is just the seven original Deep South states, yes wealthy almost beyond imagination, but as potentially vulnerable as, say, oil-rich Persian Gulf countries are today.
So, again, could the Union get along without $200 million in cotton exports?
Well, we already know the answer because that's just what happened in 1861 - 1865.
Turns out the Union got along just fine without Deep South cotton.