Questions to Consider:
1) How did the rise of cotton cultivation affect the geographical distribution of population and the economy of the Old South? How did northerners’ image of the Old South differ from the way in which southerners saw themselves?
2) What major social divisions segmented the white South?
3) How did slavery affect social relations in the white South? Why did non-slaveholding whites come to see their futures as bound up with the survival of slavery?
4) What conditions in the Old South made it possible for a distinctive culture to develop among the slaves, and what were the predominant features of that culture?