Читать книгу American Civil War For Dummies - Keith D. Dickson - Страница 124

Agricultural resources include food for the population and their animals, as well as nonfood crops (dyes, tobacco, cotton, hemp, timber); they also include the numbers of animals available both for food and for transportation. The South, a predominantly agricultural society, produced some food crops, but, ironically, not the amount that Northern farms did. The reason for this was the heavy reliance on staple, or cash, crops — tobacco and cotton. “Cotton is King!” was the motto of the prewar South. Indeed, it was. The South’s money and wealth came from cotton and tobacco, not food crops. The Southern economy depended on being able to sell both cotton and tobacco on the international market. No other region of the nation, or the world for that matter, could grow these crops in abundance. It is not surprising, then, to see that economically, food production in peacetime was less important to the South than cotton and tobacco production. In wartime, however, it made a great difference.