Deep South

Founded when English planters from Barbados settled the Carolina Lowcountry (1670) and carried a fully-formed West Indian slave-plantation system across the Gulf and the lower Mississippi. Its rice, indigo and then cotton economy rested on enslaved labour on a scale that made much of the region demographically majority-enslaved by 1860. The most hierarchical of the founding cultures, governed by a planter elite — the structural core of secession in 1861.

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