By 1831 the South supplied nearly half the world’s raw cotton

Evidence

As slave-labor camps spread throughout the South, cotton production surged. By 1831, the country was delivering nearly half the world’s raw cotton crop, with 350 million pounds picked that year. Just four years later, it harvested 500 million pounds. Southern white elites grew rich, as did their counterparts in the North, who erected textile mills to form, in the words of Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, an “unhallowed alliance between the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 560

Categorization

• CANDY: The Sumner quote ‘unhallowed alliance between the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom’ is a memorable, tweetable line about North-South economic interdependence.