Corn, not cotton, was antebellum America’s most valuable crop

Evidence

Cotton was not antebellum America’s most valuable agricultural commodity (corn was); nor did it account for a large share of the total national product. However, it did yield higher returns than other staple crops and, most important, utterly changed the economic landscape. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1843

Categorization

• CANDY: A genuinely counterintuitive one-liner: cotton wasn’t the most valuable crop, corn was — great dinner-party fact and instantly shareable.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: the passage concedes cotton wasn’t the top crop by value but claims it ‘utterly changed the economic landscape’ — I’d want the mechanism of how a second-ranked crop transforms an economy more than a top-ranked one.