> The slave South couldn't even make shoes In part because they didn’t need to, they could just buy them and other goods the from the north/Europe and focus on

> The slave South couldn't even make shoes In part because they didn’t need to, they could just buy them and other goods the from the north/Europe and focus on the production of cotton which was more profitable and lucrative (the Northern states didn’t have that option). The pre civil war economy was highly specialized and interlinked, the Northeast benefited massively from slavery and cotton exports which brought in large amounts of capital and credit to the country which in part made industrialization possible. > History shows that free people outproduce slaves by a wide margin. Running an industrial slave economy has been tried a few times, with dismal results. That doesn’t seem true at all and in fact the complete opposite if we focus on preindustrial agriculture. Slaves were much more productive at producing cash crops like cotton or especially sugar cane than free people.