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... though agriculture thrived in the South, planters focused on cash crops like tobacco and cotton and did not produce enough food to feed the southern population.

Without gold and without banks, the Confederacy did the only thing it could: it printed money. Lots and lots of money. However, it could not do much to collect taxes to support this huge printing effort because the Confederate Constitution forbade the central government from imposing taxes on the states, and left it up to each individual state to tax its citizens. As in the American Revolution decades before, states collected little money and, thus, the Confederacy was left nearly broke.

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The Confederate government levied taxes in 1864

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, but by that time it was too late to do much good. With money flooding the market, its value fell dramatically, and horrendous inflation dogged the Confederate war effort from beginning to end.

Still searching for ways to gather more money, the federal government introduced the first income tax in 1862, and the Bureau of Internal Revenue, later known as the IRS, was established. All of this worked relatively well, and the Union dealt with a rate of inflation that never topped 80% per year, while the South suffered a rate that reached 9,000% by the end of the war

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Most Southern white families did not own slaves: only about 384,000 out of 1.6 million did. Of those who did own slaves, most (88%) owned fewer than 20 slaves, and were considered farmers rather than planters. Slaves were concentrated on the large plantations of about 10,000 big planters, on which 50-100 or more slaves worked. About 3,000 of these planters owned more than 100 slaves, and 14 of them owned over 1,000 slaves.

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In Congress, Southern Representatives and Senators were concerned that their interests would not be suitably addressed. As immigrants flocked to the Northern areas, swelling the ranks, Southerners were afraid the Northern states would increase their representation in the House of Representatives, blocking "Southern-friendly" legislation. The interests of Southern Americans who were African Americans, however, did not seem to concern a large number of Southern Congressmen. By the late 1850s, the fear of Northern domination in national economic policy, combined with the desire to maintain Southern institutions (including slavery), became a major influence on the people who eventually chose to secede from the Union

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The Union had more than double the population of the Confederacy (including slaves)

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What did the Confederacy hope to accomplish by seceding from the Union? The clearest goal was to defend and preserve the right of Southern Whites, including the right to own slaves. While the concept of owning another human being would obviously be a moral and criminal issue today; many slaveowners either ignored or tried to justify their way out of that dimension, focusing on the economic aspects of slavery. They held that the right to own people was a property right, just like owning land or buildings. Thus, when Northern politicians tried to ensure that new states admitted to the Union were "free-soil" (i.e., that no slavery was allowed), slaveowners felt that their right to settle in the West with their "property," including slaves, was being infringed. In addition, in the minds of secessionists, the threat of national abolition not only had the potential of reducing the wealth of many prominent Southerners, but also interfered with the "property" rights of Southern Whites. Thus, secession seemed to be the only way of preserving those rights.

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...the image of the large plantations and elegant Scarlet O'Hara-esque Southern belles sipping mint juleps was applicable to only a small minority of southern farms

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In addition to reducing millions of Americans to the status of chattel, it made it very difficult for non-landed, unskilled Whites to succeeded in the face of labor competition from slaves.

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By the time of the Civil War, an extensive railroad system had been built, with new lines through the Northwest being added. In the South, disputes between states prevented the construction of interstate railroad systems.

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