THE COTTON REGIME It would be hard to overestimate the predominance of the special crops in the industry and interest of the Southern community.

For good or ill they have shaped its development from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.
Each characteristic area had its own staple, and those districts which had none were scorned by all typical Southern men.

The several areas expanded and contracted in response to fluctuations in the relative prices of their products.

Thus when cotton was exceptionally high in the early 'twenties many Virginians discarded tobacco in its favor for a few years,[1] and on the Louisiana lands from Baton Rouge to Alexandria, the planters from time to time changed from sugar to cotton and back again.[2] There were local variations also in scale and intensity; but in general the system in each area tended to be steady and fairly uniform.

The methods in the several staples, furthermore, while necessarily differing in their details, were so similar in their emphasis upon routine that each reinforced the influence of the others in shaping the industrial organization of the South as a whole.
[Footnote 1: _Richmond Compiler_, Nov.