An instructive place to begin is to look at the numbers of African-American slaves. The ownership of black slaves began in 1654. By 1780, the number of slaves was 694,307. 70 years later, when the issues that would lead to the Civil War began to explode across the nation, the number of slaves was 3,200,600. (In 1840, the number was 2.4 million, so this represents a rapid increase.) Of course the main reason was the Industrial Revolution in England created a need for American cotton, and cotton was based upon a labor of slavery. Though other plantation crops were also considered "slave crops" (rice in South Carolina, sugar in Lousiana and Florida, tobacco in Virginia and North Carolina), the overwhelming plantation crop was cotton. As James Hammond of Virginia put it in a famous speech in 1857, "Cotton is king."Here are the numbers of slaves for each state in 1850. If I don't list a state here, it effectively had no slaves:Virginia 472,528South Carolina 384,984Georgia 381,682Alabama 342,844Mississippi 309,878North Carolina 288,548Louisiana 244,809Kentucky 210,681Maryland 90,368Missouri 87,322Texas 58,161Arkansas 47,100Florida 39,310Delaware 2,290New Jersey 236Wisconsin 4With the exception of Virginia, the bulk of slaves were located in the deep South, (South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi): the cotton country. Virginia had the most slaves because it also had the most people in the South. Richmond remained the key city for trade and commerce, although by 1850 Charleston and Atlanta were in some competition for this. But it's important to note that Virginia slave owners, beginning around 1830 or so, made a good chunk of their money breeding slaves and selling them south to work in the larger plantations, usually at incredibly high prices. The reason that the slave trade from Africa was abolished earlier in the century was that Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina joined the northern states in supporting this, because they saw selling slaves as a form of income. There was also friction therefore between the lower South, which wanted a resumption of the slave trade in order to compete with Virginia, and the upper South, which desired to protect their own source of income. This dispute would come to a head and create problems with the formation of the Confederacy.With regard to the numbers of slaves in the "border" and western states, those numbers are extremely significant to the narrative and we will discuss that in detail later on.