Before the Civil War the South was one of the richest regions in the world, standing just behind Britain and the Northern states. More than half of the richest one percent of Americans were Southerners.
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Throughout colonial and antebellum history, U.S. slaves lived primarily in the South. Slaves comprised less than a tenth of the total Southern population in 1680 but grew to a third by 1790. At that date, 293,000 slaves lived in Virginia alone, making up 42 percent of all slaves in the U.S. at the time.