More than two decades before the Civil War, a planter in Edgefield, South Carolina, contemplated the languishing cotton prices and the plummeting value of his slaves—which by some accounts were worth less than a third of their value before the Panic of 1837.

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"Every day, I look forward to the future with more anxiety," James Henry Hammond confided to his diary in 1841. "Cotton is falling, falling never to rise again." But his fortunes did improve, and Hammond earned the admiration of influential South Carolinians, who eventually sent him to the U.S. Senate—where, during an 1858 debate with William Seward of New York, Hammond argued the South's agricultural riches could bring the world to its feet in event of war with the North. "What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years?" Hammond asked. "England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her. No, you dare not make war on cotton! No power on earth dares make war upon it. Cotton is King."

But if your image of the South's plantation economy is a refined, agrarian ideal that changed little in two-and-a-half centuries, before the loathsome Yankees put an end to it, well, that moonlight and magnolias picture isn't quite right.

In fact, the only constant in the South's plantation economy was change—as reflected in the way Hammond's fortunes varied over those 17 years. The South's crops evolved—from tobacco and indigo to rice and sugar and then, only relatively late in the game, to cotton.

The lands being farmed evolved—from coastal plains linked by rivers and bays, to interior regions connected by rail and canals.

The states with the most promising crops evolved—from the old Atlantic seaboard states of the Carolinas and Virginia, west and south to Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and eastern Texas.

And the labor evolved—from a situation where enslaved blacks and whites essentially were both pioneers struggling to eke out an existence in a new world, to a system of chattel slavery in which the slaves were as much an asset as the land.

As England struggled for its own foothold in the New World, one of the few surviving settlers from the London Company planted a powerful seed around 1612 in what is now Virginia's coastal plain. The tobacco John Rolfe planted wasn't the harsh strain grown by the natives, but a milder seed that Spanish colonists were growing in the Caribbean and South America.

Bad relations with the American Indians had plagued the colonists, who were struggling simply to keep themselves fed—much less earn the riches they had hoped to earn in this new land.

Rolfe's seed would change all that.

When the first of Rolfe's new tobacco crop was sold in London, the essential framework of the Southern plantation economy was put in place. The building blocks included colonists and planters eager for riches, seeds of crops from other places, a wealthy European market and a complicated gumbo of human relations that would breed both invention and cruelty.

Rolfe found good ways to grow and cure the Spanish tobacco, possibly with advice from his new bride, Pocahontas. Seven years after Rolfe first planted his tobacco, Jamestown had exported 10 tons of it to Europe. This luxury crop eventually gave colonists needed income to buy African slaves.

The tobacco not only increased the colonists' wealth, but the crown got its cut as well—a steady stream of income as the plant grew in popularity in London and beyond. At times, the colony had to force its residents to plant food.

Within three decades, Jamestown was shipping 750 tons of tobacco back across the Atlantic, making tobacco the largest export in the American colonies. But the crop wore out the soil, so there was a scramble across the Chesapeake Bay waterways for fresh, suitable lands.

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