King Cotton?

Andrew Sullivan at the Daily Dish points out this fascinating map that overlays areas of high cotton production with the county results from the 2008 election. Each black dot represents a location producing over 2000 bales of cotton in 1860, just before the Civil War.

The link between these two maps is not causal, but correlational, and the correlation is African-Americans. Once they were the slaves on whom the cotton economy had to rely for harvesting. Despite an outward migration towards the Northern cities, their settlement pattern now still closely corresponds to that of those days.