As in my understanding the southern states dependence on slavery created a long term ineffecient reliance on manual labor in contrast to the Norths growing industrial capacity.
Did southern intelligenta try to defend slavery on economic terms?
I.e where there pro and anti slavery economist camps?
How did these exchanges/debates look like?
Where there prominent economic scholars that a modern reader could read about?
How did political bodies/parties/groups use or meet economic theories on slavery?
I haven’t come across any such bodies or debate in the South. I don’t believe this did happen to any significant degree.
The reason I believe so is that slavery made tens of thousands of plantation owners extremely wealthy. Amongst the wealthiest people on earth. There can be no debate whether slavery made some people extremely rich.
Absolutely there was a lot of discussion about how slavery affected poor whites and implicitly the South as a whole but such conversations were highly censored. As the years progressed towards 1860, It became dangerous for a man in the South to question the institution of slavery. People were lynched for owning books that were modestly critical of the slave based economy. So, again I doubt economists would dare set up shop in the South to deliberate the question.
Slave owners owned slaves in full and did whatever maximised their profits. They rented them, bought and sold them, expanded their assets through impregnating them. They took massive loans out and financed investments in slaves. They didn’t just focus on cotton and tobacco. They tried all sorts of crops. When crops didn’t do well in one region they would take all their slaves elsewhere or sell them elsewhere. Many millions of dollars were made selling slaves from tapped out economies like Virginia towards new territories like Mississippi.
Slaves were not only contained to farming. They were put to work in manufacturing, as mechanics, home services, mining, and other works. Fredrick Douglas was rented out as a tradesman to build ships.
Most of those occupations did not make profit like cotton work did. So simple economics led to the price of slaves in Mississippi to sky rocket to $2000 for a healthy slave and in other parts of the country, there was no way to make such earnings from the asset. So slaves were often sold South. That was simply market driven economics rather than the work of economic advice.
There are very many Southern men who argued in favour of slavery. They argued that it was economically better, religiously right and it was the cornerstone of freedom of the white people. We saw some of those individuals extend that conversation to support secession and war in order to preserve the institution. The most vocal and radical of these men were called fire-eaters. An interesting book on these men is “The Fire Eaters” by Eric Walther