Answer: Mountainous Areas
Explanation:
The wealthiest planters, such as the Virginia elite with plantations near the James River, owned more land and slaves than other farmers in the Upper South.
But the Mountainous areas of the South differed significantly from the rest of the South in more than just
its variable terrain of extensive plateaus, long valleys, and rugged, worn mountains.
Slaves performed diverse tasks -- a
pattern ostensibly not unique. In most of the American South, slaves were found to have different vocations. But in the Mountain South, because of the relatively high proportion of small plantations--another distinctive characteristic -- each individual slave often did far
Small plantations-- characterized by Dunaway as small slaveholding farms. Because the region contained a much greater proportion of small plantations than the remainder of the South.
Also the proportion of slaves allocated to nonagricultural labor, such as mining and tourism; despite being only about 15 percent of the adult population, black workers made up 30 percent or more of the nonagricultural workforce in many areas of the Mountain South. In all types of labor, slaves typically worked in the task system as
opposed to the gang system. These are overwhelming evidence both for the distinctiveness and
for the connectedness of the Mountain South relative to the whole of the American South.
