Question

Why did many southerners
become cotton farmers?

Answer 1

at the time cotton was really worth value so people started to become more of cotton farmers

Answer 2

by 1820, the United States was more than growing 30 times as much cotton as it had when Whitney invented the gin, making it the world's leading supplier. The mills' insatiable hunger for cotton kept prices high, so that white southern farmers demanded ever more land, and ever more enslaved people, to grow it.