Cotton was not the nation's only agribusiness before the Civil War. The tobacco, rice, sugar, livestock, lumbering, and wheat industries accounted for more dollar income than cotton, but not one of them along before 1860, or even 1900, approached the dollar value of cotton. Each of these commodities involved hundreds of middlemen for every single producer, creating an intricate web of trade and commerce that stretched across North America to Europe. The cotton plantation employing slave labor marked only the first stage in the business of producing, marketing, and distributing cotton products.