I’m a blond, too. I’ve never used my hair color as an excuse for malingering.

When the South depended on slavery for all it’s workers, it had no incentive to explore other possiblilites. In the North, it was necessary to develop a more streamlined way to do business because wages, no matter how low, had to be paid. Even the lowliest workers in the North had some opportunity to go to school and possibly better themselves.

In the South, slaves could not, by law, be taught to read. This meant that the Southern industries (mostly agriculture) depended entirely on uneducated workers. When the Civil War put an end to slavery in the United States, the South had two enormous problems: How could they maintain their plantations when they had to start paying wages for farm workers, and how could freed slaves become productive members of society when they had been denied any form of education?

The landowners of the South had never had any experience in the competitive business practices that abounded in the North. When the Civil War was over, there were vast areas where the farm lands had been laid waste, there were tremendous numbers of families where all the grown men had been killed or maimed, and a great many widows and orphans who were unprepared for the huge job of rebuilding their economy.

In addition to all the internal woes in the South, enterprising Northerners were only too happy to come in and steal everything that was lying around unprotected. Look up “Carpetbaggers” to see how well this worked.

Many Southern families, having lost everything of value during the war, simply packed up and moved West. Those who stayed had too much to do and not enough men, resources or money to do it. Sharecropping became a way of life for many and ensured their continued poverty.

You may have heard the adage “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” This means that if you put all your time, energy, money and expectations into one thing, if that thing fails, you lose everything, just as you would if you tripped and dropped the basket of eggs. Everything would end up a mess on the ground. The pre-Civil War South put all their eggs in the slavery basket. When slavery fell, everything was broken and ruined.

The racist attitudes that have prevailed since then have continued to keep the South at a level below the rest of the country in nearly every aspect of living. Instead of getting on with business and accepting that slaves were now equal citizens, they fought tooth and nail to subjugate the freed slaves and keep them from gaining any advances in citizenship. It took another 100 years before the Supreme Court shot down the “separate but equal” laws that the South enacted to keep people of color from gaining true independence. When you expend 100 years of effort to fight progress, you win. Progress in the South lost the fight.

Today, 142 years after the end of the Civil War, the South is still considered the poor stepchild of the United States. If your state scores poorly in educational standards, you hear people say “At least we’re not as bad as Mississippi.” When you see Jerry Springer’s guests, you assume they’re from Alabama. The stereotypes of “redneck” “cracker” and “poor white trash” are all Southern. Jokes like “If you divorce your husband in Georgia, are you still cousins?” abound. That this is all racist, too, is absolutely true, but as in the case of lawyer jokes, it is also true that they brought it upon themselves.

The reason why slavery was an impediment was simple, there was no incentive to change. By keeping slavery alive, the South fell behind in industrializing, which was a bad thing. The rest of the world was moving ahead with technology while the South effectively stood still. The problem was one of production, which with slave labor was fixed while the North was able to increase production, so market share shifted to the place with the most manufacturing, which was the mechanized North. Slavery would maybe have died out on its own when the mismatch in the economies of the North and South became large enough to put the south out of business.

Slavery was a set-back to the South making progress.

It prevented the south from moving forward in a more modern world. Much of the world was against slavery.

it means slavery was a hinderance or a problem for the south. basically that it hurt the South

It means that slavery was an obstacle against progress throughout the South.

If you have words you don’t understand, here is a useful link that I use:

http://dictionary.reference.com/

It means that their disrespect of humans hindered them from becoming great.