Essay on Importance of Slavery to the Southern Way of Life

Importance of Slavery to the Southern Way of Life America almost from the beginning was heavily dependent on forced labour. In 1619, John Rolfe in Virgina reported about the last day of August came in a butch man-of-war that sold us 20 negers. This is the first record of Africans settling in America. The Southern colonies were more dependent on labour then the North, as the climate in the South was ideal for plantation agricultural. In the 17th century the basis of the work force, in mainly the Southern colonies were Europeans labourers, who as indentured servants, offered landowners a solution to their labour shortage. Beginning in the 1680s, the mainland colonies underwent a massive shift,†¦show more content†¦European indentured servants satisfied the labour needs until the 1680s, when the mainland colonies underwent a major shift, from indentured Europeans to slave labour. Statistics show that between 1680 and 1750 the estimated proportion of blacks in the population of Southern colonies increased, from 6 percent to 40 percent. African slaves worked cotton, sugar, coco, tobacco and rice plantations, which would have otherwise been worked by Southerners on a much smaller scale. In 1800 to 1860 as the slave population in the Southern States increased from just under, 1,000,000 to just fewer than 4,000,000, the amount of cotton bales produced rose to 375 thousand. This gives a very good example of how important slavery was to the profitable function of the Southern plantations. There was little industry in the South, and even if some industry could be established the South would not have been able to compete with the Norths reputable trade and industry market. Basically the South depended on plantations and the slaves to work them, as economic profit, but historians of today still debate whether this is true. Was slavery economically profitable for the Southern colonies? Stampp, Conrad and Meyer, and Fogel and Engelman all recent historians have argued that slavery was efficient and vibrant form of economic organisation, which did not deter Southern economic growth, butShow MoreRelatedThe Causes Of The Civil War1409 Words   |  6 Pagesinclude; states’ rights, economics, and slavery. The most recognizable and popular cause is slavery. The freeing of the slaves was an important moral issue at the time and one of the greatest causes of the civil war. It was only by carefully avoiding the moral issue involved in slavery that Northerners and Souther ners could meet on any common ground. (Goldston, 79). The time came in which our great country would finally address the moral issue of slavery. 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