What Method Did Chesapeake Planters Use in the Early Eighteenth Century to Prevent Slave Revolts?

Slavery and Empire

Slave labor and the African slave trade formed the courage of the American colonial economy.

Learning Objectives

Talk over the historical trend of slavery, the increasing need for slave labor in the New World, and the various groups that resisted slavery

Central Takeaways

Key Points

• The idea that military victors had the correct to enslave defeated opponents was commonly held in ancient Greece and Rome.
• The increasing demand for imported labor in the American colonies turned the slave trade into a big-scale and highly lucrative business concern.
• Simply a small fraction of the enslaved Africans brought to the New Globe ended upward in British North America, with the vast majority of slaves sent to the Caribbean area sugar colonies.
• In the North American colonies, the importation of African slaves was directed mainly due south, where extensive tobacco, rice, and cotton wool plantation economies demanded extensive labor forces for cultivation; this created the Southern slave institution in the United states.
• Poor working weather condition, affliction, and malnutrition contributed to the high mortality rate amidst slaves in the Americas.
• Forms of slave resistance ranged from deadening labor paces to vehement rebellion.

Primal Terms

• bondage: The state of being enslaved or the practice of slavery.
• slave trade: An exchange of persons held in bondage; for instance the exchange that occurred across the Atlantic ocean from Africa to the Americas from the 16th through the 19th centuries.

Introduction

Slavery formed a cornerstone of the British Empire in the 18th century. Every colony had slaves, from the southern rice plantations in Charles Town, South Carolina, to the northern wharves of Boston. Slavery was more than than a labor organization; it also influenced every attribute of colonial thought and culture. The uneven relationship it engendered gave white colonists an exaggerated sense of their own status. English liberty gained greater meaning and coherence for whites when they contrasted their condition to that of the unfree class of black slaves in British America. African slavery provided whites in the colonies with a shared racial bail and identity.

Increasing Demand for Slave Labor

Slavery, every bit a theory, had been a commonly accepted European practice long before the exploration of the New World. Drawing on ancient Greek and Roman history, pro-slavery defenders noted that enslaving prisoners of war was an acceptable alternative to execution—once an enemy had surrendered, it was believed to be the victor's right to claim the life of their enemy through death or enslavement. Hence, when the Portuguese slave traders started exploring the coast of Africa where information technology was customary for warring ethnic tribes to enslave each other, they began to buy these slaves for consign to the New World colonies. Other pro-slavery advocates argued that it was their mission to convert African non-Christians (whom they referred to as "heathens") to Christianity and that slavery immune them to exercise this more than effectively.

Slave traders in Gorés, past Jacques Grasset de Saint-Sauveur: Depiction of European and African slave traders.

The European demand for New World cash crops, especially sugar, tobacco, rice, and cotton, led to a demand for labor to cultivate these crops. Although the practices of indentured servitude and the enslavement of American Indians was already in place, planters in the southern British colonies quickly came to favor enslaved Africans. Not only were Africans well suited to tropical climates, they also brought special skills and husbandry knowledge for crops such as rice, which the British found useful. Slavery and the African slave trade rapidly became a building block of the colonial economy and an integral part of expanding and developing the British commercial empire in the Atlantic world.

Only a fraction of the enslaved Africans brought to the New World ended up in British North America. The vast majority of slaves shipped across the Atlantic were sent to the Caribbean sugar colonies, Brazil, or Spanish America. Throughout the Americas, but especially in the Caribbean, tropical illness took a large toll on the population. Unlike American Indians, Africans had a express natural immunity to xanthous fever and malaria; nonetheless, malnutrition, poor housing, inadequate clothing allowances, and overwork contributed to a high mortality rate which further increased the demand for the importation of Africans to replenish the labor supply.

Slavery in the British Colonies

The transport of slaves to the American colonies accelerated in the second half of the 17th century. In 1660, Charles II created the Purple African Company to trade in slaves and African appurtenances. His brother, James II, led the company before ascending the throne. Under both these kings, the Royal African Company enjoyed a monopoly to transport slaves to the English colonies. Between 1672 and 1713, the visitor bought 125,000 captives on the African declension, losing xx% of them to death on the Middle Passage, the journey from the African coast to the Americas.

In the North American colonies, the importation of African slaves was directed mainly southward, where all-encompassing tobacco, rice, and later, cotton plantation economies, demanded extensive labor forces for tillage. In dissimilarity to the high mortality rates of the Caribbean sugar plantations, N American slave populations tended to alive longer. By the 19th century, many southern farmers found that natural increase was a viable alternative to importation in guild to furnish their slave populations.

Slave Resistance

Slaves everywhere resisted their exploitation and attempted to gain freedom through armed uprisings and rebellions, such as the Stono Rebellion and the New York Slave Coup of 1741. Other less fierce means of resistance included sabotage, running abroad, and slow labor paces on the plantations. Unlike their counterparts in the Caribbean, however, American slaves never successfully overthrew the system of slavery in the colonies and would not gain freedom until legislative decree fabricated later the United States Civil War.

The Triangular Trade

Triangular Trade was a organization in which slaves, crops, and manufactured goods were traded between Africa, the Americas, and Europe.

Learning Objectives

Differentiate betwixt the Get-go and Second Atlantic slave systems

Key Takeaways

Key Points

• An estimated 9.four–12 meg Africans arrived in the New Earth between the 16th and 19th centuries in the Atlantic slave trade. The First Atlantic Arrangement refers to the 16th-century menstruation in which Portuguese merchants dominated the West African slave merchandise—supplying Castilian and Portuguese New World colonies with imported African labor.
• The 2d Atlantic Organisation characterizes the 17th and 18th centuries, when British, Dutch, and French merchants replaced the Portuguese as the major slave traders in the Atlantic.
• In the Triangular Merchandise, enslaved Africans were imported from Africa to the American colonies as the labor strength needed to produce cash crops, which were exported to Europe in exchange for manufactured appurtenances.
• European goods were then used to trade with Africans for slaves, who were exported to the American colonies, where the cycle of the trade started again.
• The Middle Passage was the stage of the Triangular Trade where millions of enslaved people from Africa were shipped to the New World.
• The bloodshed rate on slave ships was very high, and an estimated 2 1000000 enslaved passengers died en road from affliction, violence, abuse, lack of nutrient or water, or suicide.

Key Terms

• triangular merchandise: A arrangement of exchange of slaves, cash crops, and manufactured appurtenances betwixt Due west Africa, Caribbean area or American colonies, and Europe from the belatedly 16th to early on 19th centuries.
• First Atlantic System: The part of the slave trade dominated by the Portuguese and Spanish.
• Second Atlantic System: The trade of enslaved Africans past more often than not British, French, and Dutch traders.

The Atlantic Slave Merchandise

The Atlantic slave trade took identify across the Atlantic Sea, predominantly from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The vast majority of slaves transported to the New Globe were Africans from the central and western parts of the continent, sold by African tribes to European slave traders who and then transported them to the colonies in North and South America. Well-nigh contemporary historians guess that between nine.4 and 12 million Africans arrived in the New Earth from the 16th through 19th centuries.

Various African tribes played a central role in the slave trade by selling their captives or prisoners of state of war to European buyers, which was a mutual practice on the continent. The prisoners and captives who were sold to the Europeans were unremarkably from neighboring or enemy ethnic groups; sometimes, African kings sold criminals into slavery as a form of punishment. The majority of African slaves, nonetheless, were strange tribe members obtained from kidnappings, raids, or tribal wars.

The Outset Atlantic System

The First Atlantic System is a term used to characterized the Portuguese and Spanish African slave trade to the South American colonies in the 16th century—which lasted until 1580, when Portugal was temporarily united with Spain. While the Portuguese traded enslaved people themselves, the Spanish empire relied on the asiento system, application merchants (generally from other countries) the license to trade enslaved people to their colonies. During the Outset Atlantic Organization, nearly of these traders were Portuguese, giving them a near-monopoly during the era, although some Dutch, English, and French traders as well participated in the slave trade. Later the union with Spain, Portugal was prohibited from direct engaging in the slave trade equally a carrier and and so ceded command over the trade to the Dutch, British, and French.

The 2d Atlantic System

The Second Atlantic Organisation, from the 17th through early on 19th centuries, was the trade of enslaved Africans dominated past British, French, and Dutch merchants. Well-nigh Africans sold into slavery during the Second Atlantic System were sent to the Caribbean area carbohydrate islands as European nations developed economically slave-dependent colonies through sugar tillage. It is estimated that more than than half of the slave merchandise took place during the 18th century, with the British as the biggest transporters of slaves beyond the Atlantic. In the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, most of the international slave merchandise was abolished (although American slavery continued to be well into the late 19th century).

Slavery in the Americas

European colonists in the Americas initially good systems of both bonded labor and ethnic slavery. Nevertheless, for a diversity of reasons, Africans replaced American Indians as the main population of enslaved people in the Americas. In some cases, such as on some of the Caribbean Islands, warfare and disease eliminated the indigenous populations completely. In other cases, such every bit in South Carolina, Virginia, and New England, the need for alliances with American Indian tribes, coupled with the availability of enslaved Africans at affordable prices, resulted in a shift away from American Indian slavery.

The resulting Atlantic slave trade was primarily shaped by the desire for inexpensive labor as the colonies attempted to produce raw goods for European consumption. Many American crops (including cotton wool, sugar, and rice) were not grown in Europe, and importing crops and appurtenances from the New Earth often proved to be more than profitable than producing them on the European mainland. However, a vast amount of labor was needed to create and sustain plantations that would be economically profitable. Western Africa (and afterwards, Central Africa) became a prime source for Europeans to acquire enslaved peoples, to come across the desire for free labor in the American colonies, and to produce a steady supply of profitable greenbacks crops.

Triangular Trade

The term triangular merchandise is used to characterize much of the Atlantic trading arrangement from the 16th to early 19th centuries, in which three main commodity-types—labor, crops, and manufactured goods—were traded in three key Atlantic geographic regions.

Depiction of the classical model of the triangular trade: The triangular trade was a arrangement in which slaves were transported to the Americas; sugar, tobacco, and cotton wool were exported to Europe; and textiles, rum, and manufactured goods were sent to Africa.

Ships departed Europe for African markets with manufactured goods which were traded for purchased or kidnapped Africans. These Africans were transported across the Atlantic equally slaves and were then sold or traded in the Americas for raw materials. The raw materials would subsequently exist transported back to Europe to complete the voyage.

A classic instance would exist the trade of sugar (oftentimes in its liquid course, molasses) from the Caribbean to Europe, where it was distilled into rum. The profits from the sale of saccharide were and so used to purchase manufactured goods, which were so shipped to West Africa where they were bartered for slaves. The slaves were then brought to the Caribbean to be sold to saccharide planters. The profits from the auction of the slaves were then used to buy more sugar, which was shipped to Europe, and and then on. This particular triangular trip took anywhere from five to 12 weeks and ofttimes resulted in massive fatalities of enslaved Africans on the Middle Passage voyage.

The Middle Passage

The Middle Passage was the phase of the triangular trade where millions of enslaved people from Africa were shipped to the New World for sale. Voyages on the Middle Passage were a large financial undertaking more often than not organized past companies or groups of investors, rather than individuals. The duration of the transatlantic voyage varied widely, from i to six months depending on weather condition atmospheric condition. An estimated 15% of African slaves died during the Middle Passage; historians estimate that the full number of African deaths direct attributable to the Middle Passage voyage is approximately ii million.

African kings, warlords, and private kidnappers sold captives to Europeans who held several coastal forts. The captives were usually forcefulness-marched to these ports along the western declension of Africa, where they were held for sale to the European slavers. In one case sold to the European traders, African captives were brought to the slave ships for the voyage to the Americas. Typical slave ships independent several hundred slaves with approximately thirty crew members. Captives were usually chained together in pairs to save space and, at all-time, were fed one meal a twenty-four hour period with water. Sometimes captives were allowed to movement around during the day, but on most ships captives spent the entire journey crammed below decks.

During the Eye Passage voyage, disease (peculiarly dysentery and scurvy) and starvation were the major killers. Furthermore, outbreaks of smallpox, syphilis, and measles were fatally contagious in close-quarter compartments. The rate of death increased with the length of the voyage as the quality and corporeality of food and h2o diminished. While the treatment of slaves on the Middle Passage varied by ship and voyage, it was ofttimes horrific. Captive Africans were considered by many Europeans to be less than human being; they were instead seen as cargo or goods to be transported every bit cheaply and speedily every bit possible for trade. Corporal punishment was very mutual, with whippings used to punish melancholy or any form of resistance.

Slaves resisted in a variety of ways during the Heart Passage, normally by refusing to consume or committing suicide. In turn, crews and slave traders oft strength fed or tortured slaves and put nets on the sides of ships to proceed slaves from attempting suicide. In that location are some recorded incidents of coordinated mass slave uprisings; still, most failed and were met with repercussions.

Slave ship: Diagram of a slave send from the Atlantic slave merchandise. Slaves were chained together in incredibly close quarters, and overcrowding led to the spread of deadly diseases.

Chesapeake Slavery

The economy of the Chesapeake region revolved around tobacco and relied heavily on slave labor.

Learning Objectives

Discuss how planters in the Chesapeake region increasingly invested in the Atlantic slave merchandise to support their rural tobacco-based economy

Cardinal Takeaways

Key Points

• The Chesapeake colonies developed similar agronomical systems based on tobacco, which later diversified to include cotton and indigo.
• Tobacco required intensive labor for cultivation, and the failing availability of white indentured servants —too as fearfulness of uprisings from wealthy whites—fabricated Chesapeake planters plow toward African slave labor.
• The introduction of large-scale inexpensive labor via slavery allowed for an increase in tobacco exports, which generated significant wealth for whites in the region.
• The presence of slaves created an economical gap between wealthy and poor Chesapeake farmers, with the wealthy elites dominating the social and political life.

Cardinal Terms

• Chesapeake region: The colonial regions comprised of Virginia and Maryland.

Slavery in the Chesapeake Region

The Chesapeake region was composed of Virginia—with Jamestown, its first successful settlement established in 1607—and Maryland. Each of these colonies developed a similar agricultural system that revolved around tobacco, which was later diversified with the introduction of cotton wool and indigo.

During the after part of the 17th century, the evolution of the Chesapeake region revolved around tobacco cultivation, which required intensive labor. At first, Chesapeake farmers hired indentured servants—men and women from England who sold their labor for a period of 5 to seven years in exchange for passage to the American colonies—to harvest tobacco crops. Nonetheless, past the 1680s, fluctuating tobacco prices and the growing scarcity of land in the region made the Chesapeake less highly-seasoned to men and women willing to indenture themselves. The scarcity of indentured servants meant that the price of their labor contracts increased, and Chesapeake farmers began to expect for culling, cheaper sources of bonded labor.

As a upshot, many Chesapeake farmers turned toward imported African slaves to fulfill their want for inexpensive labor. Although African chattel slavery was a more than expensive investment that white indentured servitude, it guaranteed a lifetime service of free labor. As the need for Chesapeake cash crops continued to grow, planters began to increasingly invest in the Atlantic slave merchandise.

Tobacco and slavery: In this 1670 painting past an unknown artist, slaves work in tobacco-drying sheds.

Back up for Slavery

A bully deal of support for the organisation of chattel slavery came from the wealthy white's fright of rebellions from the labor force. In the late 17th century, indentured servants fabricated upwards the majority of laborers in the region. Wealthy whites worried over the presence of this big class of laborers and the relative freedom they enjoyed, as well as the alliances betwixt black and white servants. Replacing indentured servitude with black slavery macerated these risks, alleviating the reliance on white indentured servants, who were often dissatisfied and troublesome, and creating a caste of racially defined laborers whose movements were strictly controlled. It also lessened the possibility of further alliances between black and white workers. Racial slavery even served to heal some of the divisions between wealthy and poor whites who could at present unite as members of a "superior" racial grouping.

While laws in the tobacco colonies had already fabricated slavery a legal institution, new laws were passed toward the end of the 17th century that severely curtailed blackness freedom and laid the foundation for racial slavery. Virginia passed a law in 1680 prohibiting free Africans and slaves from begetting arms, banning Africans from congregating in large numbers, and establishing harsh punishments for slaves who assaulted Christians or attempted escape. 2 years afterwards, another Virginia police force stipulated that all Africans brought to the colony would exist slaves for life. Thus, the increasing reliance on slaves in the tobacco colonies—and the draconian laws instituted to control them—not only helped planters meet labor demands, merely as well served to assuage English fears of uprisings and convalesce class tensions between rich and poor whites.

Rural Economy and Society: Slavery every bit a Social Identifier

The local economy in the Chesapeake was overwhelmingly agrarian, rural, and rooted in the headright arrangement, which guaranteed numerous acres of state to any immigrant who paid their ain passage to the New World and settled in the region. The headright organisation was designed to promote immigrant settlement and the cultivation of key staple crops that increased the prosperity of the Chesapeake region. As the headright system attracted more and more settlers to the Chesapeake, an increasing split up between coastal planters and farmers on the borderland began to sally, with those in the westernmost areas usually poorer than planters in the due east.

With the importation of African slaves, most social and economic divisions between wealthy and poor farmers in the Chesapeake increased. Equally African slaves were mostly more expensive to buy than indentured servants, the wealthy planters invested heavily in African slaves and agricultural applied science and expanded their lands, while poor farmers struggled to maintain their smaller agronomical enterprises.

These wealthy slave-owning planters came to dominate the superlative of the social and political hierarchy in the Chesapeake, placing full-blooded and wealth as significant social identifiers. Notwithstanding, pocket-size farmers composed the largest social class in the Chesapeake. These agriculturalists owned small amounts of property and a limited (if whatsoever) enslaved labor forcefulness. The class division betwixt wealthy planters and minor farmers continued well into the 19th century, until the Civil State of war united these factions against the Northern states.

Slavery in the Rice Kingdom

S Carolina was the first colony founded deliberately on slave labor to support its growing rice economy.

Learning Objectives

Explain why South Carolina was deliberately founded on slave labor

Key Takeaways

Fundamental Points

• The colony of South Carolina was one of the first colonies founded with the intention of basing an economy on slave labor.
• Many of the early on planters in South Carolina were wealthy immigrants from Barbados, who brought their African slaves.
• The principle ingather of South Carolinian plantations was rice, which was introduced to Southward Carolina in 1694 and brought unprecedented prosperity to the region.
• Slavery was integral to rice cultivation because of its labor intensiveness and because slaves from the rice-producing regions of Africa provided colonial plantation owners with crucial technical cognition about rice cultivation.
• Rice production ceased to be profitable after the abolition of slavery because planters could no longer rely on gratis labor.

Cardinal Terms

• Joshua John Ward: The largest American slaveholder, dubbed "Rex of the Rice Planters."
• greenbacks ingather: Any food that is grown for sale rather than for personal use or feeding to livestock.
• Rice Kingdom: An epithet for South Carolina, so named for its principle greenbacks crop harvested by slaves in the early 18th century.

Overview: Slavery in South Carolina

South Carolina, later dubbed the " Rice Kingdom," was one of the first Due north American colonies to be deliberately founded on slave labor. In the 17th century, wealthy planters from Barbados, accompanied by their African slaves, immigrated to Due south Carolina looking for abundant lands. The planters were well aware that African slaves had skills and attributes well suited to the semi-tropical surround of South Carolina. Hence, Due south Carolinian planters began importing Africans in large numbers, and in 1710, African-born slaves outnumbered American-born people. By 1720, Southward Carolina's population was 65% enslaved. Wealthy planters cultivated rice and other cash crops along the southeastern coast, while backwoods subsistence farmers were pushed out to the Appalachian Mountains and backcountry in the later part of the 18th century. These backcountry farmers, similar their counterparts in the Chesapeake, seldom owned slaves.

Ledger of sale in South Carolina: Ledger of sale of 118 slaves, Charleston, South Carolina, c. 1754.

The Rice Economy and the Role of Slavery

The principle cash ingather harvested by the South Carolina slave population in the early 18th century was rice, a crop which probably originated in Madagascar and had been introduced into South Carolina in 1694. Once rice was established as the principle cash ingather of Due south Carolina, information technology brought unprecedented wealth and prosperity to planters and the region. By 1850, a South Carolinian rice planter, Joshua John Ward, was the largest American slaveholder, with an manor that held ane,130 slaves and gave him the title, "King of the Rice Planters."

Information technology is no coincidence that white planters in the region starting importing African slaves when rice cultivation was introduced into the South, as the first English language planters in South Carolina knew little about rice cultivation. The planters relied on the expertise of their African slaves imported from the Rice Declension. For case, enslaved Africans showed planters how to properly dyke the marshes, periodically flood the rice fields, and use sweetgrass baskets for milling the rice quicker than wooden paddles. These innovations increased the efficiency and profitability of cultivation. In later years, water-powered mills, designed by millwright Jonathan Lucas, also helped expand rice cultivation in the South. Rice plantations were larger than their tobacco counterparts in the Chesapeake, and planters expected slaves to cultivate upward to five acres of rice a year, in addition to growing their own vegetables to feed themselves and their families.

Rice tillage in the southeastern United States became less assisting with the loss of slave labor after the American Civil War, and it finally died out but later the plough of the 20th century.

The One-time Plantation, c. 1790. Painting of slaves on a South Carolina plantation.

Slavery in the Northward

While Northern states had fewer slaves and somewhen outlawed slavery entirely, they were withal economically dependent on the institution.

Learning Objectives

Explain why the colonial North characteristically had smaller slave populations than the Southward

Key Takeaways

Key Points

• While slavery was allowed in the Due north, information technology was less integral to the Northward's economic system than to the South'southward, and slave populations were generally much smaller in the Northward.
• Even though slavery was not prevalent in the North, northern commercial and industrial centers (particularly textiles industries) had a vested interest in the survival of slavery in the South.
• The reliance of the Northern textile industry on Southern crops was intensified by the invention of the cotton fiber gin.
• The concept of "free states" and "slave states" adult past the early 19th century and became increasingly politically charged in the years leading upward to the American Civil War.

Cardinal Terms

• slave country: An area in the 18th and 18th century United States in which slavery was permitted.
• gratis state: An area in the 18th and 19th century United States in which slavery was prohibited.

Slavery in the Colonial North

The northeastern and mid-Atlantic states, including Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, had legally permitted slavery in the 17th and 18th centuries. However, during the decades leading upwards to the American Ceremonious State of war, well-nigh all slaves in the North had been emancipated through a series of state legislature statutes, creating the northern "free states" in opposition to southern "slave states."

Even though slavery was permitted, northern states characteristically had far smaller slave populations than the South. Few slave ships arrived in New York, Philadelphia, or Boston, which instead became trade centers for manufactured goods. Slaves that lived in the North were oftentimes domestic servants or bondsmen to small farmers and rural ironworks. Unlike in the South, northern farms were not large-calibration enterprises that focused on producing a single cash crop; instead they were oft smaller, more agriculturally diversified enterprises that required fewer laborers. Hence, the demand for enslaved bondsmen gradually dwindled—specially every bit rapid soil depletion and the growth of industry in northern cities attracted many rural northerners to wage labor.

The Gradual Abolition of Slavery

The first U.S. region to abolish slavery was the Northwest Territory nether the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. United states of america created from this region—Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota—were generally settled by New England farmers and American Revolutionary War veterans who were granted land in this area. This territory was entirely slave-gratis from its inception and separated past the Ohio River from the Due south, which was pushing for an expansion of legal slavery into the West. The concept of "gratis states" developed in contrast to these "slave states" by the early 19th century. After the Northwest Ordinance, Massachusetts abolished slavery in its country constitution, and several other northern states followed suit by drafting statutes that provided for gradual emancipation. In 1804, New Jersey became the terminal northern state to abolish slavery.

Connected Dependency on Slavery

Even though slavery was not a prevalent institution in the North, the commercial urban centers that sprang up in these colonies meant that most northerners had a vested stake in ensuring that American slavery flourished in the South. This is specially true later on the advent of the cotton gin, which supplied the N with the surplus of raw cotton necessary to produce finished goods for export. Northern industry and commerce relied on southern cash crop production; therefore, while slavery was actively abolished in the North, almost northerners were content to let slavery to flourish in the southern states. Indeed, it wasn't until later on arguments over the access and representation of states in the marriage and the threat of southern states overpowering their northern counterparts considering of their higher slave populations, that many northerners began to oppose the expansion of southern slavery.

Gratuitous States in 1789: This map illustrates the free states in the United states in 1789, which included Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine. The Northwest Ordinance was also a free territory, though it was not yet incorporated as a state.

Slavery in the South

The rise of large-scale plantations in the S led to the widespread apply of slavery to back up the colonial economic system.

Learning Objectives

Describe the rise of plantation slavery in the southern colonies

Cardinal Takeaways

Key Points

• While every colony had slaves, from the southern rice plantations in South Carolina to the northern wharves of Boston, information technology was in the big agricultural plantations in the South where slavery took concord the strongest.
• The Chesapeake region and North Carolina thrived on tobacco production, while South Carolina and Georgia thrived on rice and indigo.
• The northern part of Carolina—later established as the separate colony of N Carolina—turned toward tobacco production, similar its neighbour Virginia, and relied increasingly on slave labor to bulldoze its economic system.
• Unlike the other southern colonies, the colony of Georgia was originally founded under James Oglethorpe 's vision that slavery be banned. However, colonists who relocated from other slave-holding colonies largely overlooked this prohibition.
• Despite its proprietors' early vision of a colony guided by Enlightenment ideals and free of slavery, by the 1750s, Georgia was producing quantities of rice grown and harvested by slaves.

Key Terms

• Chesapeake: A region of colonies in British colonial Northward America consisting of Virginia and Maryland.

Slavery in the Southern Colonies

Slavery formed a cornerstone of the British Empire in the 18th century. Every colony had slaves, from the southern rice plantations in Charles Town, South Carolina, to the northern wharves of Boston. However, it was in the large agricultural plantations in the South where slavery took concur the strongest. Early, enslaved people in the Southward worked primarily in agriculture —on farms and plantations growing indigo, rice, and tobacco. Cotton did non go a major crop until after the American Revolution. The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 enabled the cultivation of short-staple cotton wool in a broad diverseness of areas, leading to the development of large areas of the Deep S as cotton wool country in the 19th century.

Tobacco was very labor-intensive, as was rice cultivation. The Chesapeake region and North Carolina thrived on tobacco product, while South Carolina and Georgia thrived on rice and indigo. The rapid expansion of large-scale plantations and single-crop agriculture in the Deep South greatly increased need for slave labor, and slavery became the courage of the British colonies.

Northward Carolina

While the southern part of Carolina produced thriving economies on rice and indigo (a plant that yields a dark blueish dye used past English royalty) throughout the 18th century, the northern part of Carolina—later on established as the split colony of North Carolina—turned more toward tobacco production, like its neighbor Virginia. North Carolina continued to produce items for ships, particularly turpentine and tar, and its population increased as Virginians moved there to expand their tobacco holdings. Tobacco was the primary export of both Virginia and North Carolina, which increasingly came to rely on slave labor from Africa.

Georgia

In the 1730s, Enlightenment principles prompted the founding of a new colony: Georgia. James Oglethorpe, a member of Parliament and advocate of social reform, sought to create a colony for England'southward "worthy poor" to outset anew. To encourage industry, he gave each male immigrant l acres of land, tools, and a year's worth of supplies. In Savannah, the Oglethorpe Plan provided for a utopia: "an agrarian model of sustenance while sustaining egalitarian values belongings all men as equal."

Unlike the other southern colonies, Oglethorpe's vision chosen for slavery to exist banned. However, colonists who relocated from other colonies, especially South Carolina, disregarded this prohibition and brought with them their slaves. Despite its proprietors' early vision of a colony guided past Enlightenment ethics and free of slavery, by the 1750s, Georgia was producing quantities of rice grown and harvested by slaves.

James Edward Oglethorpe, by Alfred Edmund Dyer: James Oglethorpe was a British general, Member of Parliament, and philanthropist, besides as the founder of the colony of Georgia. Unlike the southern colonies effectually him, Oglethorpe originally envisioned Georgia to exist a slave-costless guild.

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Source: https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-ushistory/chapter/slavery-in-the-colonies/

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