Cotton production in the US relied on cheap labor, leading to the purchase of African slaves for use on plantations. Slavery persisted in the South longer than the North, and was a major difference in the Civil War. Native Americans and European indentured servants were initially used, but African slaves became the cheaper option. The children of enslaved women were also born into legal slavery, providing a regular supply of free labor for cash crops like tobacco and sugar.
Cotton production requires land and labor, and slavery was a cheap form of labour. Many landowners in the United States from the 1600s onward purchased people for use as slaves from areas of the world such as Africa to work the cotton fields, as a way to keep operating expenses to a minimum. The extra money saved by keeping slaves instead of paid labor meant that landowners could invest even more money in the business and potentially make more cotton and more profits for other ventures.
Slavery was outlawed in the United States after the Civil War. This is relatively late in the century compared to British colonies, for example, such as those in the Caribbean or Canada. Cotton and slavery persisted in the Confederate states in the southern United States longer than the northern parts of the continent, and this was one of the major differences between the two sides in the Civil War.
The plantations, which were commercial properties in the Southern states, typically used African slave labor. The people in slavery were either Africans who had been abducted from their homes and taken to the Americas by ship, or people who were descended from the first generation of Africans. The main focus of people with African blood was a change from the initial forms of labor available to the first settlers in the country.
Originally, Europeans and their descendants in America sought to turn Native Americans into cheap labor, but these people were commonly familiar with the area and thus were able to get away from forced labor more easily than others. The next choice was the poor Europeans, who came to live in America as indentured servants, which meant they worked for a set period of years for room and board but without money. Plantation owners had to purchase new indentured servants every few years, however, as African slaves became a cheaper choice in the late 1600s due to a higher expectation of living standards for European workers, cotton and slavery became inextricably interconnected.
Slaves were a labor choice that made economic sense to plantation owners at the time, if not ethical sense. In comparison to the failed experiment with Native American labor, newly arrived African slaves did not know the country and could not speak the language. The difference in skin color also made it more difficult for a slave to escape a plantation that combined cotton and slavery, compared to white indentured servants.
Another potentially lucrative component of cotton and slavery was that the children of an enslaved woman were typically born into legal slavery. This gave cotton plantation owners a regular supply of virtually free labor. While cotton was a large part of the Southern states economy, slave labor also made cash crops such as tobacco and sugar more profitable than they would have been with other forms of labor.
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