South Into A Slave Society example essay topic

The British colonies in North America started out as small settler colonies based mostly in the north. However as the colonies expanded, colonies developed in the south. The southern and northern colonies were based on very different things. The north was based on industry and other manufactured goods, while the south was based on staple crops and raw materials. Because the southern way of earning money was crops, the people in the south turned to African slaves as a cheap labor force. There were many different factors involved in this transformation into a slave society.

There were several geographic, social, and economic factors that changed the south into a slave society. The thing that begun the need for slaves was the geography. In the south the climate is the soil is good, perfect for growing certain cash crops that were highly demanded in exports. These crops included tobacco, indigo, and rice. The people in the south decided instead of using indentured servants like in the north, they would go to an even cheaper labor force that they could keep for life and do whatever they wanted with. They decided to follow in the footsteps of the sugar colonies in the Caribbean and use enslaved Africans.

Another reason they chose to use slaves was because for workers certain areas in the south there is a high death rate because of the climate, and Africans were cheap to replace. They were often killed by being overworked, or because of mosquito born illnesses like malaria. The thing that really fueled slavery in the south was greed. The south was based on the plantation system; in the plantation system a wealthy landowner and his family own a huge plot of land.

They grow a cash crop to export and they exploit the labor of African slaves to produce their crop. This kind of thing was encouraged in the mercantilist system of the British, so the slave trade flourished and the southern American colonies became a slave society. So a system developed, the south would produce huge amounts of raw materials and trade that with the British and the northern colonies for manufactured goods, this was how they lived and without slaves to produce for them they would have gone broke. Another reason slavery became part of the south was because whites thought they were superior to blacks and that they should have the blacks as their slaves. This racism made slavery not only profitable but also socially expec table.

The whites made slavery work by making blacks inferior and controlling them with force, because on plantations slaves greatly outnumbered whites but they were to scared to rebel because of how harshly they were treated.