Slavery In Colonial America

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Slavery in Colonial America was different from all previous forms of slavery. This is because of the factors that race and economics played in slavery. The people in southern colonies needed slaves to be able to compete in the market, there was a labor need on the plantations, and the potential profit was much larger for a slave owner than a regular farmer. Racism also played a role in New World slavery as the people had negative pre conceptions of “blackness”, and racism was reinforced by the brutal methods used, which in turn reinforced the usage of the brutal methods. Also, the Africans were not the initial resort, as Indentured Servants and Native Americans were both used prior to the Africans. Slavery in the southern colonies was rooted…show more content…
The motivation for slavery in the New World “was not racism but the pursuit of profit”. The potential profit for the farmers was their main motivation for utilizing slavery. Slavery in Colonial America was popular because there was a need for “the whites to find a reliable and stable labor force”. The southern colonies had many opportunities for economic growth, and slavery allowed them to capitalize on them. There were many southern plantations that would not have been able to be as proficient had there not been slave labor to help the farmers. A specific example of this is rice production in South Carolina and Georgia, as “rice cultivation was so difficult and unhealthy that white laborers generally refused to perform it. Hence planters in South Carolina and Georgia were more dependent on slaves than their northern counterparts”. Farmers who did not utilize slaves would not be able to compete in rice cultivation with other farmers who had many slaves to do the labor for them. The economic market reinforced slavery as the farmers needed to own slaves to be able to compete with others. Therefore, slavery in the southern colonies was based on the economic benefits of a cheap, stable…show more content…
Slavery “was both a labor system and a means of racial control in a white people's country... [Slavery] only reinforced racial prejudice in a vicious cycle”. Slavery had two purposes, to create a labor force and to enforce the whites beliefs of racial superiority over the Africans. These points both worsened racial prejudice as the white people looked even further down upon the slaves, which led them to use more dehumanizing processes. This even furthered the ideas of superiority over the Africans. The whites created stereotypes of Africans as being uncivilized to “ma[ke] it easier to fasten chains upon them”. These stereotypes enabled the colonists to have stronger thoughts of superiority and stronger thoughts of the African people’s inferiority. Furthermore, these views link back as the “color black evoke[d] a highly negative symbolism, conjuring up images of death and sin”, which further brought a negative connotation to Africans and proved to the colonists their inferiority. Moreover, the racist ideas and brutal methods of controlling the slaves were changed by the colonists’ beliefs of African
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