Question

research paper five paragraphs with five source with citation.

Why did plantation labor transition from Amerindian and indentured labor to enslaved African labor? How did each labor system work? What products magnified labor systems?

Answer 1

After enslaved Native American laborers began to die due to exposure to disease, European powers began purchasing enslaved Africans, who became their primary labor source. Britain sent their first slave ships to the British West Indies to work on tobacco plantations and then later sugarcane plantations.

Spread of slavery: In the English colonies, the first use of enslaved labor started in the British West Indies. The majority of enslaved Africans were sent to the tobacco fields in the British West Indies, even after the first ship of enslaved Africans landed in Virginia in 1619. By 1776, 20% of the colonial population was African American. There is a common misconception that slavery was limited to the Chesapeake and Southern colonies, as well as the British West Indies. Slavery did exist in the New England and Middle colonies, just at a smaller scale. In New England, enslaved Africans accounted for about 2-3% of the population before the American Revolution.

Labor systems: The first labor system in the British colonies was indentured servitude, in which servants worked for landowners in exchange for passage to America. But because indentured servants only worked for a short period of time and sometimes fought over access to land after their terms ended, plantation owners switched to using enslaved Africans as their primary source of labor. Enslaved Africans became vital to the cultivation of tobacco and soon made up nearly 50% of the population in the Chesapeake and Southern colonies.

Methods of resistance: Enslaved Africans resisted slavery in both covert and overt ways. Examples of covert forms of resistance include work slow-downs and breaking tools. Examples of overt forms of resistance include running away or organizing rebellions. One of the most successful rebellions in the American colonies was the Stono Rebellion in 1739, which resulted in the deaths of more than 40 white colonists and more than 40 Africans.

It 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 planters in South Carolina knew little about rice cultivation. The planters relied on the expertise of their African slaves imported from the Rice Coast. For instance, 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 up to five acres of rice a year, in addition to growing their own vegetables to feed themselves and their families.

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 particularly true after the advent of the cotton gin, which supplied the North 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, most northerners were content to allow slavery to flourish in the southern states. Indeed, it wasn’t until later arguments over the admission and representation of states in the union and the threat of southern states overpowering their northern counterparts because of their higher slave populations, that many northerners began to oppose the expansion of southern slavery.