Survival of Slavery in The Southern Colonies

The survival of slavery in the Southern Colonies.

Slavery survived in the southern colonies of the New World because of a variety of factors. These factors included political, economic, and environmental incentives to keeping and using slaves. Politically the slave codes promoted the survival of slavery by taking away all rights of, and oppressing the slave community, making them far inferior to the English, making slavery, in the English eyes, a viable solution to their labor shortage.  Economically, the prices plantation owners fetched for the tobacco and rice their slaves cultivated, coupled with the cheapness and extensive ownership of the labor, provided them with large profits. And Environmentally, the Africans natural hardiness and conditioning to a warmer, more humid climate, made them the optimum workforce in the hoter southern colonies, as the English indentured servants were more likely to die from the heat because of coming from a more temperate climate. Slavery in the southern colonies was able to survive as a way of society because of these defining factors of the benefits of slaves.

The Slave trade surviving as the veritable crux of southern colonial society was due largely in part to the huge economic gains that could be had by selling slaves and by using slaves as a labor force. The large plantations of rice and tobacco needed a lot of labor to harvest their crops. Slaves provided that labor. Plantation owners could make huge profits from their slaves because once they bought a slave, that person’s labor was theirs until the slave died. This allowed for fewer purchases of workers. Indentured servants, Englishmen who agreed to work for 4-7 years in exchange for paid passage across the atlantic, would eventually be free because their contracts would expire, and since they cost around the same amount as a slave and had around the same life expectancy, slaves were a much more cost-effective choice. Alternately, the men who transported slaves across the Middle Passage, also reaped large profits. Because slaves were in high demand, due to a high mortality rate and expanding plantation population in the colonies, their captors and shippers could charge, and receive, a much higher price per slave, so high in fact that even if they lost half of their slaves on the trip across The Middle Passage, they could still expect a handsome profit from the venture. Yet even with the high prices for slaves, the plantation owners still made enormous profits because of the high prices of the goods they sold. Replacing slaves was no real problem for them and the norm as it happened quite often.