The Growth of America

Sugar increased the slave trade especially for the Portuguese. “Because planters needed three times as many workers to raise cane as tobacco, rising sugar production greatly multiplied the demand for labor” (76). Initially, white indentured servants were imported to do the work, but eventually as they became scarce slave traders switched to African slaves, causing the British West Indies to be transformed into a predominantly slave society. While the population of African Americans shot up, the population of white people remained stable.

Tobacco also attracted laborers. In places such as Virginia and Maryland, the profit generated from the tobacco industry was essentially the only way of supplying the population with the essentials for survival. When profits went down, plantation owners worked servants harder and for longer periods of time, elongating their required labor to be completed as a result of even minor offenses. Poverty in tobacco-dependant areas caused growing unrest, which was directed at Native Americans.

Rice grown in Carolina made the people there about as wealthy as sugar was making the Caribbeans. African slaves were preferred to work in the rice fields, both because there was a more likely chance that they had grown the crop in their homeland, and because many of them had developed immunities to diseases, such as malaria and yellow fever, which were easily destroying indentured white servants who had never before been exposed to them.