Slavery In Early Colonial America

Between the years of 1670 and 1750, the enslaved population in the northern colonies remained at a steady number. In the southern colonies, population of enslaved African Americans increased from 15 percent to almost 40 percent of the total population. Slave labor allowed southern farmers to plant and harvest more crops without having to pay for labor, leading to the emergence of the wealthy planter-class that defines the antebellum south. Without the labor of enslaved people, this planter class would not have amassed exorbitant sums of wealth. Having slaves allowed these families to become even wealthier, helping them buy more slaves. Plantation owners would purchase slaves from the region of the West Africa that had experience growing rice

The obvious similarity was that both practices saw someone of a lower social class serving someone of a higher class. However, slavery was very different in many ways. Slavery was involuntary, hereditary and lifelong: you couldn’t earn your way out of slavery, and the servitude was passed through generations, as your children would be slaves as well. Additionally, slaves were generally brought in from faraway places, such as Africa, meaning that slaves were of a different race and nationality than those whom they served.
Early slavery began largely as an economic institution. Colonists in early America needed labor to produce an economic profit. In the southern colonies, the need was much greater, as the climate and region was much more suited to rice, cotton, and other staple crops that required a large workforce. Slavery still existed in the northern colonies but to a much lesser degree than in the south. Throughout the 1600s and into the 1700s, slavery grew in strength in the colonies, as it was increasingly given legal

The conditions in the Caribbean were horrible, and many slaves who remained there died of disease. Of those slaves who were brought to the American colonies, the population was able to grow on its own, as the slaves did not die as quickly from disease and terrible work conditions.
With the American Revolution, great changes came to North America. The British colonies became states and an American nation. Whereas the years leading up to the revolution saw slavery gaining increasingly greater legal protection in the south, the institution became weaker in the north as abolitionists, who sought to end slavery, began to grow in number and northern states began passing laws to either restrict or abolish slavery. This early abolition movement was rooted in religious groups, mostly located in the