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Slavery In The Middle Passage

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Contrary to popular belief, slavery was a prominent labor system in the world for much of time. Before slavery really started to take hold in the Americas, typically plantations hired servants rather than slaves. This was because slaves were more expensive than servants and neither lived long, so it was smarter at the time for planters to pay for servants. After death rates started to drop, it was more logical for planters to invest in slaves. Even though they were more expensive than servants, they could work for years. While servant demand started diminishing, the slave demand heightened. This was only one of the many changes that helped slavery become more and more conspicuous. The Middle Passage allowed several hundred slaves to come to America on just a single ship. The Middle Passage had such despicable conditions that for every eighty-five slaves to come over, about fifteen died while on the Middle Passage journey. Slaves were unfamiliar with the foreign land of America and, this …show more content…

Before slave labor boomed normal slave imports would be about seventeen thousand and after slave labor became more popular it rose to about sixty thousand annually in under two centuries. Slave labor mainly started to grow because of increases in cash crops such as tobacco. Without the acceleration in these cash crops, then it is possible that slavery wouldn’t become as popular as it did. Slavery spread through the colonies very rapidly. Colonies began to realize the money that they could save from having slaves instead of servants, so they took the opportunity. Things like the Middle Passage and Atlantic Slave Trade made it very easy to make slavery the dominant labor system because slaves were plentiful. Just like ideas and crops can spread through colonies, slavery did as well. As stability in crops rose, so did slavery as the most effective labor system for southern

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