What Was the Main Benefit of Slavery to Governments in the Colonies?

With cash crops of tobacco, cotton wool and sugar pikestaff, America's southern states became the economic engine of the burgeoning nation. Their fuel of choice? Human being slavery.

If the Confederacy had been a separate nation, information technology would have ranked as the 4th richest in the world at the start of the Civil State of war. The slave economy had been very adept to American prosperity. By the get-go of the war, the South was producing 75 percent of the world's cotton fiber and creating more than millionaires per capita in the Mississippi River valley than anywhere in the nation. Enslaved workers represented Southern planters' most meaning investment—and the majority of their wealth.

Enslaved workers leaving the fields with baskets of cotton. (Credit: Bettmann Archives/Getty Images)

An Economic system Congenital on Slavery

Building a commercial enterprise out of the wilderness required labor and lots of it. For much of the 1600s, the American colonies operated as agricultural economies, driven largely by indentured servitude. Most workers were poor, unemployed laborers from Europe who, similar others, had traveled to North America for a new life. In exchange for their work, they received food and shelter, a rudimentary didactics and sometimes a trade.

By 1680, the British economy improved and more jobs became available in Britain. During this time, slavery had become a morally, legally and socially acceptable institution in the colonies. As the number of European laborers coming to the colonies dwindled, enslaving Africans became a commercial necessity—and more widely acceptable.

With ideal climate and available state, property owners in the southern colonies began establishing plantation farms for greenbacks crops like rice, tobacco and carbohydrate cane—enterprises that required increasing amounts of labor. To encounter the need, wealthy planters turned to traders, who imported ever more homo chattel to the colonies, the vast bulk from West Africa. Equally more enslaved Africans were imported and an upsurge in fertility rates expanded the "inventory," a new manufacture was born: the slave sale. These open markets where humans were inspected like animals and bought and sold to the highest applicant proved an increasingly lucrative enterprise. By the mid-19th century, a skilled, able-bodied enslaved person could fetch up to $2,000, although prices varied by the country.

Slave sale circa 1861. (Credit: API/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images)

Economic Necessity Trumps Morality

Slave labor had go so entrenched in the Southern economy that naught—not even the belief that all men were created equal—would dislodge it. When delegates to the Ramble Convention met in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, they were split up on the moral question of man bondage and homo's inhumanity to man, but not on its economic necessity. At the fourth dimension, in that location were near 700,000 enslaved people living in the United States, worth many millions in today'south dollars.

When the topic of slavery arose during the deliberations over calculating political representation in Congress, the southern states of Georgia and the Carolinas demanded that each enslaved person be counted along with whites. The northern states balked, saying it gave southern states an unfair advantage. Their compromise? Delegates agreed that each enslaved person would count as three-fifths of a person, giving the Due south more representation, and that the slave trade would exist banned xx years hence, in 1807, a concession to Northern states that had abolished slavery several years before.

VIDEO: The System of American Slavery – Historians and experts examine the American system of racialized slavery and the hypocrisy it relied on to office.

Before the American Revolution, tobacco was the colonies' main cash crop, with exports of the aromatic leaf increasing from 60,000 pounds in 1622 to 1.v million past 1639. Past the cease of the century, Uk was importing more than than 20 1000000 pounds of tobacco per year. Simply after the colonies won independence, Britain no longer favored American products and considered tobacco a competitor to crops produced elsewhere in the empire. E'er a fickle article for growers, tobacco was beset by price fluctuations, weakness to conditions changes and an exhausting of the soil's nutrients. Simply even as tobacco waned in importance, another cash crop showed promise: cotton fiber.

Slaves on an American plantation operating a cotton fiber gin. (Credit: MPI/Getty Images)

Roll to Continue

King Cotton

Picking and cleaning cotton involved a labor-intensive process that slowed production and limited supply. In 1794, inventor Eli Whitney devised a machine that combed the cotton bolls free of their seeds in very short order. Manually, one enslaved person could pick the seeds out of x pounds of cotton in a day. The cotton gin, which Whitney patented in 1794, could process 100 pounds in the same time.

There was an irony in all this. Many people believed the cotton gin would reduce the need for enslaved people because the machine could supplant homo labor. But in reality, the increased processing capacity accelerated need. The more cotton processed, the more that could be exported to the mills of Great Britain and New England. And the invention of the cotton gin coincided with other developments that opened up large-calibration global trade: Cargo ships were built bigger, better and easier to navigate. Powerful navies protected them against piracy. And newly invented steam engines powered these ships, as well as looms and weaving machines, which increased the chapters to produce cotton cloth.

With all these factors amping up product and distribution, the South was poised to expand its cotton-based economy. With more land needed for cultivation, the number of plantations expanded in the Due south and moved west into new territory. Production exploded: Betwixt 1801 and 1835 alone, the U.Southward. cotton fiber exports grew from 100,000 bales to more than a million, comprising half of all U.S. exports. The event: As cotton became the backbone of the Southern economic system, slavery drove impressive profits.

The benefits of cotton wool produced past enslaved workers extended to industries beyond the South. In the N and Bully United kingdom, cotton mills hummed, while the financial and shipping industries also saw gains. Banks in New York and London provided capital to new and expanding plantations for purchasing both land and enslaved workers. As a result, enslaved people became a legal class of holding that could be used equally collateral in business concern transactions or to pay off outstanding debt. Enslaved people comprised a sizable portion of a planter's property holdings, becoming a source of tax revenue for state and local governments. A sort of sales tax was as well levied on enslaved worker transactions.

Steadily, a well-nigh-feudal society emerged in the South. At the top was the aloof landowning elite, who wielded much of the economic and political ability. Their plantations spanned upwards of a thou acres, controlling hundreds—and, in some cases, thousands—of enslaved people. A civilisation of gentility and high-minded codes of honor emerged.

Below the elite class were the pocket-size planters who owned a handful of enslaved people. These farmers were self-made and fiercely independent. Pocket-sized farmers without enslaved workers and landless whites were at the bottom, making up three-quarters of the white population—and dreaming of the solar day when they, too, might ain enslaved people.

No matter how wide the gap between rich and poor, class tensions among whites were eased by the belief they all belonged to the "superior race." Many convinced themselves they were actually doing God'due south work taking care of what they believed was an inferior people.

Enslaved people returning from the cotton fields in South Carolina, circa 1860. (Credit: Fotosearch/Getty Images)

Slavery, Wealth and the Confederacy

By the start of the 19th century, slavery and cotton had become essential to the connected growth of America'due south economy. However, by 1820, political and economical pressure on the South placed a wedge betwixt the North and South. The Abolitionist movement, which called for an elimination of the institution of slavery, gained influence in Congress. Tariff taxes were passed to help Northern businesses fend off strange competition but injure Southern consumers. By the 1850s, many Southerners believed a peaceful secession from the Union was the only path forrard.

When considering leaving the Union, Southerners knew the North had an overwhelming reward over the South in population, industrial output and wealth. Still, the booming cotton economy most Southerners were optimistic almost their future. Equally one state later some other left the Union in 1860 and 1861, many Southerners believed they were doing the right affair to preserve their independence and their property.

To raise funds, Confederate leaders sold bonds for gilt coin, which was in apportionment at the fourth dimension. The Confederate currency was inherently weak and became weaker with each press. In time, the paper coin lost xc percent of its ownership power. What gilt and silver existed, was taken out of circulation and hoarded by the government and individual citizens.

What Happened to the Gilded?

Past state of war'southward terminate, the Confederacy had picayune usable capital to continue the fight. In the conflict's waning days, it is believed that Confederate officials stashed away millions of dollars' worth of gilt, almost in Richmond, Virginia. As the Spousal relationship Army entered the Confederate capital in 1865, Confederate President Jefferson Davis and millions of dollars of golden escaped to Georgia. What happened after that is disputed, the subject field of many myths and legends.

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