Why Slavery Took Root in the American South | A Brief History of Things

Slavery was more widespread and more lasting in the Southeast, an old tradition going back to the Mississippian societies, whose leaders saw slaves as symbols of power and revenge.

In the last 25 years of the 17th century, the English chose to build slavery on the American mainland, and so made themselves the largest slaveholders in the world. In many ways the American colonies' turn to bondage is puzzling.

Among the countries of Western Europe, England was once thought the least likely to take up so brutal a form of servitude, because opposition to slavery ran wider there than anywhere else in Europe. That came largely out of resentment at the Barbary pirates of North Africa, who preyed on English ships year after year: from the 16th century to the 18th they enslaved thousands upon thousands of English sailors, soldiers and merchants.

Slavery made little economic sense either, since a slave cost more than a servant. In the closing decades of the 17th century an adult male African slave sold for 25 pounds on average, while a servant's indenture ran about 10 pounds. As Adam Smith saw it, slaves were resentful workers, usually from a distant culture, who did not speak their master's language, knew nothing of his society, and had to be trained from scratch. Worse, they had every reason to run away, to sabotage the work, or to kill the man who owned them. An indentured servant, by contrast, spoke his master's language, accepted the same rules, and knew the same way of farming. His contract ran for a fixed term, so he had no reason to flee. All else being equal, then, a planter should have chosen the cheaper, easier, less dangerous option: servants from Europe.

In fact the English colonies did choose indentured servants at first, and largely stayed away from slaves. In the first hundred years of the colonial era, indentured servants made up between a third and a half of all the Europeans who came to North America. Slaves were rare: in 1650 the whole colony of Virginia held only 300. Then, between 1680 and 1700, their number suddenly jumped. In those two decades Virginia's enslaved population grew from 3,000 to more than 16,000, and kept climbing. Over the same years the number of indentured servants shrank sharply. This was a turning point in world history. From then on England's American colonies were slave societies, and England was the master of the slave trade.

What caused the turn? One explanation is that as the American colonies spread, cheap land grew more plentiful, the pull on workers grew stronger, employers were bound to want to limit how freely those workers could move, and enslavement was the hard-to-avoid end point. But that does not explain why slavery was uncommon in land-rich English colonies such as New England and New York, and common in land-poor English colonies on Caribbean islands such as Barbados and Saint Kitts.

So many researchers have turned to a second explanation. England's sectarian wars in the middle of the 17th century were a disaster: between 1650 and 1680 the country's population fell by nearly 10%. Fewer workers pushed wages up at home, which was bound to raise the pay needed to draw indentured servants across the Atlantic. At the same time, servants in Massachusetts, Virginia and Carolina whose terms had run out were setting up plantations of their own and looking for indentured servants themselves, which drove the price of labor higher still.

Yet before turning to slaves, planters had one more option: to look for workers in Scotland. The Little Ice Age was bringing one failed harvest after another, and desperate Scots were leaving home in great numbers. Thousands took service as mercenaries in Russia, Sweden, Norway and the German principalities, and crowds of Scottish refugees wandered the streets of London with their hands out, begging for work and food. To the American colonies they looked like labor for the taking, and English farmers had been hiring poor Scots for centuries.

Groups of Scots did come to the American colonies. But malaria was raging there, and Scots and other Europeans died so fast in malarial country that they were of little use as workers. Britons still crossed to America family by family, but merchants gradually stopped shipping Europeans over in bulk and began looking for another supply of labor.

For a time the Native peoples of the southeastern colonies were that supply. Slavery existed in most Native societies, though the institution differed from one to another. It was more widespread and more lasting in the Southeast, an old tradition going back to the Mississippian societies, whose leaders saw slaves as symbols of power and revenge. Slaves worked the fields or did menial chores, and could be handed over as gifts.

When Europeans turned up in Carolina, the tribal confederacies there were glad to trade their surplus slaves for axes, knives, metal pots and, above all, guns. The confederacies of the Southeast saw at once how much better the new weapons were, and an arms race broke out across the region. Local peoples raided their enemies, took captives to sell, and traded them to Europeans for firearms. That called for still more firearms, since guns were needed for defense as well — demand breeding demand, in a vicious circle.

By 1700 England's colonies ran along the Atlantic coast, from what is now Maine in the north to South Carolina in the south. The northern colonies lived beside tribes that barely kept slaves and had no interest in trading captives. The southern colonies lived beside tribes descended from the old Mississippian societies, which held many slaves and had long experience of the slave trade. Chesapeake Bay was the line between the two kinds of society — and it lay not far from what would later divide America's slave states from its free ones.

In economic terms, trading Native slaves was good business for locals and newcomers alike: one slave bought a gun, ammunition, a horse, a hatchet and a set of clothes, goods that would otherwise take a long stretch of hunting to earn. For a planter, a Native captive cost 5 to 10 pounds, half the price of an indentured servant. More important, a slave cost far less to keep each year, because there was no need to let him go after a few years — so the purchase price could be recovered over decades.

Between Native slaves and indentured servants, the colonists chose the former. Carolina's first census, in 1708, counted 4,000 English colonists, about 1,500 Native slaves, and only 160 servants, most of them under indenture.

Yet however rich the profits of the Native slave trade, it was also very short-lived. By 1715 it had all but disappeared.

First, it suffered in part from its own success. Carolina's colonial elite pressed the Native peoples for slave raids more and more often, until the whole American Southeast was at war and no side had any peace. The tribes that suffered picked up guns and launched a string of attacks on Carolina that nearly destroyed the colony.

Second, Native slaves were unreliable, even dangerous workers, who used what they knew of the land against their masters.

Finally, malaria came to Carolina, as it had to Virginia. The English colonists decided to use the warm climate to grow rice, and that soon proved a fatal choice. Rice paddies are notorious havens for mosquitoes. Plasmodium falciparum arrived; a few years later so did yellow fever. The graveyards filled quickly. In some parishes more than three-quarters of the colonists' children died before the age of 20. As in Virginia, nearly half of all deaths came in the autumn.

Native people caught malaria as readily as English indentured servants did, and had no resistance at all to other diseases. Across the American Southeast the death toll among them was appalling. Once again the colonists went looking for another answer to their labor problem: people who could withstand disease better than European servants or Native slaves. They soon found one — adults from West and Central Africa. Then as now, they were the least likely people in the world to catch malaria. Populations with inherited resistance to it exist all over the world, but those of West and Central Africa stand out: they are almost completely immune to vivax malaria and about half-resistant to falciparum malaria, on top of the strong acquired immunity built up by repeated infection in childhood. In Virginia and Carolina, where vivax malaria was rife, African slaves survived and had children at higher rates than English colonists did, and their immunity became the source of their enslavement. Europeans found that if they wanted to grow tobacco, rice or sugarcane, African slaves were the best choice — better than European indentured servants or Native slaves.

The border between Pennsylvania and Maryland is known as the Mason-Dixon Line, the famous boundary surveyed in 1768 by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon. It split the American East Coast roughly in two: on one side falciparum malaria raged, on the other it did not. It also divided the regions where African slavery was the main institution from those where it was not — and, oddly enough, it ran close to the line between the Native societies that held slaves and those that did not.

It was a cultural line as well, with one of the most durable divisions in American culture on either side of it: the Yankee North and the Dixie South. Some historians have long insisted that the cradle of Southern culture was the great plantation. Later research showed that in colonial times great plantations existed only in the countryside south of Chesapeake Bay and in the lowlands around Charleston — plainly the two English colonies worst hit by malaria. Seen that way, the mansion in the film Gone with the Wind looks like the ideal house for malarial country: built on top of a low hill, ringed by broad, flat, closely trimmed lawns, its tall windows thrown open to the wind. Every detail seems designed to keep out the five-spotted anopheles, an insect that breeds well only in low, uneven, sometimes sheltered, windless places.

Some scholars point out that malarial places were more prone to "extreme economic polarization." A bigger plantation cost more to run, but it was also safer. In the sickly season a rich Carolina planter could afford to move to a malaria-free house in the mountains or by the sea, while poor farmers and slaves had to stay in the fever country. Over time the big planters gained the upper hand and the small owners went on struggling. So the malaria parasite not only pushed farmers toward slavery, it also favored the growth of the great plantation, which in turn raised the demand for slaves.

In a sense slavery flourished together with the falciparum parasite and the social and cultural divisions already in place, and as the years passed it was reinforced again and again, in the economy and in the culture alike. That may explain why the American South became the stronghold of slavery.

Recommended reading: 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

Cover image: 12 Years a Slave

How does an object become a globalized commodity? How does an object drive globalization? And how is an object manufactured on a global scale? The column "A Brief History of Things" starts from "objects," looking at how these "objects" have permeated our lives and changed our world.

Topics it has covered include: shipping containers, railroads, water, Disney, climate, discounts, T-shirts, nautical charts, warriors, tea, spices, opium, coffee, timber, used clothing, trade, soybeans, IKEA, Arabia, corn, hotels, gold, disease, silver, fur, oil, natural gas, Western civilization, the railroad stock wars, automobiles, luxury goods, poverty, antibiotics, the Swiss tourism industry, General Electric, cable TV, advertising, Discovery Channel, merchants, car models, the yuan, missionaries, guano, Amway, adventurers, the steam engine, addiction, shipping routes, cotton, eggplant, the Huguang-fills-Sichuan migration, the Nicaragua Canal, FAW-Volkswagen, bathing, New York, agriculture, alliances, HSBC, mountaineering, ports, cotton cloth, the euro, Amazon's "priority delivery", weeding, tea theft, scrap, "Zara syndrome", wilderness culture, Matteo Ricci's map, the convert Shen Fuzong, the Black Death, cod, human genes, migrating to Southeast Asia, red-barbarian cannons, barbarians in economics, the welfare state, herbal medicine in Western medicine, machine guns, tin tanks, smallpox, ISIS, the Cold War, sports, overseas Chinese, the Battle of Waterloo, Zhukov, Republican-era political parties, the East India Company, artillery, Stilwell, innovation, the Pacific War, the Opium War, "Western Shock", Chinese food, Europe, Prussia, Arab nationalism, the Middle East wars, the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the financial crisis, Chinese youth tour groups to Japan, air pollution, The Internationale, Volkswagen, the "Jiang Qing dress", the Manchus, teamwork, Japanese industrial policy, appeasement, the Nazis, coal, World War I, the collapse of the Soviet Union, lawsuit marketing, "Collecting China", ballots, Indian independence, tea sterilization, Captain Sully, populism, Portuguese expeditions, Brzezinski, the Turkish empire, the Afghan war, 9/11, China-Japan relations, the fabi currency reform, red currency, Connectography, the pushback of domestic goods, the August 19 incident, street protests, the Qing government's market bailout, Japan's underclass, the fates of the Nationalists and Communists, the "Punish Vietnam" diplomatic war, the Taiping Rebellion, the Qin and Han empires, the Tibet question, the British Empire, Stalin, Kublai Khan's "capital region", the wokou pirates, democracy in wartime, MacArthur's legacy, brandy, rum, and modern America, Soviet cinema, the Ottoman Empire, young Stalin, the foreign-run customs service, the Soong family, 1916, vegetarianism in Asia, the divide between Europe and America, late-Qing newspapermen, Afghanistan, Qing finances in Xinjiang, the Genghis Khan exchange, German nationalism, the Qing empire, royal hunts, America 1927, the electricity war, rust, sleep, the Vietnam War, Reagan, ruins, the May Thirtieth Movement, the partition of Palestine, Israel, Bridgewater Associates, post-industrial cities, The Wealth of Nations, World War I, 1950s America, U.S. naval warfare, Microsoft, cloud computing, nationalism, automation, the English Revolution, Istanbul, World War I, ethnic cleansing, Yuan Shikai……