The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 — John Shaqi
The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922Various
History
The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922
Various
African Americans -- Periodicals
With the extensive development of various industries in the colonies,
slavery soon left the North and was used exclusively in the South.
There are several reasons for this shift. In the first place, the
colonies of the North were settled by people from the lower and middle
classes, who had been accustomed to working for themselves and who
thus had no use for slaves, while the South was settled largely by
adventurers, who had never worked and who looked upon labor as
dishonorable. In the second place, the North had a temperate climate
in which any man could safely work, while the heat of the South was so
intense that a white man endangered his life by working in it, whereas
the Negro was protected by facility of acclimation. Another cause was
the difference in soil. The soil of the South was favorable to the
growth of cotton, tobacco, rice, and sugar, the cultivation of which
crops required large forces of organized and concentrated labor, which
the slaves supplied. On the other hand, the soil of the North favored
the raising of cereals, which required neither organized nor
concentrated labor; for one man working alone was able to produce more
than one man working in a group: and thus slave labor was of little or
no advantage to the North. Then, too, its soil, lacking the fertility
of that of the South, required considerable fertilizing, which slave
labor did not have the intelligence to learn. Thus in 1750 the slaves
included three per cent of the population of the New England colonies,
nine per cent of the middle colonies, and twenty-five per cent of
those south of the Potomac River.[1] By the end of the eighteenth
century every State north of Maryland, with the exception of New
Jersey, had provided for the immediate or gradual abolition of
slavery, while the rise of the cotton industry, quickened by the
invention of the cotton gin in 1793, had bound the institution on the
South.
In order to understand the institutions of the South, it is first
necessary to know something about the dominating class of people. The
planters, numbering in 1860 about 384,750 and owning 2,308,518
slaves,[2] were first in the social scale and controlled affairs.
"They included an aristocracy or gentry reflecting distinctions of
colonial government, and expanding under influences that prevented an
amalgamation of widely separated elements."[3]
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