Why did chesapeake planters

Return to skim any sections that seem unfamiliar. What challenges faced early Chesapeake colonists? One hundred forty-four English colonists arrived at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay on April 26, Powhatan, a powerful chief of nearly fourteen thousand Algonquian people who lived in the Chesapeake, rescued the weakened and demoralized English colonists by offering them corn for barter.

Despite promises by the Virginia Company that the colony would make settlers rich, most colonists went to an early grave. Later, the colonists captured Pocahontas and held her hostage at Jamestown where she converted to Christianity and married John Rolfe.

Although the Indians retaliated against the English, they did not organize an all-out assault against the intruders, because they needed the colonists as allies against other tribes in the region, and because they valued English goods obtained through trade. The demise of the Virginia Company marked the end of the first phase of colonization of the Chesapeake region. Tobacco was a demanding crop that required close attention and a great deal of hand labor year-round.

The English colonists worked hard because their labor promised greater rewards in the Chesapeake region than in England. Indentured servants borrowed the cost of transportation from a merchant or a ship captain in England who sold this contract to a tobacco planter in North America; the servants agreed to work for four to seven years to repay the loan. When the servant survived his term of indenture, the system allowed for planters to reap handsome profits and promised poor immigrants freedom in a land of promise.

Indentured servants were overwhelmingly male, young, and unskilled; women and skilled craftsmen were rare in the Chesapeake. The servant labor system perpetuated the gender imbalance in the Chesapeake, although all servants, regardless of gender, race, or nationality, tended to work and socialize together.

Servants had no control over who purchased their labor and the work they performed in the tobacco fields was difficult. Planters devised severe laws to keep servants in their place and to extend the terms of indenture; women servants were subject to special restrictions and risks, and were frequently pressured into sexual relations but prohibited from marrying during their term of indenture.

Planters could not easily hire free men and women because land was abundant, and free people preferred to work on their own land for themselves. The principle cash crop harvested by the South Carolina slave population in the early 18th century was rice, a crop which probably originated in Madagascar and had been introduced into South Carolina in Once rice was established as the principle cash crop of South Carolina, it brought unprecedented wealth and prosperity to planters and the region.

It is no coincidence that white planters in the region starting importing African slaves when rice cultivation was introduced into the South, as the first English planters in South Carolina knew little about rice cultivation. The planters relied on the expertise of their African slaves imported from the Rice Coast. For instance, enslaved Africans showed planters how to properly dyke the marshes, periodically flood the rice fields, and use sweetgrass baskets for milling the rice quicker than wooden paddles.

These innovations increased the efficiency and profitability of cultivation. In later years, water-powered mills, designed by millwright Jonathan Lucas, also helped expand rice cultivation in the South. Rice plantations were larger than their tobacco counterparts in the Chesapeake, and planters expected slaves to cultivate up to five acres of rice a year, in addition to growing their own vegetables to feed themselves and their families.

Rice cultivation in the southeastern United States became less profitable with the loss of slave labor after the American Civil War, and it finally died out just after the turn of the 20th century. The Old Plantation, c. Painting of slaves on a South Carolina plantation. While Northern states had fewer slaves and eventually outlawed slavery entirely, they were still economically dependent on the institution. The northeastern and mid-Atlantic states, including Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, had legally permitted slavery in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Even though slavery was permitted, northern states characteristically had far smaller slave populations than the South. Few slave ships arrived in New York, Philadelphia, or Boston, which instead became trade centers for manufactured goods. Slaves that lived in the North were often domestic servants or bondsmen to small farmers and rural ironworks.

Unlike in the South, northern farms were not large-scale enterprises that focused on producing a single cash crop; instead they were often smaller, more agriculturally diversified enterprises that required fewer laborers.

Hence, the need for enslaved bondsmen gradually dwindled—especially as rapid soil depletion and the growth of industry in northern cities attracted many rural northerners to wage labor. The first U. The states created from this region—Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota—were generally settled by New England farmers and American Revolutionary War veterans who were granted land in this area. This territory was entirely slave-free from its inception and separated by the Ohio River from the South, which was pushing for an expansion of legal slavery into the West.

After the Northwest Ordinance, Massachusetts abolished slavery in its state constitution, and several other northern states followed suit by drafting statutes that provided for gradual emancipation. In , New Jersey became the last northern state to abolish slavery. Even though slavery was not a prevalent institution in the North, the commercial urban centers that sprang up in these colonies meant that most northerners had a vested stake in ensuring that American slavery flourished in the South.

This is particularly true after the advent of the cotton gin, which supplied the North with the surplus of raw cotton necessary to produce finished goods for export. Northern industry and commerce relied on southern cash crop production; therefore, while slavery was actively abolished in the North, most northerners were content to allow slavery to flourish in the southern states.

The Northwest Ordinance was also a free territory, though it was not yet incorporated as a state. The rise of large-scale plantations in the South led to the widespread use of slavery to support the colonial economy. However, it was in the large agricultural plantations in the South where slavery took hold the strongest. Early on, enslaved people in the South worked primarily in agriculture —on farms and plantations growing indigo, rice, and tobacco.

Cotton did not become a major crop until after the American Revolution. The invention of the cotton gin in enabled the cultivation of short-staple cotton in a wide variety of areas, leading to the development of large areas of the Deep South as cotton country in the 19th century.

Tobacco was very labor-intensive, as was rice cultivation. The Chesapeake region and North Carolina thrived on tobacco production, while South Carolina and Georgia thrived on rice and indigo. The rapid expansion of large-scale plantations and single-crop agriculture in the Deep South greatly increased demand for slave labor, and slavery became the backbone of the British colonies.

While the southern part of Carolina produced thriving economies on rice and indigo a plant that yields a dark blue dye used by English royalty throughout the 18th century, the northern part of Carolina—later established as the separate colony of North Carolina—turned more toward tobacco production, like its neighbor Virginia.

North Carolina continued to produce items for ships, especially turpentine and tar, and its population increased as Virginians moved there to expand their tobacco holdings. Tobacco was the primary export of both Virginia and North Carolina, which increasingly came to rely on slave labor from Africa.

In the s, Enlightenment principles prompted the founding of a new colony: Georgia. However, colonists who relocated from other colonies, especially South Carolina, disregarded this prohibition and brought with them their slaves. Unlike the southern colonies around him, Oglethorpe originally envisioned Georgia to be a slave-free society.

Privacy Policy. Skip to main content. Expansion of the Colonies: — Search for:. Slavery in the Colonies. Slavery and Empire Slave labor and the African slave trade formed the backbone of the American colonial economy.

Learning Objectives Discuss the historical trend of slavery, the increasing demand for slave labor in the New World, and the various groups that resisted slavery. Key Takeaways Key Points The idea that military victors had the right to enslave defeated opponents was commonly held in ancient Greece and Rome. The increasing demand for imported labor in the American colonies turned the slave trade into a large-scale and highly lucrative business. Only a small fraction of the enslaved Africans brought to the New World ended up in British North America, with the vast majority of slaves sent to the Caribbean sugar colonies.

In the North American colonies, the importation of African slaves was directed mainly southward, where extensive tobacco, rice, and cotton plantation economies demanded extensive labor forces for cultivation; this created the Southern slave institution in the United States. Poor working conditions, disease, and malnutrition contributed to the high mortality rate among slaves in the Americas.

Forms of slave resistance ranged from slow labor paces to violent rebellion. Key Terms bondage : The state of being enslaved or the practice of slavery. The Triangular Trade Triangular Trade was a system in which slaves, crops, and manufactured goods were traded between Africa, the Americas, and Europe.

Key Takeaways Key Points An estimated 9. The First Atlantic System refers to the 16th-century period in which Portuguese merchants dominated the West African slave trade—supplying Spanish and Portuguese New World colonies with imported African labor. The Second Atlantic System characterizes the 17th and 18th centuries, when British, Dutch, and French merchants replaced the Portuguese as the major slave traders in the Atlantic. In the Triangular Trade, enslaved Africans were imported from Africa to the American colonies as the labor force needed to produce cash crops, which were exported to Europe in exchange for manufactured goods.

European goods were then used to trade with Africans for slaves, who were exported to the American colonies, where the cycle of the trade started again. The mortality rate on slave ships was very high, and an estimated 2 million enslaved passengers died en route from disease, violence, abuse, lack of food or water, or suicide.

Key Terms triangular trade : A system of exchange of slaves, cash crops, and manufactured goods between West Africa, Caribbean or American colonies, and Europe from the late 16th to early 19th centuries. Chesapeake Slavery The economy of the Chesapeake region revolved around tobacco and relied heavily on slave labor. Learning Objectives Discuss how planters in the Chesapeake region increasingly invested in the Atlantic slave trade to support their rural tobacco-based economy.

Key Takeaways Key Points The Chesapeake colonies developed similar agricultural systems based on tobacco, which later diversified to include cotton and indigo. Tobacco required intensive labor for cultivation, and the declining availability of white indentured servants —as well as fear of uprisings from wealthy whites—made Chesapeake planters turn toward African slave labor. A royal governor appointed justices of the peace, who set tax rates and saw to the building and maintenance of public works, such as bridges and roads.

In the s, the colonial assembly adopted a bicameral pattern: the House of Burgesses the elected lower house and an appointed Governor's Council. The assembly met regularly, not so much for representative government as for the opportunity to raise taxes. The founding of Maryland. Lord Baltimore planned for Maryland to serve as a haven for English Catholics who suffered political and religious discrimination in England, but few Catholics actually settled in the colony.

Protestants were attracted by the inexpensive land that Baltimore offered to help him pay his debts. Baltimore granted his friends the large estates, which resembled medieval manors and paved the way for the plantation system. At first, relations between Maryland's Catholics and Protestants seemed amicable. For a time they even shared the same chapel. In , under Baltimore's urging, the colonial assembly passed the Act of Religious Toleration , the first law in the colonies granting freedom of worship, albeit only for Christians.

By , however, with Maryland's Protestants in the majority, the act was repealed. A near civil war broke out and order was not restored until , when Lord Baltimore was returned to power. Religious squabbles continued for years in the Maryland colony. Chesapeake society and economy. Tobacco was the mainstay of the Virginia and Maryland economies.