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Southern Colonies Essay

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The hunger for the abundance of wealth was the motivating force behind the settlement and origin of the Southern Colonies. Beginning in the early 1600’s, many wealthy Europeans from England made an investment of men and money into a potential trading post in the New World.. While the initial goal was to find gold, the brutality of the environment forced the first colonists in Jamestown, Virginia to learn how to farm in order to survive. As the colony began to become sustainable, lands began to be purchased and the mass cultivation of products such as Tobacco, rice, coffee, sugar started to take root. During the growing stages of the first colony, the primary use of labor was white Indentured servants from England. As gardens turned into plantations, …show more content…

Under the autocratic rule of Cecilius Calvert, Maryland became a colony in 1632. With a similar climate to England, it was another opportunity for the rich to buy more land and for the poor to escape Europe. With not enough workers, Maryland turned to the use of African slaves for field labor. According to Eric Foner, “Of the estimated 7.7 million Africans transported to the New World between 1492 and 1820, more than half arrived between 1700 and 1800...it was a regularized business in which European merchants, African traders, and American planters engaged in a complex bargaining over human lives”(Foner 131). West Africa’s society was severely altered with the loss of thousands of their citizens to the New World. The transition from Indentured servants to African slaves provided plantation owners the access to thousands of workers that would be bound to slavery for life. With the influx of slaves, the tobacco trade was able to increase from 200,000 pounds in 1624 to 15 million pounds by 1664, to 30 million pounds by the 1680’s. The African slaves were viewed as 3/5ths human and as a result received treatment even harsher than the previous servants. Profits began to reach new unforeseen heights and as a result, the dehumanization of the slaves became a social normality.(Foner

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