Why Is Slavery Important To The Economy

In the 1600s through the mid 1800s slavery played an important stage in the economic development of early America and helped America to become an economic power house later in time by laying the foundation of a strong economy and government. Slavery propelled the new world’s economy and once America got its independence the taxes on slaves and the products that slaves made and grew helped boost the economy and along with the exports that they made. Slavery played a larger role in building America’s economy then you would think and slavery is a very important event to our history.

Slavery paid for a lot of the shares of capital, farming, and manufactured goods that laid the basis for American economic growth. It did this by creating jobs
that would not exist without slavery. Slaves provide many things like cotton, rice, and labor, they worked in factories and because they were slaves the only labor the owners would pay would be a 1-time price which was to buy them. Which made the cost of labor cheap. By having cheap labor, the factory and plantation owners could sell their products cheaper than if they had to pay for workers who are paid by the hour to do the same job. Since products were cheap more people could afford to buy them and it helped the economy since there was more money flowing through the it. In his narrative Green Cumby talks about all the work he did on the planation and how badly he was treated and what they ate he say that if slaves did not get all of their work done the “dey git whip till dey have blister on ‘em. De iffen dey didn’t do it, de man on a hoss goes down de rows and whip with a paddle make with holes in it and bu’s de blisters”. Slave owners only provide the bear minimum for their survival and treaded them very badly. This made their profits extremely good since they did not have to spend it on hourly pay and only spend a small percentage of their cost on the slaves like food, housing and other expenses that came with owning slaves. Slavery was a business and the owners were trying to make the biggest profit they could and that meant unlike treating slaves like employs they were treated like property.

Cotton is a great example of one of these exports because the U.S.
had the most cotton production in the world. Most of this cotton was grown, it was grown on slave plantations in the U.S.. Slavery provide the world with over 50 percent cotton and provided about 70 percent of the cotton used by the British textile industry. This helped the economy because all of the cotton that we were selling overseas, we were collecting taxes on the exported cotton. Trading with other countries is very important to a county’s economy and Britain was a major trading partner with the U.S.. Trading with Britain helped the U.S. because it allowed the U.S. to get resources that we could not get and in exchange we provide Great Britain with cotton among other things that they could not make or grow. In his narrative Green Cumby talks about all the cotton that was made on just his plantation and when he had “to pick cotton and sometime pick 300 pound and tote it a mile to de cotton house. Some pick 300 to 800-pound cotton and have to tote de bag de whole mile to de gin” so you can imagine out of all the plantations in in the south how much cotton was produced. With all this cotton most of it got exported from the south to New York City and then was sold and shipped out to Europe. This established and strong trade relationship Great Britain and other European
countries.
Not only did slaves on plantations and in factories help the economy but the slave trade itself helped the economy. There were a lot of taxes that slave owners had to pay when owner slaves. The traders that imported slaves from Africa were taxed on the slaves that they brought in and then there was also a tax when they sold them to their new owners. John Barbot describes the journey that slaves make to America talking about how “the trade of slaves is in a more peculiar manner the business of kings, rich men, and prime merchants, exclusive of the inferior sort of Blacks” Once they were sold to their new owners they would have to also pay property tax. The Property taxed depended on how much and slaves you owned among other factors like land. Slavery supplied the government with a lot of money through taxes, allowed for the economy to get stronger and to help the U.S. get out of debt. The U.S. tried not to tax the people as much because that is one of the main reasons that they declared independence from Britain so a lot of taxes focused on import and export taxes.

Slavery did a lot more than just supply crops to the U.S. it brought huge amounts of capital to the state and federal government. It made relations between countries and establish trade routes like the Triangular Trade. Slavery also made the U.S. the top supplier of cotton in the world. The U.S. would not be what it is today without the impact that slavery had on it along with the events that followed it.