USA HISTORY

LIFE IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICA 1807 1861

SLAVERY IN AMERICA COTTON SLAVE TRADE AND THE SOUTHERN RESPONSE

Question [CLICK ON ANY CHOICE TO KNOW THE RIGHT ANSWER]
Why did Europeans feel it was necessary to have slave labor?
A
They had been raised around slave labor all of their lives.
B
They had learned of the practice after visiting Africa.
C
They were multiple tribal battles that forced Africans into slavery.
D
They were needed to work on plantations because there was a shortage of natives and servants.
Explanation: 

Detailed explanation-1: -Ivory, gold and other trade resources attracted Europeans to West Africa. As demand for cheap labour to work on plantations in the Americas grew, people enslaved in West Africa became the most valuable ‘commodity’ for European traders. Slavery existed in Africa before Europeans arrived.

Detailed explanation-2: -Moreover, slave labor did produce the major consumer goods that were the basis of world trade during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: coffee, cotton, rum, sugar, and tobacco. In the pre-Civil War United States, a stronger case can be made that slavery played a critical role in economic development.

Detailed explanation-3: -The Origins of American Slavery Most of those enslaved in the North did not live in large communities, as they did in the mid-Atlantic colonies and the South. Those Southern economies depended upon people enslaved at plantations to provide labor and keep the massive tobacco and rice farms running.

Detailed explanation-4: -As a result, Europeans looked to Africa for a new source of workers. Africans were deemed suitable for work in the Americas because they were unfamiliar with the land and so less likely to escape, largely resistant to European diseases, accustomed to laboring in the tropics, and came from farming cultures.

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