Why was slavery more popular in the south than the north?

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The climate was more conducive to big plantations that needed a lot of niggers to work on them

more economical to use slavery for harvesting cash crops such as cotton whereas northern farms, i think, tended to be smaller and less labor intensive. there was almost always a shortage of white laborers in early america, too, so i reckon having bonded slaves whose movement you control and whose kids become your property makes it a very advantageous system to have.

furthermore, it's important to add that slavery in early america was thought to be in terminal decline by most observers. Virginia had been the main slave economy in the 1780s and 90s, but around that time it was going into economic stagnation and decline. Once upon a time, tobacco had yielded high profits as a cash crop, but soil exhaustion and, i think, dropping tobacco prices (from competition abroad?) made the huge tobacco estates unprofitable. In this new situation, Virginia planters found having large slave labor forces to take care of was becoming an increasing burden than a benefit. I remember reading a quote by George Washington saying something to the effect that slavery wasn't even economically profitable anymore. All of this changed with the importation of the new improved strains of short staple cotton into the US and (though this is in contention nowadays) the cotton gin made on top of accelerating industrialization in Britain (which was heavily reliant on the processing of cotton into cheap mass produced textiles using steam powered machine factories) which saw a huge surge in the price of the cotton and the increasing demand for slave labor. As a result, you see a huge internal slave trade popping up (as the slave trade got banned in 1805) trafficking slaves from the stagnant plantations in Virgnia to the richer cotton-friendly soils in the west, especially in the "black-belt" of alabama, mississippi and louisiana.

Virginia was originally settled by gentlemen and their lackeys from the west of England (running away from Cromwell), who were very much about priviledge and keeping the serfs in their place. It's a cultural trait that carried over in much of the south.

In New England, Pennsylvania, New York, the immigrants were from other places with a more middle class culture. Slavery didn't set so well with puritans and quakers, for instance.

Read "Albion's Seed" by David Hackett Fischer.

South: Access to water
North: No access to water

Having smaller, fewer farms always made sense to me, but I was also taught that part of it was also due to there being more factories in the north and that these preferred hiring wage laborers. I guess I just don't understand how that would be more economical.

Alright, that's also a good point. Wasn't slavery banned in Georgia when it was first being settled? Was it after the Revolution that this changed or before?

North: Rivers, canals, railroads, ocean ports on east coast

Also, thanks for the serious answers guys, I'm used to just getting memes spammed at me.

well as i said the virginia farmers were just looking for somewhere to dump all of their black slaves, this was before massive immigration of the 1840s started, when the problem of wage labor became a genuine issue and also before there could be a large enough work force of cheap white labor to work the fields. By this time slavery as an institution had been established and the black slave population was expanding naturally to boot, making the supply of unpaid labor even larger. As I also mentioned before there was always a huge shortage of white labor because most white laborers in the early decades would simply up and move West instead in hopes of getting a plot of land to farm for themselves instead of becoming a ranch hand picking cotton on a southern plantation. And since blacks were already seen with somewhat of a stigma by this point, it would also be humiliating to have to do a job that was by that time traditionally reserved for black slaves.

Southerners were (and still are) a bunch of lazy fucks

>more economical

Stopped reading

southern climate was good for growing cash crops like sugar, cotton, and tobacco. Not so much for food crops.

The cash crop plantations exported and made the money for the South. Then they bought things produced by the more northern food farmers.

the south was also settled by scots, ulster scots, scot-irish, and the french. who were trying to recreate the social class stratified society of Europe. Owning land and slaves put you at the top of society. then the middle class was the merchants, the military officers, skilled artisans, and highly educated professionals. Then you had the food farmers that didn't use slaves. The free white laborers. the subsistence farmers. then the free blacks and then finally the slaves. racism and slavery kept you from being at the bottom of society. ending slavery doubled the wage earning labor pool.

meh, you're an idiot with poor reading skills and no knowledge of history. what else should we expect from you?

Agriculture is hard and you don't have to pay slaves to do hard work. It's that simple

Good, it's too late for you anyway.

>doubled the wage earning labor pool.
meaning it doubled everyone wages? or the wages altogether went up since there were more people earning wages?

Probably the same reason slavery didn't last long in Canada, it gets too fucking cold for any real work to be done after a certain point, and if a whole chunk of the year your slaves aren't working, why bother with slaves?

Another key point is malaria. I shit you not, the line at which malaria can survive in North America nearly 1:1 matches the Mason-Dixon line. And malaria was a serious issue down south in the 17th and 18th centuries; lots of swamps so lots of mosquitos. They actually did try to rely entirely on white labor, which should surprise nobody because why would a bunch of racist white guys actually want blacks around, but a third of each boatfull of indentured servants would die to malaria upon arrival whereas African slaves cost less to buy and also had a pretty sizable amount of innate immunity.

it doubled the size of paid laborers. which means wages would stagnate or go down.

I think the reason has to do with the start of the Atlantic slave trade. The first participants in the slave trade were Spanish and Portuguese colonists/merchants, so slavery expanded north/east to the British colonies. You should research the First and Second Atlantic systems to see how the nationality of the traders/clients progressed.

The northern colonies were founded with heavy Puritan influence while the southern colonies were mostly founded through basic colonialism also.

Industrial economies want wage slaves who buy industrial consumer products and its much easier to downsize or upsize a wage labor force quickly, agricultural economies want slaves because its reliable and fuck and also pretty cheap.