What was plantation slavery?

Plantation slavery was the system of large scale agricultural slavery in the southern United States from the colonial period through the Civil War, in which enslaved Africans and their descendants performed forced labor on commercial farms producing tobacco, rice, sugar, and especially cotton for export to international markets, while plantation owners accumulated wealth and political power that shaped American history through 1865.

The earliest American plantation slavery began in tidewater Virginia and Maryland with tobacco cultivation in the seventeenth century. About 20 enslaved Africans arrived at Jamestown in August 1619, brought by a Dutch privateer. Indentured servitude initially provided more of the colonial labor force, but as land became more available and indenture less attractive, planters turned increasingly to enslaved African labor. By 1700 about 28,000 enslaved Africans lived in British North America.

Lowcountry South Carolina developed rice plantation slavery in the late seventeenth century, drawing on West African knowledge of rice cultivation. Indigo plantations followed in the 1740s. By the eighteenth century, large coastal plantations of hundreds of acres employed dozens or hundreds of enslaved workers under task or gang systems.

The American Revolution disrupted slavery temporarily and led northern states to abolish it through gradual emancipation laws starting with Pennsylvania on March 1, 1780. The Atlantic slave trade was banned by Congress effective January 1, 1808. But slavery exploded in the South after the cotton gin invented by Eli Whitney in 1793 made short staple cotton commercially profitable. Cotton spread from Georgia and South Carolina across the Deep South to Texas, replacing tobacco in many areas.

By 1860 the United States produced about 75 percent of the world's cotton supply, and the southern slave economy was the wealthiest sector of the American economy. The enslaved population grew from about 700,000 in 1790 to about 4 million in 1860, mostly through natural increase after the trade closure. The market value of enslaved people in 1860 was about 3 billion dollars, more than the combined value of all American railroads, factories, and banks.

The slave system was brutal. Enslaved people worked from sunup to sundown six days a week. They were subject to whipping, branding, mutilation, sexual assault, and sale. Families were broken up by sale to settle debts or maximize profits. Over the antebellum period perhaps 1 million enslaved people were sold and forcibly relocated through the domestic slave trade from the Upper South to the Cotton Belt.

Despite resistance ranging from work slowdowns to literacy in defiance of laws, to running away, to outright revolt (Gabriel's Conspiracy 1800, Denmark Vesey 1822, Nat Turner 1831), most enslaved people had no escape from the system. Slavery ended through the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment ratified December 6, 1865.