1. -only ¼ of whites owned slaves -Most owned fewer than 5 slaves
Facts about Slavery
-nearly 388,000 slaves came to North America (about million came to the New World in total)
-only ¼ of whites owned slaves
-Most owned fewer than 5 slaves
-Only 12 percent of whites owned 20+ slaves
-Major slave crops were corn,tobacco, sugar, rice, cotton
-”The Cotton Curtain:” area
where Cotton is the main crop
I. Why and how did the South become so different from the North?
D. The Plantation Economy
Slaveholders - Only about a quarter of the white population lived in slaveholding families. Most slaveholders owned fewer than five slaves. Only about 12 percent of slave owners owned twenty or more, the number of slaves that historians consider necessary to distinguish a planter from a farmer. Nevertheless, planters dominated the southern economy.
Cash crops - The South’s major cash crops—tobacco, sugar, rice, and cotton—grew on plantations.
Tobacco had shifted westward in the nineteenth century from the Chesapeake to Tennessee and Kentucky.
Sugar plantations were confined almost entirely to Louisiana.
Rice was confined to a narrow strip of coast stretching from the Carolinas into Georgia.
Cotton was king of the South’s plantation crops. Planters produced three quarters of the South’s cotton, and cotton made planters rich, but some wealth went to northern middlemen who bought, sold, insured, warehoused, and shipped cotton to the mills. Southern plantations benefited northern industry by providing an important market for textiles, agricultural tools, and other manufactured goods.
Diverging economies - While the North developed a mixed economy—agriculture, commerce, and manufacturing—the South remained overwhelmingly agricultural. Because the South had so few cities and industrial jobs, it attracted small numbers of European immigrants who instead went North and West. 1

2. Cotton Plants and Plantations

3. Work: What kinds of work did slaves do?
1. Field work (started at 11 or 12 years of age)
2. House servants (1 in 10)
3. Skilled workers/mechanics/artisans (no more than 1 in 20)
4. Slave driver (maybe no more than 1 in 100)
III. What was plantation life like for slaves?
A. Work
Field work - Whites enslaved blacks for their labor, and all slaves who were capable of productive labor worked. When slave children reached the age of eleven or twelve, masters sent most of them to the fields. The overwhelming majority of plantation slaves worked as field hands.
House servants - A few slaves (about one in ten) became house servants. Nearly all of those (nine out of ten) were women. House servants enjoyed somewhat less physically demanding work than field hands, but they were constantly on call, with no time that was entirely their own and most bore the brunt of white frustration and rage.
Skilled artisans - Even rarer than house servants were skilled artisans. In the cotton South, no more than one slave in twenty (almost all men) worked in a skilled trade. Most were carpenters or blacksmiths.
Slave driver - Rarest of all slave occupations was that of slave driver. Probably no more than one male slave in a hundred worked in this capacity. Their primary task was driving other slaves to work harder in the fields.