The Early Plantation System

• In the early days of the Southern colonies land was inexpensive but workers were hard to find. Men could buy up huge estates on which to grow profitable crops such as tobacco, but they couldn't find anyone willing to work the land. At first they solved this problem by using indentured servants. An indentured servant was a type of temporary slave, contracted to work for a period of several years in order to pay back the cost of a passage by ship from Britain to the colonies. The conditions of plantation life were harsh and dangerous, and 40 percent of indentured servants died before paying off their debts.
  
  

Bacon's Rebellion

• The profitability of tobacco began to decline in the 1670s, and by that time most of the land had already passed into the hands of a small elite. Indentured servants who finished their period of servitude could no longer hope to purchase land of their own and become plantation owners. In the 1690s, a rebel army of indentured servants led by Nathaniel Bacon captured Jamestown, Va. and sacked many of the plantations. The rebellion soon collapsed, but by this point African slaves had become affordable for most plantation owners. From Bacon's Rebellion onward, plantation owners would rely on slave labor from Africa rather than indentured servitude.
  
  

Cotton

• After the decline of the tobacco crop, the plantation economy of the South shifted over to cotton. Cotton had not been profitable in the past because of the labor required to separate seeds from flax, but technology had improved as demand had increased. By the 1830s, America was the world's leading supplier of cotton. Just like tobacco, cotton was cultivated on huge plantations. In order to keep cotton profitable, plantation owners bought slaves from Africa. In the 1850s, half the population of the cotton states was slave labor.
  
  

A Stratified Society

• Because of the availability of cheap land in the early South, large estates were bought up by a small aristocracy of wealthy landowners. The result of this was a society with a strict class divide between rich and poor. Plantation owners were essentially aristocrats at the top of society. Below them were farmers with few or no slaves. Below these farmers was a huge slave population without whom the entire system would not have existed. The labor-intensive and land-intensive nature of Southern agriculture led directly to the plantation economy.