Black slave plantations Due to the different geographical conditions, different immigrant components, and different ruling systems in Britain, the economies of each colony grew and developed in different directions. In the north, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhodes, the industry and commerce of New York, Pennsylvania, and Delaware in the central region had developed economy and had more self-cultivated clothes; in the city, there were more small and medium-sized owners and merchants. In the south, Maryland, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia plains were vast, with fertile land and hot climates, suitable for tobacco, rice, and blue indigo leaves. The large plantations were economically developed. Most of the planters were feudal aristocrats in Europe, who served a large number of slaves and used the number of slaves and land as the standard for calculating their property.

The initial targets of planters were mainly indentured slaves. Indentured slaves were the working people in Europe who sold their labor force in advance due to poverty, or were exiled to the Americas. Later, due to the development of the plantation economy, indentured slaves no longer met the needs, and the landlord gradually turned the main targets of slavery to African-American blacks.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, European colonists plundered the first blacks to America and sold them as slaves. By the eighteenth century, the evil activities of selling blacks reached a climax, and the number of black slaves continued to increase. In 1860, among the fifteen slave states in the United States, four million blacks, accounting for half of their total population; 320,000 white slave owners sent more than 3.953,000 blacks. It can be seen that the close relationship between black slavery and plantation economy.

Planters regard black people as living property, do not give black people any rights, can only engage in heavy physical labor, and work more than fifteen or sixteen hours a day. Heavy labor and bad life can only be tortured to death by a healthy slave in just six or seven years.

The plantation economy is based on the super-economic exploitation of slaves. It developed in response to the needs of the European tobacco and cotton markets. It serves the European capitalist economy and is also an integral part of the world capitalist economy. Therefore, the plantation economy has a capitalist nature. However, until the end of the 18th century, plantation slavery "has somewhat a patriarchal nature" and later gradually became a "commercial exploitation system" (Marxist).

When the capitalist economy flourished in the north, the slave owners of southern plantations not only tightly bound slaves to the land, but also transported the raw materials needed for the economic development of northern capitalism to the European market, and then transported European industrial products back to the Americas, which affected the supplement of the free labor force in the north and the supply of raw materials and commodity markets needed for northern capitalism. Slavery became a shackle for the development of North American capitalism. The contradiction between slavery and the capitalist system in the north became increasingly sharp, and the focus of its struggle was the existence and abolishment of slavery.

From the colonial period to the liberation of slaves in 1863, the United States used slave labor in the southern region to cultivate one or a few large agricultural organization forms of crops for export.

Slavery Plantations during the colonial period During this period, slavery plantations developed in the southern states (Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia). The conditions for its emergence were: ① The southern colonies were mainly operated by companies composed of British aristocratic landlords and wealthy merchants, who obtained a large amount of land by the British king; ② The southern plains were vast, fertile land, warm climate, suitable for extensive and large-scale operations, and could adopt low-tech slave labor. The main crops of the plantations were tobacco, rice and blue indigo exported to Europe.

The main source of the early slaves of white indentured slaves was white indentured slaves, mainly poor European immigrants who were unable to pay their travel expenses to North America. They were forced to contract with the ship owner or immigration broker who transported them, and used five years of unpaid labor to repay their travel expenses after they arrived in North America. Some criminals, wanderers and those who were unable to pay off their debts were transported to the colonies by the British government to sell them as indentured slaves. These people generally had to work for 7 to 10 years without compensation. It is estimated that about half of the white people who moved to America during the colonial period moved as indentured slaves. Until the end of the 17th century, they were the main source of labor in southern plantations.

Black slaves were plundered and trafficked from Africa to North America by Western European colonists. In 1619, the first 20 black slaves were transported to Jamestown, a Dutch colony in Virginia, North America. There were black slaves in each colony, but the number was not large until the mid-17th century. Since the 1760s, British merchants took over the Dutch to monopolize the slave trafficking industry, and black slaves increased rapidly, and replaced indentured slaves as the main labor force in the plantation in the late 17th century.

According to the first U.S. population survey in 1790, there were 698,000 black slaves, accounting for 2/5 of the total population in the south. Black slaves, like land, tools and other means of production, are the private property of planters, and their children are also the property of slave owners. Slaves worked for slave owners for life. Slaves have the right to dispose of slaves at will, including buying, selling, beating and even extermination. Heavy labor and inhuman treatment often cause slaves to be tortured to death after less than 10 years of working in the plantation.

Slave labor produced export crops for planters that made a lot of profits. In 1766, North American colonies, mainly Virginia and Maryland, exported about 100 million pounds of tobacco to the UK, worth about 770,000 pounds. Rice and blue indigo produced in South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia were also bulk products exported to Britain and Europe.

Slavery Plantations during the United States Period The American War of Independence (1775-1783) did not abolish slavery in the south, and the US Constitution in 1787 legalized slavery. After independence, two new conditions emerged, slavery in the south was further consolidated and strengthened: one was the colonial expansion to the west, which allowed the planters to obtain a large new territory in the southwest; the other was that in 1793, Americans E. Whitney (1765-1825) invented the cotton gin to remove cotton seeds.

The efficiency increased by 100 times, greatly promoting the development of the cotton planting industry. At this time, it was when the development of the cotton textile industry had increased sharply after the beginning of the British industrial revolution, and it was profitable to plant cotton. Cotton planting gave slavery a new life. Plantation slave owners actively expanded to the west with a large number of slaves and cultivated cotton. By 1860, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and other states had become the main plantation cotton planting areas.

Slave labor brought huge profits to planters, and the number of slaves continued to increase. According to statistics, in 1860, slaves increased to nearly 4 million, of which 3/4 were working in plantations. Slaves accounted for about 1/3 of the total population in the south. In 1860, the majority of small planters owned less than 10 slaves (about 280,000); those with 10 to 49 slaves belonged to medium planters (about 100,000), and generally cultivated 200 to 400 acres of land, and those with more than 50 slaves and cultivated more than 500 acres of land were large planters (about 100,000). There were also a few super-large planters, with more than 200 slaves and thousands of acres of land.

The slavery nature of the plantation. The slavery plantation is run by the plantation owner and produces for the capitalist world market for the purpose of making profits. This is its capitalist characteristic. However, from the perspective of economic essence, it is a slave economy because it excludes the basis of capitalist production - free wage labor, and has the basic characteristics of the slave-owned production method. This is that slaves are the property of the plantation owner and have no personal freedom; slaves engage in forced labor under direct violence; slaves deprive them of slave labor not only surplus labor, but also a considerable part of necessary labor.

The significance and influence of plantation slavery played an important role in the growth of world capitalism: ① The products it produces (including tobacco, rice, blue indigo, and cotton) made the North American colonies develop foreign trade, and foreign trade is an essential condition for large-scale industry. ② The cotton it produces supplies the needs of the cotton textile industry, the most important part of the British industrial revolution, thus promoting the development of the industrial revolution. Marx said: "Direct slavery is the basis of bourgeois industry. Without slavery, there would be no cotton; without cotton modern industry is unimaginable" ("Complete Works of Marx and Engels", Volume 4, page 145). ③ For the United States, the shipping industry and textile industry in the north developed by the slave economy in the southern part; pork, grain and whiskey produced by farmers in the central and western regions found markets in the south and achieved agricultural prosperity.

However, the resurrection of the long-outdated slavery of British colonialists and American bourgeoisie in North America fully demonstrates the cruel and barbaric exploitation of colonialism and capitalism. The evil plantation slavery is the darkest page in American history. On September 22, 1862, President A. Lincoln published the "Emancipation Declaration" to the world, declaring that black slaves were liberated from January 1, 1863, and thus slavery was abolished.

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