Economics of American Negro Slavery

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of buildings.” This was more of a rule than an exception for slaves. Even though most slaves worked on plantations, this does not imply that all their time was consumed by rising and picking cotton. A third of slaves on plantations were children and another fifth of adults were not involved in field tasks. There was more to the plantations than just producing cotton. Most of the food that was consumed was produced on the plantations. The slaves had to rear the livestock as well as grow the feed. Between producing cotton (34%), rearing livestock, growing the feed (25%), and growing corn (6%), the slaves had a remaining 35% of time available for other work. This working time was spent constructing fences and buildings, land improvement, raising other crops, and producing clothes. So the idea that slaves strictly labored in the fields is false and in fact, they had various tasks around the plantation.
Chapter two also converses about the interregional redistribution from the Chesapeake Bay area to the rest of the south. In 1690, Mar...