As Professor Oestreicher discussed, through the process of slaves being sold South, families and folkways would be disrupted by forced labor migration ("Industrialization of Slavery"). Northup, even though not being forced away from a family of slaves, like the majority of the slaves being sold south, was still representative of a slave who was being forced away from his family. A family which would remain in Saratoga Springs, New York, while Northup would take part in forced labor in Louisiana for twelve years. The majority of slaves who were sold to the south were male due to the labor intensification of cotton production and the necessity of land clearing in this newly occupied territory of the United States. These new cotton producing regions were covered with trees, the removal of which is extremely difficult due to the necessity of uprooting the trees (Oestreicher "The Changing Slave Community"). Epps" plantation, where Northup spent the majority of his time as a slave, was small, but representative of this trend in gender inequality. Out of the seven slaves who worked the field six were males. This trend also results in the necessity to obtain slave labor from outsourcing opposed to reproduction. In older slave regions there was not as much gender imbalance, resulting in a slave population that would re-populate itself. Epps only obtained one of his slaves through the means of reproduction, also making Northup's scenario representative of this change in slave labor (Northup 21). Purchasing slaves from older slave regions was a way for cotton producers to obtain laborers for the cotton fields, but the actual labor itself represented a change in slavery in the United States, a change which Solomon Northup experienced firsthand.
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The labor of cultivating cotton was based on the individual abilities of each slave, as they were to consistently produce to their highest potential, or suffer the consequences.