The development of slavery in the United States of America started in the 1600's when demand for labour on plantations was far greater than previously expected. There are several other main reasons to explain this growth and why black people were a perfect choice to work on these plantations. The southern states in America relied heavily on agricultural production and therefore had many plantations for growing "cash crops" such as tobacco, rice, indigo, hemp and cotton. These fields needed lots of manual labour to make them profitable. The alternatives to slavery such as free white labour, indentured labour, redemption and convict workers all had their own problems and this left slavery as a logical and practical choice. The slave owners justified their use of slavery with many reasons. Some of these are that they were civilising the blacks, exercising their right to enslave and saving them from wild Africa.
Almost since the start of the colonisation of America, slavery had been used as manual labour to maintain the very large plantations in the southern states. Slavery of the African race was chosen over other forms of labour due to many reasons. Negro slaves were used by the plantation owners due to their availability. The slaves could be easily obtained due to many slave ships capturing Negroes in Africa and bringing them to America via boat. Using Negroes as slaves lead to many advantages for the plantation owners, the main advantage being they did not need to be paid. Plantation owners could force their slaves to work very long hours and did not have to feed and house them as well as they would have had to if their workers were white. .
Although the initial price for slaves was relatively high and the owner had to feed, house, dress and care for the slaves, the owners soon made money on them due to no wages having to be paid and the production rate of their crops increasing due to long working hours.