The ownership of slaves in the North was more of a luxury than a neccesity to keeping one's livelyhood going, such as the slaves on a plantation's relationship with their owners in the Southern colonies- some affluent Northerners kept slaves just to have their help with housework or as a personal attendant. This is a perfect example of the main difference between slave labor in the North and the South: in the North slaves were dispensible to their way of life- they were simply to add granduer and convience to their lives. While in the South the colonies' entire economic structure depended on the labor of the slaves- all of the South's exports were harvested by slaves, without them their economy would colapse because there would be no driving …show more content…
It is most likely that slavery originally caused a prejudice towards the Africans being sold on the slave trade by the white colonists that later caused full on racism to bloom after decades of treating the Africans as property. This discussion is spoken of in length in document 4. The document goes over how Oscar and Mary Handlin fathered the idea that economic nessecity caused slavery and subsequently racism: "Racism emerged to justify slavery; it did not cause slavery." (Doc. 4). This idea was later challenged by multiple historians such as Winthrop D. Jordan and George Fredrickson who believed racism ultimately was the cause of slavery: "Jordan argued that Europeans had long veiwed people of color- and black Africans in particular- as inferior beings appropriate for serving whites. Those attitudes migrated with white Europeans to the New World, and white racism shaped the treatment of Africans in America- and the nature of the slave labor system- from the beginning." (Doc. 4). Regardless of its origins though, slavery was sustained to such a length primarily due to its economic effects in the colonies. Not only were the plantation owners making large fortunes off of the bondage of Africans but the prices of the products being sold directly correlated and were