Topic: “What crops were important to the English Colonies in the south of North America? How did the cultivation of these crops shape the colonies?”

Cotton, corn, and tobacco were the most vital to the success of farmers in the south, and helped format the South, and its people into the way it is now. Cotton and corn required immense amounts of labor to pick, tend, and harvest the crops. Also, tobacco is favored, and popular here in the south still today; all these ways crops helped shape the southern colonies in the United States of America.

Typically it was slaves and a few lower class whites that provided the large amounts of labor that are needed to efficiently harvest corn and tobacco, and pick cotton, and remove the seeds from the cotton. Obviously, labor was the key ingredient to making the South successful, and making the people who live there tough, worn out, and hard to break. Cotton, at the time, was one of the main resources for clothing. The low bales produced put cotton on high demand, at high prices. Southerners cut costs by using cheap, inexpensive slave labor. “Ample evidence indicates that slaves worked well below their capabilities. In several instances in Mississippi, when cotton picking was carefully supervised in local experiments, slaves picked two or three times their normal output. The records of the Barrow plantation in Louisiana revealed that inefficiency and negligence were the cause of two-thirds of the punishments inflicted on slaves…”(1).

The work ethic that the people in the southern colonies of North America had was one of the main reasons that they survived, and now thrive in. “…but even as

A few reasons that the amount of cotton was not up to par in the South was because of the poor diets, and cruel punishments from whites. The cruel punishments that were given out by white southerners did not just mean that