Excerpt from The Slavery Issue in Federal Politics
Equatorial Africa was discovered in the same period as the American continent, and its natural resource of crude labor was tapped and exploited simultaneously with the resources of gold in Mexico, sugar in the West Indies, tobacco in Virginia and rice in Carolina. The African staple of negro labor was looked upon in the period in much the same way as the American staples; they all furnished the means of increasing private and public wealth. The Irish product of indentured white labor was still another item in the list of important staples. The prices of all these commodities were regularly quoted in the colonial markets; merchants dealt in them indifferently and people in need of labor bought servants or slaves just as people in need of tobacco, sugar or rice bought supplies of these. There seems not to have been much discussion of the right or wrong of holding men to indented serv ice or slavery. Wage-earning labor was not to be had on any feasible terms in most parts of America and captains of industry were forced to buy bond men or do without laborers.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
