The institution of slavery in what was to become the United States was established in seventeenth century Virginia. Small units of land that were privately owned produced harvests of crops such as tobacco, rice, sugar cane, and cotton. These crops were very labor intensive. The European immigrants who had come to America to start their own farms were very reluctant to work for anyone. Convicts had been sent from Europe as a labor force but they were not enough to satisfy the great need for workers.
So planters began to buy slaves.
The slaves in the colonies had been taken from Africa and b…
