Well, it is an easy case to make, but the history is quite long. I gotta run, but will just throw out a quick condensed version.
The first blacks to come here permanently arrived in 1619 as slaves who were treated as indentured servants. They worked in Jamestown, Virginia on tobacco plantations, since tobacco was the chief cash crop allowing the colonies to survive. The plantation owners could not, for a variety of reasons, depend upon Europeans as servants and could only grow and prosper by the cheap labor afforded by African slaves. The thing grew from there. Tobacco was a very labor intensive crop. Had the slaves not been available, the colonies would have faltered just as several had faltered years prior. There would have been no Jefferson, Madison, Henry, Washington, Wythe because these men, or rather men like them, would have been compelled to squeak out a meager existence. Slavery afforded them the opportunity to sit on their behinds and think, eventually to deliver to us the greatest government system known to man. |
