Northern slavery grew out of the paradox the new continent presented to its European masters. So much land was available, so cheaply, that no one was willing to come to America and sign on to work as a laborer. The dream that drew Europeans across the Atlantic was to own acres of land or make a fortune in trade or a craft. It was a reasonable expectation. In the 1680s a landless Welsh peasant from the mountains of Montgomeryshire could bring his whole family to Pennsylvania for £10 and acquire 250 acres for another £5; placing just one son in a trade in Britain would have cost the family £7.
Yet workers were needed to clear the land, work the soil, build the towns, and exploit the new continent. Because of this acute labor shortage, all the American colonies turned to compulsory labor. In New Netherland, in the 1640s, a free European worker could expect to be paid 280 guilders a year, plus food and lodging. In the same time and place, experienced African slaves from the West Indies could be bought outright, for life, for 300 guilders.
"To claim that the colonies would not have survived without slaves would be a distortion," historian Edgar McManus writes, "but there can be no doubt that the development was significantly speeded by their labor. They provided the basic working force that transformed shaky outposts of empire into areas of permanent settlement." [1]
Or, to consider the situation from a broad view of the entire New World, "... export agriculture and effective colonization would not have occurred on the scale it did if enslaved Africans had not been brought to the New World. Except for precious metals, almost all major American exports to Europe were produced by Africans." [2]
Every New World colony was, in some sense, a slave colony. French Canada, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Cuba, Brazil -- all of them made their start in an economic system built upon slavery based on race. In all of them, slavery enjoyed the service of the law and the sanction of religion. In all of them the master class had its moments of doubt, and the slaves plotted to escape or rebel.
Roughly speaking, in New England black slaves were a valuable shipping commodity that soon proved useful at home, both in large-scale agriculture and in ship-building. The Mid-Atlantic colonies -- New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania -- had been under Dutch rule before the British conquered them in 1664, and there African slavery had been actively encouraged by the Dutch authorities. This was continued by the British.
Both the Dutch and English colonists in the North prefered to get their slaves from other New World colonies, rather than directly from Africa. Direct imports from Africa were considered too dangerous and difficult. Instead, the middle colonies originally sought their African slaves from Dutch Curaçao and later from British Jamaica and Barbados. "These slaves were familiar with Western customs and habits of work, qualities highly prized in a region where masters and slaves worked and lived in close proximity." [3] They also were more inured to Northern winters, which incapacitated or killed those direct from Africa. Both reasons contributed to the adjective often used to advertise West Indies slaves being sold in the North: "seasoned."
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