Decades Paper

ECONOMIC – Up to 1775*
Title: “Slavery and its Role in the Southern Economy”

The southern colonies of North America established their economy upon agriculture, which drove their agrarian workforce. Cash crops were especially crucial to the southern colonies, such as tobacco and cotton, both of which expanded into plantations. Indentured servants worked these plantations with promises of land and “freedom dues,” and some of them actually escalated up the economic ladder. Planters soon gained a sense of power as they were usually the ones who funded these workers to come to America and obtained land ownership by doing so (this was known as the headright system). By the late-17th century, indentured servants opportunities diminished as the cost of migration and threat of a population plagued with excess laborers grew more apparent.
The overpopulation of indentured servants fostered a hostile and rebellious environment of poor white laborers in the southern colonies. As a result, southerners looked towards slavery as an alternative to labor. Many slaves were brought via the Triangular Trade, crossing the transatlantic trading route because of their specialized skills in crop cultivation. The southern colonies were blessed with many waterways and fertile soil that allowed facilitated methods of crop transportation. Many indentured servants were being displaced in the labor workforce by slaves in the late-1600s, continuing unsuccessful labor occupations.
The African slave population boomed in states like South Carolina and Massachusetts. The plantations they worked were integral to the economic foundation of the southern economy in agricultural and labor exploits.

ECONOMIC – UP TO 1775**
Title:...

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...ntrol, the First B.U.S. was destroyed.
During Andrew Jackson's presidency, he highly distrusted the practice of big banks; in other words, the Bank of the United States, which he viewed as a tool that only benefitted the wealthy and kept the common people down. The 2nd Bank of the United States, which was lead by Nicholas Biddle, reduced bank failures and allowed economic expansion through credit from the Washington government after the War of 1812. When Henry Clay forced the re-charter of the B.U.S. earlier to Jackson, the bill was immediately vetoed. Jackson went to as far as withdrawing the funds in the B.U.S. and depositing it into wildcat banks, killing it after draining its wealth by 1836. However, the wildcat banks were extremely unreliable, as they continually disrupted the harmony of the economy and caused economic crashes throughout the 19th century.