Plantation Economy Quotes

In the South the war is what A.D. is elsewhere; they date from it.

Wealthy men, too, like several of those in our neighborhood, had so many slaves that they were compelled to buy other plantations on which to employ them.

The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.

Once American land, African labor, and European capital were bonded together on the cotton plantation, a new source of cotton could finally outmuscle the peasant household on the Indian Subcontinent.

So far from engaging in a war to perpetuate slavery, I am rejoiced that Slavery is abolished. I believe it will be greatly for the interest of the South. So fully am I satisfied of this that I would have cheerfully lost all that I have lost by the war, and have suffered all that I have suffered to have this object attained.

All our riches for the present do consist in Tobacco.

Slaves were at one and the same time investments (purchased and then rented out as laborers), credit (used to secure loans), property, commodities, and capital.

In the 17th century, Barbados was regarded in London as 'the brightest jewel in the English crown'.

A plantation seems a fit place for those ingenious spirits that being low in the world, are much clogged and oppressed about a livelihood. For the means of subsisting being easy there, they may have time and opportunity to gratify their inclinations, and thereby improve science and help nurseries of people

English merchants were responsible for shipping over three million slaves (half the total) from Africa to the slave plantations of the Caribbean and southern USA, before their trade's abolition by parliament in 1807

One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war.

In many of our Plantations of late Years, by bad Management and Extravagancies, the Majority of the People are become Debtors, hence their Elected Representation in the Legislature have a great Chance to be generally of the Debtors Side: or in other Words, the Representatives being generally Freeholders, and many of them much in Debt; by large Emissions their Lands rise in Denomination Value while their Debts become really less, and the Creditor is defrauded in Part of his Debt.

The history of Hawaii may be seen as a story of arrivals.

America was founded on the backs of slaves.

To me, Central America is one large plantation; and I see the people's struggle to be free as a slave revolt.

The real difference of interests, lay not between large and small, but between the Northern and Southern states. The institution of slavery and its consequences formed a line of discrimination.

Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.

If your book is set in the plantation days of the slave-owning South and you write a little romance between two slave owners without acknowledging the system they live, that's a political gesture.

Then it was that the exports of slaves from Virginia and the Carolinas was so great that the population of those States remained almost, if not quite stationary.

The British merchants represented that they received some profit indeed from Virginia and South Carolina, as well as the West Indies; but as for the rest of this continent, they were constant losers in trade.

In the pioneer West Whitopias, immigration tended to be the dominant social and racial issue. In Forsyth County, Georgia, immigration is still an issue, but because you have that complicated history of the Trail of Tears and slavery and Jim Crow, the Whitopia has a different flavor.

Right before The Civil War, only 8% of white people owned slaves. Some plantations would have hundreds and hundreds of slaves, but the vast majority of whites didn't have any.

I pity them greatly, but I must be mum, for how could we do without sugar and rum?

Those that go into a foreign plantation, their industry there is worth more than if they stayed at home, the product of their labor being in commodities of a superior nature to those of this country. For instance, what is an improved acre in Jamaica or Barbados worth to an improved acre in England? We know it is three times the value

Being a slave meant never having the stability of knowing your family would be together as many years as God designed it to be. It meant you could come back from picking cotton in a field to find that your children are gone, your husband's gone, your mother's gone. It meant knowing you are property that could be sold to the highest bidder, of value only to continue to support the plantation economy.