Why Slaves?

Bigotry, laziness, greed...

They wanted to make a one time purchase and never have to worry about payment again.

---
"Attempted murder? Now honestly, what is that? Do they give a Nobel Prize for attempted chemistry?"

Evidentaly you do not understand the term. You do NOT have to pay a slave, just enough food to keep alive. Any cheap labor is still more expensive.

I don't know about United States but I can tell you about Brazil, since I am brazilian.
The natives in Brazil did not obey or take any of the europeans teachings, they would rather die instead of being slaves, that is they culture and that is what they did, they didn't bow once for any european or whatever. They preferred to sacrifice themselves and die in pain as free men. The brazilian indians would receive visitors with joy but they wouldn't let them rule things, until nowadays they can be hostile, there are recent cases of journalists who tried to take pictures in the natives reservation and got beaten until death, I think they inheritated the bad feeling of the white men.
Why the africans accepted? In my opinion they were too much nice to the newcomers and I think they didn't see that coming, since in my view it isn't in their culture actions such harm and slave people.
The africans and natives of the countries involved were treated like animals, but for me the real animals were the europeans who raped the latin america and africa.

[deleted]

Now hold on everyone, it was one of the debates in Congress at the time of Amistad. The free laborers in the North had a FAR lower standard of living than the slave laborers in the South.

Slaves were an investment and between the housing costs (which were better than the tenements in the North) the Food cost (again better) and the healthcare costs (once more, better) it actually cost more to own a slave than it did to hire a free laborer.

The pro-slavery movement pointed this out, & the fact that slaves had a higher standard of living than free laborers time & again when they were arguing against abolition.

But the economic structure was extremely different & we were still an agrarian nation with a developing industrial base.

The reason that slaves were preferred over free labor was migratory. In the industrialized north companies held free-labor as slaves through debt to the factory stores & factory housing.

In the south with growing seasons that would be a difficult prospect & the labor needed for the farm to prosper would be far from guaranteed. Slaves, on the other hand, were sedentary & able to diversify as, like on Jefferson's plantation, there were artisan slaves.

In other-words, as where bigotry no doubt played a role in slavery, the economic argument is slightly flawed. It actually did cost far more to own a slave than to higher a free man.

However, because of an economic base in agriculture, a diversification in slave labor, & the fact that slaves unlike free farm-workers were not migratory, the benefits far outweighed the costs thus making the South's "peculiar institution," as they called it, more profitable than the cheaper free labor.

I can give you a very good answer to that from a different perspective. After 1961, when the Berlin Wall was built and the Non-Aligned countries have formed, many Westerners were aware, that all costs in the communist bloc was lower, than in the West.

Yet, guest workers in the GDR came from Angola, Vietnam, and neighboring socialist countries. The answer to that question is the same as to yours: political will. Slave economy, much like a plan based economy is unfit to compete with free trade and is doomed to fail. So, the political will behind it has to keep it up by violence, and they did, and wherever there's still slavery, they still do. Individuals rarely give up their personal freedom, if they don't have to, so paying half for things was not enticing enough to move to a society, where most of your neighbors would snitch you out.

As for Indians being legally free, I strongly recall, Gandhi's early protests in South Africa as a lawyer concerned the mandate toward Indians not being able to walk on the road, only beside it. So yes, the British exchanged African slaves for workers of other colonies, or half colonies, like China.

Circling back to the GDR, people accepted guest worker spots, because the wage was better. Claims by the pro-slavery movement on slavery not being cost effective is akin to the communist argument of workers having it better, than being under capitalist exploitation. In other words both being a lie. It wasn't done, because it was more effective, only the ruling class wanted it.

Technically I wasn't born a slave, but not as a free person either, a long iron curtain prevented me from choosing where I wished to go. You may interpret this as a divide between white people, because I stand by my view of equating colonialist slave traders to communists. What celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution is to Russia is the Confederate heritage month to the South.

I live in the Gordius Apartment Complex, my interior designer was M.C. Escher.