Slavery and the founding of the USA
A comprehensive, realist, progressive, and patriotic perspective
Most of the American Founders believed that slavery would die a natural death. There was good reason for this assumption. In general terms, as agriculture became more technically advanced, slaveholders/landholders have an economic interest in investing in the newly emerging methods of agricultural production and converting their slaves into wage laborers. In the long term, waged labor and mechanized agricultural production were destined to replace slave plantations, because the former would be more productive and more profitable.
At the time of the founding of the American Republic, slavery was a central part of the economies of the thirteen colonies only in two regions, Virginia and Charleston, with slaves producing tobacco for exportation in the former and rice for exportation in the latter. In formulating the Declaration of Independence, the inclusion of an article on the abolition of slavery would have been consistent wit…