1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

by Charles C. Mann

An inherent flaw with slavery, he maintained, is that slaves made unsatisfactory workers. Because they were usually from distant cultures, they often didn’t speak their owners’ language and could be so unfamiliar with their owners’ societies that they would have to be trained from scratch (Africans, for example, knew only tropical forms of agriculture). Worse, they had every incentive to escape, wreak sabotage, or kill their owners, the people who were depriving them of liberty. Indentured servants, by contrast, spoke the same language, accepted the same social norms, and knew the same farming methods. And their contracts were for a limited time, so they had little reason to run away (unless they thought the planter was going to cheat). Because willing hands are more likely to do their jobs well, Smith reasoned in The Wealth of Nations, “the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves.” All else being equal, he argued, economics suggests that planters should have chosen the cheaper, easier, less threatening alternative: servants from Europe.