Faced with a declining supply of white laborers, the Chesapeake planters increasingly turned to African slaves for their plantation labor. At the end of the seventeenth century, slaves became a better investment, as servants became scarcer and more expensive: £25 to £30 for a lifelong slave compared well with £15 to purchase just four years of a servant’s time. In addition, the moderating virulence of the local diseases increased life expectancy, which made planters more confident that their slaves would live and work long enough to repay their extra cost.
