How did the American Slave trade start?
At first it was not American, it was Dutch, British, etc. America as such didn’t exist, there were colonies of Britain, France and Spain in what is now the US. There had been African slaves being brought to South America and the Caribbean almost as soon as Columbus reached the New World. By the 1620’s they were being brought to Virginia to work tobacco plantations, and the practice grew. In Colonial times there were also slaves in New York and other northern colonies. But the economy of the north did not run on large agricultural plantations like the South, so slave trade was not practical. There were many ‘indentured’ white servants, largely Irish, Scottish, etc who served the North and to some extent the southerners, but they were not slaves for life. Cotton and tobacco were very lucrative crops and needed a lot of field hands to plant, plow, harvest, and what ever was done with the crops after harvest. Hiring white laborers would have cost a lot of money, even if they were only paid
