alternatehistory.com

During the development of England's colonies in North America, those lying to the south like Virginia or the Carolinas developed economies that were based on slave-labor production of agricultural products like tobacco, rice, indigo, or wheat, while the northern colonies developed economies based on trading, fishing, and more limited agricultural production. Because of the large population of slaves in the South and the presence of many wealthy masters who could dominate politics regionally and, to a lesser but still significant effect, nationally, slavery was able to survive independence until, of course, the Civil War.

So, what I was wondering was how this bifurcation could be avoided? Many of the northern colonies also had slavery just before independence, but none of their economies were so (directly) dependent on it, and all of them had much smaller proportions of slaves in their population than the southern colonies. How could this also have been true in the southern colonies, so that slaves are relatively uncommon and not used in wide-spread agricultural labor?
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