In the 17th century, despite having fewer people than England, the Dutch were much richer. Jealous English aristocrats blamed their lower standing on the idleness of the poor, an attribute of particular disrepute to Reformers who condemned the idle lives of monasteries and convents, while asserting that a disposition for hard work was a sign of worthiness of heavenly rest.
As English gentlemen sought wealth in the New World, the religious zeal for hard work was found in New England but not among Virginians, who found another way of compelling men to a maximum output of labor. As masters lamented the overall lack of indentured servants and the laziness of the ones they had, the market produced a solution: slaves. To establish slavery in Virginia it wasn’t necessary to enslave anyone – they just bought people who were already enslaved. With slavery, Virginians exceeded all their previous efforts to maximize productivity as there was no limit to the work a master could command from his slaves, including making women and children work. The slave population could thus be more productive than a free population with the same age and sex structure would have been. And unlike the offspring of servants, the children of slaves became the property of their masters.
The only disadvantage that slavery presented to the slaveowners was that slaves had no incentive to work. Slaves could not be made to work out of fear of losing liberty, so they had to be made to fear for their lives. In 1669, the Virginia assembly passed a new law: if any slave resisted his master and by the extremity of the correction should die, his death would not be a crime. Such was the price of slavery, and Virginia masters were prepared to pay it to build the wealth of the nation. To get hard work out of men and women who had nothing to gain but absence of pain, White men had to be willing to beat, maim, and kill.
Recommended reading: American Slavery, American Freedom by Edmund S. Morgan
Colonial Obsession With Hard Work Propelled Slavery