analysis, one must also look at the sources of labor in the United States, all of which have acted together to form the modern labor force. Looking in the historical view, there was a great scarcity of labor in the United States in the early Colonial Period. In fact, one very early account noted that this scarcity contributed to high wages in the colonies themselves:
The scarcity of workmen has caused them to raise their wages to an excessive rate, so as a carpenter would have three shillings the day, a laborer two shillings and sixpence, etc.; and accordingly those who had commodities to sell advanced their prices sometime double what they cost in England. . ..
However, the largest part of the labor force during the Colonial period consisted of unfree workers, categorizes as either slaves and bound or indentured servants. The indentured servant had the opportunity to become a free person at the end of the contractual period, while a slave was forever a slave. The indentured servant did not receive monetary wages, instead the payment consisted of food, clothing and lodging. There were many circumstances which forced people into indenturedness, but one of the most common was the sale of themselves for an agreed upon term in order to gain ship passage to the New World.
Slave labor, on the other hand, has been considered as being almost integral to the economic development of the United States. Although the institution of slavery developed rather slowly in the 1600s, by 1698 and into the 1700s, there were supply and demand factors which accelerated the slave traffic. By 1713, the slave trade was ready to become a full fledged capitalistic venture, albeit not without significant risks to the developers themselves.
From the opposite side of the equation, the demand side, the nature of the southern agricultural development necessitated some drastic and labor intensive programs to insure profitibility. Thus,
. . . th...