When the weather is good, farming is easier and farmers make more money. The Southern region has mild weather all year. That made it easy for planters in the Southern Colonies to raise crops. They grew cotton, tobacco, indigo, rice, and sugarcane.
But they didn’t do it alone. The slave trade brought in tens of thousands of enslaved Africans. With slave labor, one landholder could farm large areas and make lots of money. Southern planters got very rich. But enslaved people got nothing for all their hard work. Their lives were very different from the lives of wealthy planters.
