United States' Economy and Slavery

[Frodo]

I have a few simple questions that have been nagging at me for some time -could the Thirteen Colonies (before independence) had grown their economies without slavery?  Just how central was slavery to the existence of the Thirteen Colonies (and later, the antebellum United States)? And could the United States' economy had grown into the largest in the world without slavery having a role in its early development? 

[Ogis]

In a nutshell, slavery was the best thing to happen to America. It should be reintroduced, but not by race. It should be reintroduced at the poverty line. It will support capitalism and good, old-fashioned labor.

[phk]

A lot more indentured servitude and aggressive en-slavery of the Natives.

[opebo]

'Economy' as we know it is almost synonymous with slavery.

[Sbane]

In a nutshell, slavery was the best thing to happen to America. It should be reintroduced, but not by race. It should be reintroduced at the poverty line. It will support capitalism and good, old-fashioned labor.

Would you like to be the first to volunteer?

[titaniumtux]

The USofA relied on slavery at the time in a similar fashion to the West Indies, etc. America would have been fine without slavery compared to other nations if no one had slaves. If everyone but the Americans had slaves, slave-driving nations would have become industrialized at a faster rate and Americans would be migrating to those nations with the hopes of a higher standard of living. Because most countries abolished slavery around the same time (AFAIK), it's tricky to compare.

[jokerman]

This is a difficult question to answer.  Agricultural production in the south after the civil war took decades to recover, but its not clear how much of that was due to the actual trauma of the war rather than the disintegration of the slavery system; and furthermore, many aspects of slavery were carried on de facto and weren't really ended until a century later with successions of agricultural technological innovations.  One could argue that the free labor system provided for these innovations, or alternatively that these innovations were what finally broke the back of fixed southern labor and Jim Crow.  If its the former then one could argue the south could have developed fine (or even better without slavery) but if its the latter then the answer is much more ambiguous.