What was the upside of keeping slavery from a Southern plantation owners point of view?

Question

Also, who were some famous proslavery advocates before the Civil War?

Answer 1

Believe it or not it wasn't cheap labor. One of the biggest reasons to use slaves was to have a work force that didn't have big turnover.

Of course the reason that turnover was a problem was because planting tobacco especially was a very arduous task. The tobacco plant is a very hard plant to raise because it is fragile and has to be planted just right under the right circumstances in order to produce well. It was not a very fun job and it was VERY hard work.

Slaves actually probably cost more in the long run (Even though the slaves never saw any of the price that was paid) because you had to house , feed, clothe and keep them healthy. It wouldn't do to spend all kinds of money on a slave and then run him into the ground.

Did some do that? Yes, a lot, but the successful plantations knew how to make sure their slaves were healthy enough to do good work. That doesn't mean that they were all treated very well. No, just enough to get what the master wanted.

The point is that it cost them a lot more to "employ" slaves than it would have to hire the jobs out BUT the reason slavery lasted as long as it did was because no one in their right mind work work as long and as hard as they did under the hot, insect infested, disease ridden conditions.

Answer 2

We forget that slaves had a significant dollar value in the antebellum South. A good field hand was worth about $1000.
If an owner had 100 hands, that represented an investment of $100,000 to him - - a substantial amount of money.
If a slave owner wanted to buy something expensive for
his house or plantation, he could sell a slave and use the thousand dollars.
Most men did not want to simply release tens or hundreds
of thousands of dollars worth of "livestock" and get nothing
in return.
Most of the elected officials - the prominent men of the South with the most notoriety or 'fame' - were also slave owners.
Take your pick.

Answer 3

Cheap labor, pure and simple. They didn't have to hire hands to work in the fields, or to work in the house, or to do any of the other chores involved in running a plantation. The slaves were always available and didn't have a choice of whether they wanted to do the job or not.