[jcranmer]

> The settlers who went to South America with the dreams of plucking gold bars out of the fruit trees and using an enslaved population to make hard farm work a breeze met a harsher reality.

Brazil had a higher slave-to-free ratio than the US, and imported more slaves than any other colony/country in the Americas (it was also the last country to ban slavery). Actually, the US was never a major slave importer--the US and Canada combined imported only about 4-5% of the total Atlantic slave trade, and the highest slave ratio in the US was only 57% (South Carolina), both of which are outdone by individual Caribbean islands. It's also worth pointing out that the truly productive gold and silver minds were in South America--Cerro Rico may have produced 60% of the world's silver at its height.

Put another way, South America was where it was, in fact, possible to have slaves dig free money out of the ground for you and do all of your hard labor, whereas this wasn't really possible in North America (at least not until after the invention of the cotton gin around 1800 and the discovery of highly productive mines in the late 1800s).

[pizza]

TIL. thanks