<P> Before the slave boom, Chesapeake tobacco plantations were characterized by a "culture of assimilation", where white planters worked alongside their black slaves and racial boundaries were less distinct . As slaveholding increased, intense racial contrasts emerged and all - black labor units supervised by white planters came to replace mixed - race units . Unwritten race - based sumptuary laws, which would later become Jim Crow laws, became common social fixtures in Northern and Southern colonies . </P> <P> For the many farmers who seized opportunity in the profitable tobacco enterprise, financial and personal anxiety mounted amidst stiff competition and falling prices . Some historians believe that these anxieties were redirected onto subordinates in the field, which exacerbated already strained racial relations . Planters pushed slaves to their physical limits to ensure a superior crop . Slaves, meanwhile, realized that the quality of a crop depended on their effort and began "foot dragging", or collectively slowing their pace in protest of the planters' extreme demands . Farmers racialized foot dragging, portraying it as an inherent personality trait of slaves . William Strickland, a wealthy colonial tobacco planter, remarked: </P> <Dl> <Dd> <Dl> <Dd> "Nothing can be conceived more inert than a slave; his unwilling labour is discovered in every step he takes; he moves not if he can avoid it; if the eyes of the overseer be off him, he sleeps...all is listless inactivity; all motion is evidently compulsory ." </Dd> </Dl> </Dd> </Dl> <Dd> <Dl> <Dd> "Nothing can be conceived more inert than a slave; his unwilling labour is discovered in every step he takes; he moves not if he can avoid it; if the eyes of the overseer be off him, he sleeps...all is listless inactivity; all motion is evidently compulsory ." </Dd> </Dl> </Dd>

Why the chesapeake colonies and north carolina relied on the cultivation of tobacco