Today, the price of real estate in any major city and its associated suburbs is very expensive, for a lot of reasons, of which the density of the respective population, income, growth, and infrastructure, are amongst some of them, but back in the days of colonial life, overpopulation was not an issue in America, in fact, those that owned their own arable land, needed laborers, especially in order to successfully produce products such as: rice, indigo, cotton, and tobacco. This meant, particularly in the southern parts of America, that indentured servants and/or slaves, were necessary in order to create wealth for the planter class of that era, for without those indentured servants or slaves, the land itself, had very little value, for the value of that land was incumbent upon having enough laborers to create, maintain, and produce the crops that provided money for the land owner.
While today in America, some politicians may rail against immigration and the need to build a wall to preclude illegal immigrants from entering into this country, back in the colonial era, the compelling issue was the need for immigrants, for labor, for anybody of good health willing to work the land, indentured servant or not, free or not, for without that labor, lands would lie idle and fallow, producing far less than their capability would properly indicate.
This would indicate that since indentured servitude as well as slavery were legal, that both were actively pursued by the land owning class in America, with incumbent advantages of each, depending upon the location and size of the land, the climate, the capabilities of that labor, and the crops or product being so produced. In addition, since an indentured servant, upon completion of his contract terms, now was entitled to his own land or the freedom to move to another locale for employment, there were obvious advantages to the buying of slaves to begin with, in addition to the fact that slaves produced their own progeny under the ownership of their slave masters.
Not too surprisingly, for those blessed with abundant land resources, and plenty of slave labor to work it, the economics of the situation, allowed this privileged planter class, to make good coin literally off of the backs of the slaves that worked for them, so that, over time, this became an ingrained and embedded institution so much so that without such slave labor, and in acknowledgment that there was no other cheap labor available to replace this slave labor, the plantation class wassusceptible to imminent economic collapse without their access to slavery.
Fortunately, for the plantation class, the trickle-down effect, of a vibrant economy built on slave labor, meant that merchants, banks, churches, governments, and the necessary infrastructure, all had a vested interest in keeping going what was already working, especially in consideration of the fact that slaves were legally treated by the owners as their own personal property.
All of this meant, as this nation began to mature, that those that had no need for slavery, as well as those that saw the moral corruption of slavery, became quite uneasy with it, for it stained deeply this great nation of freedom, that held in bondage millions of people, with no effective escape or exit strategy whatsoever from this particular and peculiar institution. Because the wealth of the south was truly built upon slave labor it would not and could not give it up, for in those times, land was cheap, and it was enslaved human labor that provided its inestimable value, so that the seeds of the civil war to come were first sown upon the exploitation of human labor yearning to breathe free.