Slavery was truly only essential for the few large plantations. And even then they could substitute slaves with the poor "clay eaters" who could defiantly use the work. Slavery was a false dependent in the economy, despite the southerner's mind set. Truly the keeping of slaves was not based off of economic needs, but social insecurities of the whites. They needed to have inferiors, and a cheap source of labor was an additional plus. Some of the southerner's reasons for why they were superior were rather ridiculous. One of the most ridiculous reasons being that since whites have larger skulls than African Americans, they must be smarter. Not that the size of one's skull, or brain, rather, determines how smart someone is. The whites believed Africans to be animal like in nature, observing how they lived in their home country. Some even did the unthinkable of trying to justify slavery with religion; they translated "the curse of Ham" to mean that slavery was a decent liberty that they were granted by God.

Whites used faulty reasons to defend their use of slavery, which was not really necessary due to the condition of some of their fellow whites whom could have used the jobs themselves.
Truly, the South were cheap, morally deprived people. The abrupt ending of slavery after the civil war proves that slavery was not necessarily needed.