A series of momentous revolutions had transformed the instituted practice. First, as a result of a demographic revolution, a majority of slaves had now been born in the New World and they were capable of increasing the slave population by natural reproduction. During the seventeenth century, the slaves had had very few and slim opportunities to establish stable family relationships. In the Chesapeake colonies and the Carolinas, two-thirds of all slaves were male, and most slaves lived on plantations with fewer than ten slaves. These units were so small and widely dispersed, the sex ratio was so largely out of proportion, that it was difficult for black male slaves to find spouses. And a high rate of death meant that many slaves did not live long enough to marry or, if they did, their marriages did not last very long. Some families had become detached from one another because of the slave trade between plantation owners. But by the 1720s in the Chesapeake and the 1750s and '60s in the South Carolina and the Georgian Low Country, the slave population was naturally and effectively reproducing its numbers. .
Second, the so-called "plantation revolution" not only increased the size of plantations, but made them increasingly more productive and efficient economic contributors. Plantation owners in turn immediately expanded their operations in the fields and imposed more intense supervision on their slaves. .
A third and latter revolution was one of a religious nature. During the early colonial period, many planters resisted to adhering to the idea of converting slaves to Christianity out of a fear that the act of a baptism would change a slave's legal status. The black population was virtually untouched by Christianity until the religious revivals of the 1730s and 1740s. By the early nineteenth century, slaveholders increasingly adopted an ideal that Christianity would make the slaves more submissive, orderly, conscientious so in turn the plantation owners encouraged missionary activities among slaves.