S l av e r y i n t h e A m e r i c a s The Slave Trade Matthew Kachur Philip Schwarz, Ph.D., General Editor Slavery in the Americas:The Slave Trade Copyright © 2006 by Infobase Publishing All rights reserved.No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means,elec- tronic or mechanical,including photocopying,recording,or by any information storage or retrieval sys- tems,without permission in writing from the publisher.For information,contact: Chelsea House An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kachur,Matthew,1960– The slave trade / Matthew Kachur. p.cm.— (Slavery in the Americas) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8160-6134-3 1. Slave trade—United States—History—Juvenile literature. 2. Slave trade—North America— History—Juvenile literature. 3. Slavery—United States—History—Juvenile literature. I. Title. II. Series. 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PREVIOUS PAGE: Slaves captured in Africa are led to the coast,where they will be loaded on a ship and brought to the Americas. : Contents : Preface to the Series . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 1 The Earliest Forms of Slavery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17 2 Sugar and the Transatlantic Slave Trade . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 3 The Slave Trade in North America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 4 The Middle Passage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 5 The American Slave Trade . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 6 The United States Abolishes the Slave Trade . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 7 Internal and Illegal Slave Trading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 8 The End of the Slave Trade . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 Time Line . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 S l av e r y i n t h e A m e r i c a s : Preface to the Series Philip Schwarz, Ph.D., General Editor In order to understand American history, it is essential to know that for nearly two centuries, Americans in the 13 colonies and then in the United States bought imported Africans and kept them and their descendants in bondage. In his second inaugural address in March 1865, President Abraham Lincoln mentioned the “250 years of unrequited toil” that slaves had endured in America. Slavery lasted so long and controlled so many people’s lives that it may seem impos- sible to comprehend the phenomenon and to know the people involved. Yet it is extremely difficult to grasp many aspects of life in today’s United States without learning about slavery’s role in the lives and development of the American people. Slavery probably existed before history began to be recorded, but the first known dates of slavery are about 1600 B.C. in Greece and as early as 2700 B.C. in Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq). Although there are institutions that resemble slavery in some modern societies, slavery in its actual sense is illegal everywhere. Yet historical slavery still affects today’s free societies. Numerous ancient and modern slave societies were based on chattel slavery—the legal ownership of human beings, not just their labor. The Bible’s Old and New Testaments, as well as other ancient historical documents, describe enslaved peo- ple. Throughout history, there were slaves in African, Middle Eastern, South Asian, and East Asian societies, as well as in the Americas—and of course, there were slaves in European countries. (One origin of the word slave is the medieval Latin sclavus, which not only means “slave” but also “Slav.” The Slavs were people of eastern Europe who were conquered in the 800s and often sold as slaves.) This drawing shows slaves carrying their master in a garden in ancient Rome. Slaves were a part of many societies from ancient times until the mid-1800s. : Preface to the Series· 5 People found as many excuses or justifications for enslav- ing other people as there were slaveholding societies. Members of one ethnic group claimed that cultural differences justified enslaving people of another group. People with long histories of conflict with other groups might conclude that those other people were inferior in some cultural way. Citizens of ancient Greece and Rome, among others, claimed they could hold other people in bondage because these people were “barbarians” or prisoners of war. Racism played a major part in European decisions to enslave Africans. European colonists in the Americas commonly argued that Africans and their descendants were naturally inferior to Europeans, so it was morally acceptable to enslave them. New World slavery deeply affected both Africa and the Americas. African society changed dramatically when the Atlantic slave trade began to carry so many Africans away. Some African societies were weakened by the regular buying or kidnapping of valued community members. Western Hemisphere societies also underwent extraordi- nary changes when slavery of Africans was established there. Black slavery in North America was part of society from the earliest colonial settlements until the end of the U.S. Civil War. Many people consider the sale of about 20 Africans in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619 the beginning of African slavery in what became the United States. American Indians and, later, Africans also were enslaved in Spanish colonies such as today’s Florida and California and the islands of the Caribbean. In early to mid-17th-century colonial North America, slavery developed slowly, beginning in Maryland and Virginia and spreading to the Carolinas in the 1670s. Southern 6· The Slave Trade colonists originally relied on white European servants. However, many of these servants had signed contracts to work only for a certain number of years, often to pay for their passage to North America. They became free when these con- tracts expired. Other servants rebelled or escaped. When fewer Europeans were available as servants, the servants’ prices rose. The colonists hoped to find a more easily con- trolled and cheaper labor supply. European slave traders cap- tured and imported more Africans, and slave prices dropped. Soon, American plantations became strong markets for enslaved Africans. Tobacco plantation owners in the colonies around Chesapeake Bay—Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina—and rice growers in South Carolina pressured slave traders to supply more slaves. In time, more and more slaves were kidnapped from their homes in Africa and taken to the colonies in chains to cultivate crops on the growing number of Southern plantations. Slaves were also taken to the Northern colonies to be farm workers, household servants, and artisans. In 1790, the U.S. enslaved population was less than 700,000. By 1860, it had risen to 3,953,750. Similar circumstances transformed the Caribbean and South American societies and economies into plantation economies. There was a high demand for sugar in Europe, so British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and other European colonists tried to fill that need. Brazil, a Portuguese colony, also became a thriving coffee-producing region. As the sugar and coffee planters became successful, they increased the size of their plantations and therefore needed more slaves to do the work. By 1790, Brazil was the largest American colonial slave society—that is, a society whose economy and social structure Preface to the Series· 7 were grounded in slavery. Some 1,442,800 enslaved people lived in Brazil in 1790—twice the number that lived in the United States. Brazil’s slave population grew slowly, however; in 1860, it was still only about 1,715,000. However, South American slaves were forced to work extremely hard in the tropical heat. The death rate of Caribbean and South American plantation workers was much higher than that of the North American slaves. Occasionally, a North American slave owner would threaten to sell unruly slaves to the West Indies or South America. Enslaved people took the threat seriously because the West Indies’ bad reputation was widespread. If the 1619 “first Africans” were slaves—the record is not It is estimated that at least completely clear—then there 11.8 million people were cap- was a massive increase of the tured and shipped from Africa to enslaved North American the Americas. Many died during population from 20 or so the slave ship voyage across the people to nearly 4 million. In Atlantic Ocean. About 10 million 1860, known descendants of survived and were sold in the Africans, both enslaved and Americas from 1519 to 1867. free, numbered approximately Nearly one-third of those people 4.5 million, or about 14 per- went to Brazil,while only about cent of the U.S. population. 3.8 percent (391,000) came to Slaveholders thought sev- North America. eral numbers best measured their social, political, and economic status. These were the number of human beings they owned, the money and labor value of those people, and the proportion of slaveholders’ total investment in human beings. By the 1800s, Southern slaveholders usually held two-thirds of 8· The Slave Trade their worth in human property. The largest slave owners were normally the wealthiest people in their area. For example, one Virginian colonist, Robert “King” Carter, who died in 1733, owned 734 slaves. Consider what it took for slavery to begin in North America and to last all the way to 1865 in the South. This historical phenomenon did not “just occur.” Both slave owning and enslaved people made many decisions concern- ing enslavement. Should people hold other people in lifetime bondage? Could Africans be imported without damaging American colonial societies? Should colonists give up slavery? It took many years before Americans reached consensus on these subjects. White people’s consensus in the North eventually led to the outlawing of slavery there. The Southern white consensus was clearly proslavery. Enslaved peoples had to make different decisions. Should slaves resist slavery individ- ually or in groups? Should they raise families when their chil- dren were likely to live and die in bondage? Over the two centuries in which North American slavery existed, enslaved people changed their opinions concerning these questions. Some white colonists initially tried to own Indian slaves. However, because the Indians knew the local envi- ronment, they could escape somewhat easily, especially because their free relatives and friends would try to protect them. Also, European diseases simply killed many of these Indians. Once European enslavement of American Indians died out in the 18th century, Africans and their African- American descendants were the only slaves in America. The Africans and their children were people with a history. They Preface to the Series· 9