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The Origins of Slavery

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The Beginnings of Slavery

• A majority of the world’s cultures in pre-industrial times practiced some form of forced labor.

• People were enslaved for many reasons. These reasons included: being captured in battle, being a debtor, being born into slavery, or being punished for a crime.

Slave market in early medieval Eastern Europe.

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Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade• The Atlantic Slave Trade involved the forced

migration of enslaved Africans to the New World.

• An estimated ten to fifteen million Africans were transported between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries.

• These captives were transported from Africa to Europe, the West Indies, and tropical and subtropical regions of the Americas. A majority of these Africans were forced to work on plantations.

• The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade vastly changed the racial, social, economic, and cultural makeup of the American nations; and it left a legacy of racism in the Americas that endures today.

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Roots of the Trans-AtlanticSlave Trade

• The slave trade was largely fueled by the demand of New World plantation owners who sought abundant and inexpensive labor.

• They experimented with English laborers and Native-American laborers, but these workers proved problematic.

• English indentured servants retained their rights as English citizens and could only be held in servitude for a limited time. Native Americans were not resistant to European diseases and could escape easily.

• African labor filled the plantation owners’ needs. These laborers had strong immune systems; and since they were so far from their homelands, their chances of escape were decreased. Also, because of their darker skin, Africans could be easily segregated and identified as slaves.

A diagram of a Trans-Atlantic Slave Ship

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The Middle Passage

• The trip from the west coast of Africa to the Americas was called the Middle Passage.

• Depending on the place of origin, the final destination, and the weather, the trip could take twenty-five to sixty days.

• An estimated 2.5 million men, women, and children died during the Middle Passage.

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The Middle PassageContinued

• Before their horrific voyage, Africans were captured in slave raids; and many had to march up to 500 miles to the coastline. Once they reached the coast, captured Africans were imprisoned in fortresses until they were loaded onto ships.

• On board the ships the captives were kept below decks at night. These decks were only four or five feet high, and people were stacked on top of one another.

• Male captives were left shackled at all times, but women and children were relatively free on the ship. Many female captives fell prey to sexual abuse from the ship’s crew.

• On average, captives were given two meals a day and a pint of water.

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Conditions Aboard the Ships• The conditions aboard the cargo ships

were extremely unsanitary, and enslaved Africans often became sick by consuming contaminated food and water.

• Although the ship’s doctors often segregated the sickest captives from everyone else, diseases spread rapidly. Dysentery was the deadliest of the ship-born diseases.

• Slaves generally arrived at their destinations so weak and covered with sores that they had to be placed in special barracks called barracoons to be restored to health before they could be sold.

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Africans Arrive in the Americas

• If they survived the perilous Middle Passage, captive Africans faced a host of new challenges. These included acclimating to new climates, new diets, new languages of their captors, and a new array of deadly diseases.

• Mortality rates for enslaved Africans were very high. However, many Africans brought with them a fierce determination to survive, to retain the critical elements of their own culture, and to build new families despite difficult conditions.

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Slaves on the Plantations• Most of the enslaved Africans labored on

plantations in Latin America and on Caribbean islands.

• Here they faced some of the harshest living conditions and suffered extremely high mortality rates. Slaves working on sugar plantations in the Caribbean had a life expectance of only two to three years.

• Fewer than six percent of all Africans were brought to the British North American colonies.

• By 1775, about 800,000 African slaves labored in the thirteen colonies that became the United States.

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Abolition of the Slave Trade• By the late 1700s in both Great Britain and

America, religious leaders were attacking the slave trade as immoral. In America the Quakers led many of these attacks.

• Additionally, the American Revolution’s and the French Revolution’s declarations about human freedom undermined slavery’s legitimacy.

• Also, in the late 1700s Europe’s economy began shifting from agricultural to industrial. This economic shift reduced the demand for slave labor.

• The slave trade ended in the early nineteenth century. It ended first in Great Britain, and in 1808 the United States formally ended the Atlantic slave trade. However, illegal smuggling of Africans continued until the 1850s.

President John Adams fought to end the slave trade for nearly twenty years.

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Legacy of the Atlantic Slave Trade

• The millions of transported Africans affected the Americas racially, socially, culturally, and intellectually.

• Today, people of African descent dominate the populations of the islands of the Caribbean.

• African influence is particularly notable in the United States in the performing arts, cuisine, building styles, and language.

• Often forgotten is the impact of the Atlantic slave trade on Africa. During the three centuries when West Africa was about to enter its own industrial revolution, millions of people were kidnapped; and entire societies disrupted or destroyed.

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