Just one history-altering Black Death impact:
So many peasants died in Western Europe that the centuries-old serf system was permanently destabilized. Survivors were able to negotiate more independence for their labor, and the structure of medieval economics and life changed.
In West Africa, below the Sahara, people had to deal with malaria (endemic in much of Europe as well), yellow fever and sleeping sickness, the latter caused by trypanosomes (a protozoa) borne by the tsetse fly. The tsetse has impact beyond infecting humans. It also infects and kills domesticated animals from pigs to cows to horses, making it impossible to keep such animals in most of the forest belts and portions of the savannah.
This not only reduced animal protein for West Africans, it denied them large animals to help turn earth for agriculture and to provide manure for fertilizer. Thus agriculture was limited, especially in the forest, forcing people to rely on hunting and gathering. This, in turn, limited population and the ability to centralize. The peoples of much of West Africa had to rely on human strength for hoeing land and transporting goods to a far greater degree than most Europeans. That need for manpower encouraged slavery long before the Europeans came.
In the Americas, such plagues and epidemics appear to have been rare before contact with the Europeans. That may be explained, in part, by the lack of domesticated animals. In Europe, Africa and Asia, many pandemics (including influenzas and measles, but not smallpox, malaria or plague) involved microbes harbored by domesticated animals that jump to humans.
That all changed for the peoples of the Americas with the arrival of Columbus and Europeans, first, and of Africans almost immediately thereafter.
The diseases they inadvertently introduced would devastate the people of the lands on the western side of the Atlantic. Native Americans—the Indians—were to die in far greater percentages than Europeans did, even during the Black Death.
For instance, it took Europe until 1500 to finally return to a level of population achieved in 1300. In contrast, the numbers of native Americans declined with little interruption and often precipitously from the time of Columbus to practically our own day.
Pure Indian numbers are small, yes, but their DNA has more than survived—in Mexico, Central America and much of South America it has thrived—in large mestizo populations of mixed Indian-European and Indian-Afro descent.
While Indians fell to diseases from both Europe and Africa, Africans were perceived to be more resistant to malaria and yellow fever, just as Europeans were believed to be more resistant to smallpox after building up immunities over generations.
It was discovered that populations in malaria regions developed sickle-cell trait in their hemoglobin, which significantly reduced the threat of malaria. That was a greater positive than sickle cells’ negative tendency to clog and to die early leading to a constant shortage of red cells. Sickle-cell anemia is a serious threat to sub-Sahara African populations and their descendants.
The Long March to the Coast
When the first European. The big picture: From 1500 to 1900, millions of African men, women and children were captured in wars and raids—usually conducted by enemy African peoples or roaming posses from afar, but not infrequently by neighboring villages—bound together and marched or canoed (often over hundreds miles) to European-held forts and “factories” (from the Portuguese feitoria) dotting the West African coast. Many died trying to fight off their kidnappers or succumbed to disease, malnourishment and mistreatment on the weeks-long marches. And more would die in the crowded factory dungeons or in flimsy barracoon enclosures.
British Prime Minister Palmerston, an abolitionist, estimated in 1861 that as many as 50 percent of those taken captive died before they ever saw a ship. Here, we’ll be much more conservative and say that the rate of loss before boarding ships was just as great as the rate of loss at sea, or 14.5 percent over the entire history of the slave trade.
We’ll put the total number taken captive at 14.6 million, the number surviving to board a slave ship at 12.5 million and the number still living upon arrival in the Americas at 10.7 million. Thus 27 percent or nearly 4 million Africans died before they were turned over to masters on the western side of the Atlantic. And that’s a conservative estimate.
The Middle Passage
While some Africans were taken to Europe, and more to Atlantic archipelagos such as the Canary and Cape Verde islands, the vast majority were destined for the Americas.
Of these, more than half were captives of the trans-Atlantic Triangular Trade, with each voyage split into three passages: On the First Passage, ships departed from European ports with guns, ammunition, bolts of cloth, iron bars and distilled spirits, and sailed to the West Africa fort-factories to trade with African captor peoples, several of which established sizeable empires over the centuries.
The Europeans made few attempts before the late 19th century to penetrate sub-Sahara Africa to hunt for slaves directly because of disease and because trading for slaves was much more profitable and predictable than warring with populous, armed African kingdoms. Before 1800, actual colonies were established only on the Angolan and Mozambique coasts (by Portugal), and at the Cape of Good Hope (Netherlands). The Portuguese and Spanish also colonized island groups, including the Canaries, where they found the Guanche people, and the uninhabited Azores, Cape Verde Islands and little São Tomé on the equator.
On the Second (or Middle Passage), the same ships carried the enslaved from the fort-factories on the West African coast to colonies in the Americas with plantations and mining sites. The Middle Passage could take two months and frequently longer in the 16th century, with faster transits as sailing ships evolved through the 17th and 18th centuries. Only in the closing years of the slave trade in the 19th century (and well after the European corner of the Triangular Trade atrophied) did slavers begin crossing the Atlantic in steamships.
On the Third Passage, after selling and trading their human cargo in the Americas, the ships returned to their European home ports with sugar, molasses, rum, dyewoods (if departing the Spanish Main, Brazil or Caribbean colonies); or rum, whale oil, lumber, furs, rice, tobacco, indigo (if departing the North American East Coast), all purchased with profits from the sale of slaves. Sometimes there would be an intermediate passage from the Caribbean to North America, carrying slaves, sugar, molasses and rum.
Beyond the Triangular Trade
The Triangular Trade did not cover all trans-Atlantic slave voyages. After the opening of sugar-cane plantations in Brazil, ships made roundtrip voyages from Recife, Salvador and other north-Brazil ports, and later from Rio de Janeiro to trade for slaves in Angola, Congo and Mozambique. The European corner of the triangle was eliminated on these voyages.
Over the peak years (1550-1866), an estimated 12,000 ships were employed in the slave trade, making an estimated 40,000 east-to-west trans-Atlantic crossings. Most of the numbers presented here are from Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, developed over decades by a large number of researchers and scholars drawing upon extensive archives on four continents. The website is SlaveVoyages.org.
Basic Numbers
The count of ships and crews engaged in the Atlantic slave trade was enormous, but we’ll stay focused on the enslaved.
To repeat, the total taken aboard slave ships is put at 12.52 million of whom 10.70 million survived the voyage.
The volume of people—men, women and children—grew from 45,000 over the first 50 years (to 1550) to 5.61 million for the peak century of 1701-1800. And even as slave rebellions and emancipation movements intensified in the early 19th century, the annual numbers rose; another 3.18 million suffered the forced crossing from 1801 to 1850.
To compare: The number of enslaved Africans far outnumbered white European emigrants well into the 19th century. Between 1500 and 1820, 8.7 million enslaved Africans arrived in the Americas compared to 2.6 million white Europeans. The latter included 500,000 indentured servants and 129,000 convicts and political prisoners (as estimated by James Horn and Philip D. Morgan). Nearly 50 percent of the Europeans came from England, Scotland and Ireland, dominating traffic from the late 17th century on. Nearly 40 came from Portugal and Spain, which dominated in the earlier decades. German lands sent 5.7 percent of the total, third greatest.
It wasn’t until the mid-19th century that the number of white Europeans crossing the ocean to settle in the Americas began to exceed the number of black Africans arriving in bondage.
As the decades passed, more effort was made to keep more of the enslaved alive. Thus, deaths in transit were down to 13 percent in the final years, ending in 1866. That compares to more than 28 percent in the first century, 1501-1600.
Arrival at the big ports—Havana, Cap Français, Port Royal, Vera Cruz, Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, New York, Charleston, New Orleans, etc.—did not end the horror. Disease, malnourishment and terrible mistreatment continued to afflict the enslaved. Over some periods, in some colonies, especially on Caribbean islands, as many as half of those who had survived the crossing would die in the first year.
The best estimate is that the average white American male in 1787 lived about 38 years. White women probably averaged fewer years, as death at childbirth was frequent. Short average life was due in large part to high child mortality. Those living into their 20s faced disease in town and country, and high rates of fatal accidents. Not many made it beyond their 60s.
Everything was worse for the enslaved, of course. White children suffered high mortality rates; slave babies far higher. Surviving slave children and adults received worse and less food, poorer housing in shacks, rough clothing and very little medical attention, and were subject to relentless heavy work. Thus average lives of slaves in the 13 colonies may have been no more than 30 years, and were likely much shorter still on some of the Caribbean islands and in Brazil.
They Came from Many Lands
For 200 years the slave trade followed the Portuguese navigators as they worked their way below the Tropic of Cancer and around the capes of the 4,000-mile hump of West Africa: Senegal, Gambia, Sierra Leone and Upper Guinea together accounted for 1.24 million enslaved. Then came the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana), the Slave Coast (Benin), the Niger delta and the Bight of Biafra, together adding another 4.07 million.
Even greater volumes were generated after the Portuguese established a small colony at Luanda (Angola) in 1575. Over the next 225 years, more than 5.5 million Africans, mainly Bantu peoples captured in wars and raids among their kingdoms (with the Portuguese frequently in support of one or the other) were sent across the South Atlantic in chains. The last significant sources of enslaved people for the Atlantic trade were Mozambique, Madagascar and smaller Indian Ocean islands, but their count was no more than 5 percent of the total, at 543,000.
To get an idea of the mix of people, records for the port of Charleston, SC, break down sources of enslaved arrivals thusly: Senegal, Gambia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, 43 percent; Angola, 39 percent; Gold Coast, 13 percent; and the Slave Coast, Mozambique and all others, 5 percent.
In addition to the trans-Atlantic voyages, historians estimate that 500,000 of the enslaved were soon assigned to a second voyage from entrepôt ports (mostly in the Caribbean) to their final destinations. Leading intermediate ports, depending on the era, included Havana, Port Royal (Jamaica), Willemstad (Curaçao) and Fort-de-France (Martinique).
While the archives count the enslaved based on ports of departure, there is much less information on the breakdown of the enslaved by specific peoples, be they Wolof from Senegal, Mandinka from Guinea, Ashanti from the Gold Coast, Bantu Ambundu from Angola, or the scores of other separate peoples, many of them living far from the Atlantic coast, who were hunted down and enslaved by longstanding enemies (and sometimes by neighbors acting out of avarice or self-defense).
Not surprisingly, many of those left behind in ravaged villages—perhaps most, but not all—desperately sought their turn to be the hunters and enslavers.
First, Portugal, then Other Flags
The Portuguese were the most intrepid and dedicated of Europe’s early navigators, in search of glory and profit. In addition to Prince Henry, Bartholomew Diaz and Vasco da Gama, both Columbus and Magellan (the latter born a Portuguese subject) learned their navigation in Portuguese service and first proposed their audacious schemes to Portuguese kings.
Not only did the Portuguese lead the explorations of Africa’s Atlantic coast (on their way to the Far East), they also were the first to develop the slave-plantation system, on Madeira.
Portuguese ships (including Brazilian-flagged vessels in the 19th century) delivered 5.10 million enslaved Africans to the New World, nearly half the total. Britain was second, after pushing its way into the trade in the 1600s, delivering 2.73 million. French ships carried 1.16 million; Spanish ships, 885,000; and Dutch ships, 475,000. (These numbers do not include people who died at sea.) The number for Spain is deceivingly low, for most of the slaves bound for Spain’s colonies were carried by ships of other nations. They competed for the Spanish crown’s contract, the Asiento de Negros.
American ships were responsible for transporting 253,000 enslaved Africans to the Americas, more than half going to the Caribbean and Brazil. A majority of these ships were built and based in New York, Baltimore, Boston, Newport and other New England ports, and many continued to run slaves under foreign flags after 1808 when the ban on U.S. participation in the overseas slave trade took effect.
Death at Sea
Despite the fear, misery and large-scale death of being raided, captured, marched and imprisoned, the Atlantic voyage posed the greatest terrors yet to the captives.
They were packed into holds rebuilt into at least two levels, with men and older boys on one level, and women and children on the second. Headroom was minimal, often people could not sit upright. They usually twisted, often chained, in the same few square feet day after day. While women and children might be brought on deck for air once a day, crews were wary of the males. They might be lucky to see the sun five times on a six-week voyage.
The heat was often unbearable. There were no toilets, no quarantine for those who fell ill (sometimes sick people were simply tossed overboard), and the holds became fetid stews of humanity and of parasites that afflict humanity. Royal Navy sailors said it was often the downwind stench that gave away a slaver long before it was boarded.
Many of the captives were convinced they were to be eaten when the journey ended; they did not believe they were being carried all that way to work fields. Most had never seen the ocean before and it was terrifying.
Hundreds of ships foundered in storms, with many captives and crew never to be heard from again. (A note on crews: They often included freed blacks and, black or white, they were subject to disease as well.) Slaver wrecks are estimated at more than 1,000 worldwide, with more than 50 off the Island of Mozambique alone.
Still more ships were seized—and more people died—in armed engagements with enemy warships, privateers, pirates (who might hold and sell captured slaves, or free them and enlist them into their crews) and, after 1807, with anti-slaver naval patrols, most of them British.
In the end, most of the 1.8 million Africans who did not survive the ocean passage died on board of disease, malnourishment and mistreatment. Of these, virtually all were committed, with little ceremony, to the deep.
No. 1 Slave Nation: U.S.
Distribution of the enslaved was uneven among the New World colonies. Of the estimated 10.7 million who survived the Atlantic passage, 388,000 (only 3.6 percent) were directed to Britain’s 13 East Coast colonies (before and after the American Revolution). That compares to 4.8 million to Brazil (44.9 percent of the total), 1.2 million to Jamaica and 1 million-plus to Saint-Domingue (Haiti).
But by 1860, more people were held in chattel bondage in the U.S. South than in any other nation in the Atlantic world, nearly 4 million, according to the U.S. census. That compares to an estimated 3 million-plus for Brazil, No. 2 that year, and perhaps 2 million for the Sokoto Caliphate in West Africa. How could this be, with Brazil importing 12 times as many captives from Africa, a significant portion of whom arrived in the 19th century when the U.S. was importing virtually none?
Several factors were in play: First, slaves lived longer in the more temperate U.S. Second, living longer, U.S. slave women had more children. Those children were virtually all condemned to be slaves, even if fathered by white men. With slave imports cut off since 1808, U.S. slave masters were out to maximize domestic “production” of slave children.
While slaves in Brazil likely died younger, especially in the early centuries, their surviving children were far more likely to be freed than those in the U.S. For decades, Portuguese settlers in Brazil were unable to attract many European women to the colony, and thus frequently married African slave women (as well as Indian women). And they also frequently acknowledged the resulting children and freed them, often at birth.
Thus, in Brazil, slaves died at a greater rate, and moved out of slavery at a far greater rate than in the U.S. states and predecessor colonies. The Brazilian plantations needed great numbers of replacement slaves each year.
These trends accelerated with Brazil’s great Minas Gerais gold rush in the late 1600s. Slaves won more rights, including the right to a wage and to buy their freedom in return for the teamwork necessary in the goldfields. The free, mixed population of Brazil was soon large; 43 percent today identify as pardo or “brown.”
It is also likely that far more Brazilian slaves were successful in escaping their masters than their American counterparts. The hinterland was vast. The mocambo communities of Palmares numbered as many as 20,000 people in the 17th century. In contrast, the U.S. North was never a totally reliable haven, even after the Revolution (although Canada was).
Wealth of the South
Slave masters in the U.S. came to realize it was in their interest to keep slaves alive and healthy. Collectively, they were valued at more than $3 billion on the eve of the Civil War, or more than all the land in the South from Chesapeake Bay to the Brazos river in Texas.
In 1800, the enslaved workforce numbered 894,000, valued at an average of $300 each or more than $2.68 million collectively, including slaves in New York and other Northern states. By 1860 the slave force—now only in the South—had increased to 3.95 million, valued at an average $870 (in constant dollars?), or collectively at $3.5 billion (or nearly 12 times the valuation in 1800).
The slave force was thus essential to the Southern economy which, of course, is why the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln—who opposed extension of slavery—could lead to war. Their monetary value had soared through the 1800s with the Industrial Revolution in Britain, whose factories demanded huge amounts of cheap cotton.
The 1808 ban on importing of slaves from abroad did not end slave dealing in the U.S. Plantations, mainly for cotton, were opening up in the new states of the Deep South—and the new masters needed captive workers. The old Upper South masters of Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and even North Carolina were not able to grow cotton and found they had a growing surplus of slaves. Which they learned they could sell at great profit to the cotton planters.
Between 1808 and 1860, historians estimate, more than a million slaves were forced to make the one-way trip “down the river” to the Deep South via new steamboats and railroads, or by sea around Florida, or by foot down the old Natchez Trace. More than half were separated from a parent, a child and/or a spouse. And they were much further away from the dream of escape to the North.
In 1860, Mississippi was the wealthiest state in the Union. There were more millionaires among the new cotton-plantation masters of the lower Mississippi valley than among the merchants of New York. Many of the plantations had been established on lands from which the Choctaw people had been removed only 22 years before. Cotton picked and ginned here was shipped out of New Orleans directly to Liverpool or through New York.
Southern cotton was the nation’s No. 1 export commodity, by far. The planters asserted that “Cotton is King” and that economic hunger for cotton would persuade Britain and Europe to favor the South if war did break out. That was just one of many miscalculations that were to cost the South tremendous loss and hardship.
Southern Households: 30% Held Slaves
Slave ownership went well beyond the big plantations. In 1860, more than 30 percent of all Southern (slave state) households—394,000—owned slaves, according to the U.S. census. Fewer than 2,400 were categorized as large planters with 100 or more slaves (the largest plantation, growing rice in South Carolina, was worked by 1,000 slaves).
But more than 216,000 households owned from one to five slaves. Wikipedia maintains a List of Slave Owners, found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_slave_owners and a further list of Categories of Slave Owners, here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Slave_owners
(Still working on this section)
Removal of the Indians
The Timeline focuses on the European-directed slave trade in African people and its evolution. But it also takes note of much that went on between the Europeans and the native Americans whose societies were, first, stunned by the arrival of Columbus and his successors… and then all but swept away by disease, war, enslavement, forced removal from their lands and, finally, forced adaptation of European culture.
Estimates of native American populations vary by wide margins, but we’ll use the 1994 estimates of William Denevan. He agreed with other researchers that Mexico and the Andes were home for the largest populations, perhaps 17.2 million and 15.7 million respectively. He put Central America at 5.6 million; North America north of the Rio Grande at only 3.8 million and the Caribbean at 3 million. With the rest of South America estimated at 8.6 million that would provide a total of 53.9 million as Columbus made landfall in the Bahamas.
Disease came ashore with Columbus’s crews, or with the crews soon to follow. Smallpox was devastating, but so were malaria, typhus, measles, influenza and mumps; nobody understood their transmission. All were killers in Europe, but people there had built up a certain level of immunity. Not so native Americans, whose populations declined by 50 percent within decades of contact, and sometimes by far more and even more quickly.
This Timeline also touches on developments in West African homelands, where ancient ways of making war, including various forms of forced servitude, had been a fact of life for centuries; slaves were part of the trans-Sahara caravan trade. But when that gave way to the capitalistic, profit-driven economics of chattel slavery introduced by the Europeans, the intra-African conflict and slave raiding reached levels that limited natural population growth for a century. The trans-Atlantic slave trade sputtered to an end in the late 19th century, at which point the Europeans sliced up most of Africa into colonies organized for the benefit of Europe. European governments sought to justify this takeover as the only means by which slavery could be abolished within Africa.
While their driving motivation was to take control of Africa’s natural resources, the Europeans may have been right that slavery would have continued to thrive if it was left to the Africans.
Monsters?
This Timeline doesn’t attempt to capture the monstrosity of the system. But perhaps it can help to illustrate that, just as there were millions of victims, there were also many millions of everyday sort of people, including black people in Africa, working at every level of complicity. I’m not including those who benefited from lower prices for the sugar, tobacco, cotton and coffee grown and harvested by slaves, but one could. I’m not including the millions of Europeans—most desperate for a living rather than eager for adventure—who filled the ships in the great trans-Atlantic migrations of later years. But like everyone born in the U.S., these immigrants and their children soon had to make choices posed by a racist world.
Some Developments and Patterns Stand Out…
• The unexpected 19th-century super-surge of the Atlantic slave system as the Industrial Revolution created demand for more and more sugar and cotton…
• The frequency of slave uprisings, no matter how desperate the chances, erupting virtually everywhere in the Americas (and on the Atlantic islands) from the time of Columbus to the 20th century. Slave masters could rarely rest easy.
• The role of the French Revolution (the Enlightenment’s “Rights of Man”) in inspiring the uprising in Saint-Domingue, and the brutality of that complicated and shifting 13-year war for freedom finally won by the former slaves against long odds.
• There is also the rise of liberal forces in Britain, forces that changed hearts in that previously enthusiastic slave-trading empire to actually abolish its own trafficking and then to hound other nations’ slavers across the Atlantic. That was a tremendous achievement of government and a hopeful—almost miraculous—step forward for mankind.
• And there is the tumultuous conflict over slavery in the U.S. that began at the nation’s birth, spewed increasing venom (among whites) as slavery began to deliver unexpected wealth to Southern slave masters (which in turn fed moral outrage among Northern abolitionists). All of which erupted into the nation’s bloodiest war by far, whose ripples are not yet spent. A war fought mainly by whites, but in which ex-slaves and free-born blacks joined in large and fervent numbers.
The Union victory had many fathers, but not least were the black people fighting for black freedom. And no matter what disappointment and injustice followed, that victory could never be taken away from them.
• Despite all of the above, and all the stories in the Timeline, one tiny group stands out, at least for me.
How many more generations might “the system,” “the peculiar institution,” have continued to profit and grow, to enslave, debase and kill millions… if it were not for the initial, inspired and steadfast opposition of the Religious Society of Friends?