Transcript Introduction to The Slave Trade and The Middle Passage

Introduction to The Slave Trade
and The Middle Passage
http://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/slaveryand-anti-slavery/resources/facts-about-slave-tradeand-slavery
www.pbs.org
What was the slave trade?
• Approximately 11,863,000 Africans were shipped
across the Atlantic, with a death rate during the Middle
Passage reducing this number by 10-20 percent.
• As a result between 9.6 and 10.8 million Africans
arrived in the Americas.
•
About 500,000 Africans were imported into what is
now the U.S. between 1619 and 1807--or about 6
percent of all Africans forcibly imported into the
Americas.
What was The Slave Trade?
• Well over 90 percent of African slaves were
imported into the Caribbean and South
America. Only about 6 percent of imports
went directly to British North America. Yet by
1825, the U.S. had a quarter of blacks in the
New World.
The majority of African slaves were brought to
British North America between 1720 and
1780.
How much did slaves have to work?
• Sugar field workers in Jamaica worked about
4,000 hours a year--three times that of a
modern factory worker. Cotton workers toiled
about 3,000 hours a year.
• The average person would work 2,080 hours a
year if they worked 40 hours a week/52 weeks
a year.
What was The Middle Passage? (see
short video clip)
• The Middle Passage was so named because it was the
middle part of a three-part voyage -- a voyage that began
and ended in Europe. The first leg of the voyage carried a
cargo that often included iron, cloth, brandy, firearms, and
gunpowder. Upon landing on Africa's "slave coast," the
cargo was exchanged for Africans. Fully loaded with its
human cargo, the ship set sail for the Americas, where the
slaves were exchanged for sugar, tobacco, or some other
product.
• Slaves were fed twice daily and some captains made vain
attempts to clean the hold. Air holes were cut into the deck
to allow the slaves breathing air, but these were closed in
stormy conditions. The bodies of the dead were simply
thrust overboard. And yes, there were uprisings.
What did the newly captured slaves
think about what was happening to
them?
Olaudah Equiano, an African captured as a boy who later
wrote an autobiography, recalled . . .
“When I looked round the ship too and saw a large furnace
of copper boiling, and a multitude of black people of every
description chained together, every one of their
countenances expressing dejection and sorrow, I no longer
doubted of my fate and quite overpowered with horror and
anguish, I fell motionless on the deck and fainted. . . . I
asked if we were not to be eaten by those white men with
horrible looks, red faces and long hair?"
The Middle Passage route
Notice that it begins in Europe, then Africa then to the New World
Image of a slave ship
Other resources
• Index of slave narratives collected by the WPA
from 1936-1938:
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/wpa/index.
html
• “The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Eqiano”
• “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl”- by
Harriet Jacobs (from Edenton, NC)