Slavery+in+the+American+Colonies

Slavery in the American Colonies  Slavery spread quickly in the American colonies. At first status of Africans in America was very low, and some—like European indentured servants —succeeded to become free after several years of being slaves. From the 1660s, however, the colonies began making laws about slave servitude; they made the slaves and their children serve for their whole lives. By the start of the American Revolution, slaves were almost half of the population of the southern colonies, and most of the slaves were located in South Carolina. According to "Slaves performed numerous tasks, from clearing the forest, to serving as guides, trappers, craftsmen, nurses, and house servants, but they were most essential as agricultural workers and most numerous where landowners sought to grow crops for market. The most important of these crops consisted of tobacco in the upper South (Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina) and rice in the lower South (South Carolina and Georgia); farther south still, on Caribbean islands such as Barbados, Jamaica, and Saint-Domingue, sugar was an even more valuable slave-grown commodity. Slaves also worked on large wheat-producing estates in New York and on horse-breeding farms in Rhode Island, but climate and soil restricted the development of commercial agriculture in the Northern colonies, and slavery never became as economically central as in the South. Slaves in the North were typically held in small numbers, and most served as domestic servants; only in New York did they form more than 10 percent of the population, and in the North as a whole less than 5 percent of the inhabitants were slaves."


 * The Middle Passage **

The Middle Passage was the transport of slaves across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa to the American Colonies. The conditions of this journey were wretched; the human cargo caught all sorts of extremely bad diseases and were usually cruelly mistreated by the crew. Moreover, captured Africans had absolutely no idea of where they were going, and many of them wished to die before they got there. Some of them got their wish, given the average mortality rate of captured Africans on the Middle Passage was 20%. These were only some of the hardships faced by Africans as they were forced to undergo this trying and painful journey. But how were they reduced to such a miserable condition?

The slave trade is what drove the Middle Passage. Slaves were in high demand as labor for crop production in the American Colonies, especially for cotton production. So traders from Europe came to the West African coast with cargo like cloth, iron, or brandy, which they traded for slaves. They then transported the slaves to the American colonies and traded them for cash profit. The West African traders were the ones who went into the African interior to capture the Africans. They were taken from their homes, shackled, and forced to walk many miles from the African interior to the Atlantic coast. Many of them died at this stage in the journey, but the worst was yet to come. Once at the Atlantic coast, captured Africans were traded for the cargo from Europe, and exchanged hands. They were forced to wait in the dungeons of places called slave factories, where they stayed before they were to be brought aboard ships that would take them to the American Colonies. Once a ship came, slaves were cruelly branded for their later identification, were shackled to one another, and then brought on the ship. Of course, the slaves had no idea where they were going or what the white men were going to do to them. For example, one slave, Olaudah Equiano, wrote of how he thought the white men were cannibals.

"When I looked round the ship too and saw a large furnace of copper boiling, and a mulititude 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 horrow 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?"

Though he was wrong in his thinking, the reality was just as horrible. The slaves were forced to "live" in the lower deck of the ship. There was less than 5 feet of headroom, sleeping shelves took up a lot of the other space, and there were 300 to 400 people in the tiny area. There was also very little ventilation, and oftentimes there wasn't a place to get rid of human waste. With conditions like these, disease spread like wildfire, and any dead were simply dumped overboard. In addition, slaves were treated with cruelty and disdain. They would would be physically punished for any slight disobedience, and the crew would also be free to sexually abuse the women as they pleased. They were forced to undergo these challenges for a weeks and weeks, before the ship would would be able to dock at some American port city. A few weeks prior to this, the crew might try to feed the slaves more food in order to make them look better for sale. Once at the port city, the slaves would be oiled and given simple clothes so they might look more appealing for a buyer. Then the time would come when they were auctioned off.


 * Slave Auctions

Once a ship came from Africa with its human cargo, the slaves would be lead into pens close to the stage where the auction would take place. It is here that they would be washed and coated with grease or sometimes tar to make them look more healthy. They would then be led out onto the stage, and before any bidding might start, those who wanted to could examine the slaves more closely. This examination was characterized by many pokes and prods, as prospective buyers looked for the slaves who seemed to be the most healthy and also those who appeared to be the strongest. After any examinations, a slave would be led up to a raised platform, and then the trader would set a starting price for the slave in question. The starting price would tend to be higher for healthier, younger slaves, and lower for older, more sickly slaves. Then the bidding would begin, and the highest bidder would win the slave. Another form of a slave auction was, in essence, a grab and go auction. Prior to the auction, any hopeful buyers would pay the trader a certain amount of money for any number of slaves. These buyers would then receive an amount of tickets based off how many slaves they had bought. Once this was done, the slave pen would open and the buyers would be allowed to rush in and get as many good slaves as their tickets would allow. Finally, the buyers would return their tickets to the slave trader in order to check out those they had bought. ** http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1p277.html Address this site for more information on the Middle Passage. //LINK TO WEBSITE:// [|http://www.africanaonline.com/slavery_colonial_era.]