Slavery has been a recognized institution since the first person was forced to work for another without pay other than food and clothing.  All civilizations were involved, and without slavery many of the great civilizations of the past would never have been possible.

The Egyptian, Greek and Roman civilizations thrived on it.  Even before the Egyptians made slaves of the Jews, the Sumerians and others before them used slaves, and this form of labor is recorded as far back as the written word began.  Who the first slaves were shall never be known, and while the Arab slave trade was the most common, the transatlantic trade was the most vile and cruel.

Although the actual transportation of slaves was carried out by the Europeans, it was the Africans themselves that provided the slaves for transportation.  In West Africa, slavery was commonplace, most being captured in war, and used not only for work but to bolster the armies of the colonizing nations during expansion of their empires.  Although it was possible for some slaves to rise to prominent positions, they nevertheless were the property of their masters and could be killed with impunity. This was not confined to Africa, of course, and many slave masters were at one time slaves themselves.

This dehumanizing of slaves reached its worst form in the Americas where slaves were regarded as sub-human and little more than animals, and were frequently treated worse than the animals they tended.  They became commodities to be traded for money, and were provided with the absolute minimum of clothing and food.

Their transportation was the ‘Middle Passage’ of a three way trading system.  The First Passage was that of the ships from Europe to West Africa, loaded with iron, weapons, gunpowder and cloth to provide to the Africans in return for slaves. The slaves themselves were harvested by the Africans, and kept in appalling conditions awaiting transport to the new World. They were kept in cells and dungeons around the west coast and it is estimated that almost 10 million died before they even reached the coast.

So, while the Europeans were guilty of transporting the slaves from Africa to America, the Africans themselves were equally guilty of supplying them to order in as large numbers as were required. The Middle Passage was the journey from Africa to America, where the slaves were traded for rum, cotton, molasses, sugar and tobacco. The Third Passage was the return of the fleet with this cargo to Europe, when it would start all over again.

As Europeans began to colonize and make inroads into the New World, a market for labor was generated.  The indigenous population of the Americas was not reliable for work, and the Europeans were frequently overcome by the heat and humidity.  Africans, on the other hand, were ideal  They were used to the climate and were strong enough for the hardest work.

The development of the plantation system in the Southern states gave rise to a huge market for large numbers of slaves to work the expansive cotton fields and sugar plantations.  They were also widely used in mines and in harvesting tobacco crops.  Slaves were cheap, requiring little in the way of food and were also an easily renewable workforce.  Many plantations had their own breeding stock that was used to generate a steady supply of new slaves.

Portugal was responsible for most of the slave trade in the 15th – 17th centuries, though it was the British that were responsible for most of the transatlantic trade in the 18th century, transporting around 2.5 million slaves:  more than a third of the total traffic.

The transatlantic slave trade resulted in the deaths of more than half of those originally captured by the Africans that supplied the Europeans with their raw material. Although most of these fatalities occurred in Africa, the voyage itself killed up to 20% of those who embarked. The average has been calculated as around 13%. These deaths were brought on by disease and malnutrition, in the small holds where there was insufficient room for adequate sanitation and ventilation. Many tried to commit suicide by starving themselves, but were force fed to keep them alive. 

Slaves were valuable to ship’s masters who did their best to keep them alive, though for financial rather than humanitarian reasons.  It was generally considered more economical, however,  to pack in 1000 slaves with an 80% survival rate than provide more room to 600 that all survived.  The dead were thrown overboard before they could pass disease to the living.

The transatlantic slave trade was a grim period in human history, and while the Europeans have been largely blamed for providing a regular workforce to the settlers of the New World, the Africans themselves were ultimately responsible, not only for deaths before passing them on to the Europeans, but for providing the raw material in the first place without which there would have been no cargo to feed the slave markets of the Americas.

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