Impacts of the Trans-Atlantic Slave TradeUnit 4: Transoceanic Connections (c. 1450-1750)

Historical Developments

● Newly developed colonial economies in the Americas largely depended on agriculture, utilized existing labor systems, including the Incan mit’a and introduced new labor systems including chattal slavery, indentured servitude, and encomienda and hacienda systems.

● The growth of plantation economy increased the demand for slaves in the Americas, leading to significant demographic, social, and cultural changes.

● The Atlantic trading system involved the movement of goods, wealth, and labor, including slaves.● Some notable gender and family restructuring occurred, including demographic changes in Africa that

resulted from the slave trades.

Our Inquiry Questions:

● What were the causes of the trans-Atlantic slave trade? ● What were the long-term impacts of the trans-Atlantic slave trade on American and African

societies?

Document 1: Maps

Document 2: BBC - Implications of the slave trade for African societies

BBC: Implications of the slave trade for African societies

Document 3: Primary Source from a Slave Ship Doctor - 1788 (via Stanford History Education Group)

Document 4: Slave Ship Diagram (via Stanford History Education Group)

Document 5: Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, the African, 1789. (via Stanford History Education Group)

Document 6: Cotton Production in America

Document 7: Casta Paintings c. 1700(via Khan Academy)

In America people are born in diverse colors, customs, temperaments and languages. From the Spaniard and the Indian is born the mestizo, usually humble, quiet and simple.

So states an inscription on José Joaquín Magón’s painting, The Mestizo, made in New Spain (Spanish colonial Mexico) during the second half of the eighteenth century. The painting displays a Spanish father and Indigenous mother with their son, and it belongs to a larger series of works that seek to document the inter-ethnic mixing occurring in New Spain among Europeans, indigenous peoples, Africans, and the existing mixed-race population. This genre of painting, known as pinturas de castas, or caste paintings, attempts to capture reality, yet they are largely fictions.

Typically, casta paintings display a mother, father, and a child (sometimes two). This family model is possibly modeled on depictions of the Holy Family showing the Virgin Mary, saint Joseph, and Christ as a child. Casta paintings are often labeled with a number and a textual inscription that documents the mixing that has occurred. The numbers and textual inscriptions on casta paintings create a racial taxonomy, akin to a scientific taxonomy. In this way, casta paintings speak to Enlightenment concerns, specifically the notion that people can be rationally categorized based on their ethnic makeup and appearance. . . .

Casta paintings convey the perception that the more European you are, the closer to the top of the social and racial hierarchy you belong. Pure-blooded Spaniards always occupy the preeminent position in casta paintings and are often the best dressed and most “civilized.” Clearly, casta paintings convey the notion that one’s social status is tied to one’s perceived racial makeup.

Document 8: The trans-Atlantic slave trade and local political fragmentation in Africa

Although Africa is not unique to the trading of slaves, the magnitude of slave exporting rose to levels not experienced

anywhere else in the world. Between 1500 and 1900, an estimated 10 million slaves were exported from West and Central Africa, mainly to the Americas, a figure that excludes people who died either during capture, the long trek to the coast, or the journey across the Atlantic. To put this in further perspective, the estimated population in 1700 of the exporting regions was only about 28 million people. We may expect an event of such magnitude to have long-lasting social, political and economic effects. Many researchers have tried to uncover these effects with some degree of success. Some have found that relatively higher slave export intensity is associated with relatively lower GDP in more recent times. Higher slave exporting societies have also been linked to lower levels of trust, lower levels of subsequent education, and a range of other negative social outcomes.

The slave trade and political fragmentation

From a political institutions perspective, authors have found that areas with relatively higher slave export intensity had higher levels of political fractionalization after the slave trade ended. The slave trade created opportunities for wealth generation for anyone who could mobilize people to raid other towns and villages or organize kidnappings, creating significant political friction in the process, which even led to the breaking up of political units. For instance, it has been argued that the slave trade was partly responsible for the wars that led to the break-up of the Yoruba state (Bowen 2006). Indeed, researchers have also found statistical evidence that areas that had higher slave-trading intensity tend to have a higher proportion of distinct groups today (Whatley & Gillezeau 2011).

In this article, I hypothesize that the same kind of political friction caused by the slave trade should also have influenced political institutions on village- and town-level. While states may break up as a result of political friction, such a breakup is impractical in the case of villages or towns as, except in very rare cases, their inhabitants are geographically bound together. I argue, therefore, that, villages and towns tend to form more political groups in response to political friction. Such political groups serve to protect their own members and take advantage of members of other groups

Using slave export data and anthropological data from Murdock’s ethnographic atlas, particularly the variable capturing jurisdictional hierarchy within the local community, I find that places with higher historical slave export intensity did have more fragmented political structures in villages and towns at the time they were recorded by Murdock, roughly between 1900 to 1960 (see Figure below). I use the distance to slave ports in the Americas as an instrument to show that slave exports did influence local political institutions, causing them to be more fragmented.

Figure: Slave export intensity and political fragmentation in Africa

Document 9: Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion (Gilder Lehrman)

In the early hours of August 22, 1831, a slave named Nat Turner led more than fifty followers in a bloody revolt in Southampton, Virginia, killing nearly 60 white people, mostly women and children. The local authorities stopped the uprising by dawn the next day. They captured or killed most of the insurgents, although Turner himself managed to avoid capture for sixty days.

Even though Turner and his followers had been stopped, panic spread across the region. In the days following the attack, 3000 soldiers, militia men, and vigilantes killed more than one hundred suspected rebels. In a letter written a month later from North Carolina, Nelson Allyn described the retaliation against African Americans:

"The insurrection of the blacks have made greate disturbance here every man is armd with a gun by his bed nights and in the field at work a greate many of the blacks have been shot there heads taken of stuck on poles at the forkes of rodes some been hung, some awaiting there trial in several countys, 6 in this county I expect to see them strecht ther trial nex week there is no danger of their rising again here."

Nat Turner’s rebellion led to the passage of a series of new laws. The Virginia legislature actually debated ending slavery, but chose instead to impose additional restrictions and harsher penalties on the activities of both enslaved and free African Americans. Other slave states followed suit, restricting the rights of free and enslaved blacks to gather in groups, travel, preach, and learn to read and write.

Document 10: Excerpt from The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap by Mehrsa Baradaran

Slavery, “America’s original sin,” according to James Madison, created the foundation of modern American capitalism. It was slavery and the “blood drawn with the lash” that opened the arteries of capital and commerce that

led to U.S. economic dominance worldwide. The effects of the instituion of slavery on American commerce were monumental--3.2 million slaves were worth $1.3 billion in market value, almost equal to the entire gross national product. Slaves were also a valuable store of capital because they were liquid assets that could be exchanged on markets more easily than other forms of property. Slavery’s unparalled bounty is what caused many Americans to tolerate such a barbarous institution. Growing international demand for cotton fueled the growth of slavery, and the legal and political arms of the state maintained and protected it. More cotton led to more profits, which led to more demand for slaves, which led to more legislation supporting slavery, and then even crueler methods of oppression to extra more work from slaves. . . .

For all the economic gains created by slavery, the slaves themselves could never profit. During the 246 years of institutionalized slavery in America, enslaved individuals could not participate in the economy as buyers and sellers. In order for slavery to function, the slaves needed to serve as cogs in the machine and not its drivers. They were therefore not permitted to own assets or offer their labor for pay in any form. These prohibitions, which included ownership of land and trade of any kind, were often cemented in law and enforced through violence. . .

Even though the Civil War decimated the South, the ill-gotten spoils of slavery remained and grew in the former cotton empires in America and Europe for generations. The theories of racial superiority spun to justify centuries of enslavement stuck around too. These theories, so infused in American culture, could not be shed easily, and their long-lasting effects would lead to economic distortions that constantly imeded those formerly enslaved from participating in the white-dominated economy.

The freed slaves had to make the transition from being capital to becoming capitalists--from being chattel to owning it. They had to do this having “neither money, property, nor friends,” as Fredrick Douglass explained. The road to wealth presented severe obstacles during the terrible confusion and upheaval in the Reconstruction-era southern economy. . . .

The black community’s main objective, which it sought through political means, was acquiring land. Emancipated slaves and their northern Republican supporters believed that land ownership was the only way to achieve a free market in the South. Without land, they would be at the mercy of their previous owners. Sherman signed Field Order 15 in March 1865, which set aside 400,000 acres of confiscated land for freed slaves. Sherman’s plan was to create a territory exclusively for ex-slaves where they could live free of white control and manage their own economic and political affairs. In justifying this action, Sherman borrowed from Thomas Jefferson’s populist view of land as usufruct. The basic idea was that landholders owned property only due to the benevolence of the federal government, in which all land rights resided. The southern Confederates’ traitorous act of secession forfeited their land rights.

Two months after the Sherman order, Congress created the Freedman’s Bureau and tasked it with transitioning former slaves to their new lives; part of the plan was to dole out the seized land. The Freedman’s Bureau Act of 1865 formalized Sherman’s field order into a law “providing that each [former slave] might have forty acres at a low price on long credit.” The order came directly from President Lincoln, who wished to give freed slaves “an interest in the soil.” The price of land was to be fixed at $1.25 per acre, 40 percent of which was due up front. The land was to be protected by the military until Congress could act to formalize land titles. Some families even received leftover army mules. It seemed that the government was about to create a black landowning class. In fact, during the Reconstruction era, racial equality was even contemplated. Black lawmakers and radical Republican allies like Thaddeau Stevens, Charles Sumner actively pursued full integration and equality.

Conficasting and breaking up the land meant destroying the slaveholder oligarchies that had controlled the Confederacy. The backlash was extreme and ruinous. Having contemplated a complete reordering of the South, and perhaps exactly because the stakes were so high, the Reconstruction revolution was violently overthrown. Ex-Confederates won back through violence, fraud, and coercion what they could not achieve through military victory or political process. The Ku Klux Klan became a para-military force in the South whose purpose was the overthrow of

Republican government, black politicians, and any other activities not fully in line with the established Antebellum order. According to Reconstruction historian Eric Foner, “the largest number of violent acts stemmed from disputes arising from black efforts to assert their freedom from control by their former masters.” Especially vulnerable were blacks who tried to purchase land. Reformists were assassinated, and black voters were harassed. As W.E.B. Du Bois explained, “Guerilla raiding, the ever-present flickering after-flame of war, was spending its forces against the Negroes, and all the Southern land was awakening as from some wild dream to poverty and social revolution.”

President Andrew Johnson, the accidental president who assumed office after Lincoln’s assassination, joined the white souther backlash and rolled back Linconln’s promises. He thoroughly undermined the Freedman’s Bureau bill, including the land grant, and fought the black rights movements, asserting that America would remain a “white man’s government.” Though the southern rebels had expected to be hanged for their treason, Johnson welcomed them back into the fold, pardoned them, and restored their confiscated land. The land General Sherman had given to freed slaves in Georgia was returned to the original owners before a full harvest season had elapsed. The effects were devastating for blacks. Had whites made good on this promise to blacks, claimed Du Bois, it “would have made a basis for real democracy in the United States.” Instead, the agents of the Freedman’s Bureau went south to “tell the weeping freedmen, after their years of toil, that their land was not theirs, that there was a mistake--somewhere.”