Slavery in the US was distinctive in the near balance of the sexes and the ability of the enslaved population to increase its numbers by natural reproduction. In contrast, by 1850, most US enslaved persons were third-, fourth-, or fifth-generation Americans. In the nineteenth century, the majority of enslaved in the British Caribbean and Brazil were born in Africa. In the United States enslaved persons were more generations removed from Africa than those in the Caribbean. While the death rate of the US enslaved population was about the same as that of Jamaican enslaved persons, the birth rate was more than 80 percent higher in the United States. Rates of natural decrease ran as high as 5 percent a year. In the Caribbean, Dutch Guiana, and Brazil, the enslaved death rate was so high and the birth rate so low that they could not sustain their population without importations from Africa. In the American South, only one slaveholder held as many as a thousand enslaved persons, and just 125 had over 250 enslaved persons. In the Caribbean, many plantations held 150 enslaved persons or more. Plantations in the United States were dwarfed by those in the West Indies. US SLAVERY COMPARED TO SLAVERY IN THE AMERICAS About 12 percent of those who embarked did not survive the voyage. The sexes were separated men, women, and children were kept naked, packed close together and the men were chained for long periods. The Middle Passage was dangerous and horrific. Yet by 1825, the US population included about one-quarter of the people of African descent in the Western Hemisphere. Only about 6 percent of African captives were sent directly to British North America. Well over 90 percent of enslaved Africans were sent to the Caribbean and South America. Africans carried to North America, including the Caribbean, left mainly from West Africa. The majority of enslaved Africans brought to British North America arrived between 17.Īfricans carried to Brazil came overwhelmingly from Angola. Well over a million more-one-tenth of those carried off in the slave trade era-followed within the next twenty years.īy 1820, nearly four Africans for every one European had crossed the Atlantic about four out of every five women who crossed the Atlantic were from Africa. More than eight out of ten Africans forced into the slave trade crossed the Atlantic between 17. The decade 1821 to 1830 saw more than 80,000 people a year leaving Africa in slave ships.

The number of people carried off from Africa reached 30,000 per year in the 1690s and 85,000 per year a century later. The first voyage carrying enslaved people direct from Africa to the Americas probably sailed in 1526. The first Africans forced to work in the New World left from Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century, not from Africa.

The Atlantic Slave Trade was likely the most costly in human life of all long-distance global migrations. Over the period of the Atlantic Slave Trade, from approximately 1526 to 1867, some 12.5 million captured men, women, and children were put on ships in Africa, and 10.7 million arrived in the Americas.

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