The early modern era. And by that i mean, essentially, three things. First, the origins and the rise of capitalism around the atlantic beginning in the late 16th century and continuing thereafter to the present. Secondly, the establishment of european dominance around the world. This is another major theme to which the slave trade is connected. And then finally, we are talking today about one of the very foundations of American History. America is the result of the meeting of three very old cultures, and you might say continents. People from europe, people from west africa, and people from native america. So today were going to talk about one of those three pillars. The african slave trade. Now, i want to begin with a quote by a very eminent africanamerican scholar activist named w. E. B. Dubois. Heres what dubois said about the atlantic slave trade. Dubois wrote the most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of Human History is the transportation of 10 million human beings out of the dark beauty of their mother continent and into the newfound el dorado of the west. They descended into hell. He continued, it was a tragedy that beggared the greek. It was an upheaval of humanity like the reformation and the french revolution. Well, i think dubois is exactly right. This is a stunning drama of Human History, the atlantic slave trade. And i would ask you to notice his reference to el dorado. The mythic city of goals sought after by the spanish conquistadorist when they came to mexico and peru. Well, el dorado was finally found. Not that actual city, but a slave system that would produce gold and wealth on a scale previously unimaginable. So it is a story about el dorado after all. Now, ive said that the slave trade is the foundation of American History. I mean that in a very literal sense. Slavery as an institution. The slave trade as something that made that institution possible are utterly central to American History from the 17th century to the present. This, folks, is important to who we are. We can pretend that thats not true. That wont help us. In a way were talking today in discussing the atlantic slave trade about the origins and the very nature of america as a human society. Now, this is not an easy subject to discuss, as ive suggested. Because the slave trade and slavery more broadly are both fundamentally premised on violence and terror. You cant coerce people into hard work for their entire lives without a system of violence backing it up. Now, this is especially clear in the slave trade. So what were going to talk about today is difficult. Its painful. And its not only painful because of the specific history, its painful because of the truths that this requires us to face. Okay. And let me be a little more specific about that. In this post 9 11 world, we talk a lot about terror, do we not . Well, the question i have is, do we have the courage to talk about the terror that was instrumental to the very making and building of American Society . Something not done by others to americans, but done by americans to others. Thats a big question. And i think that question lies at the heart of a test of any society that considers itself to be democratic. In other words, its easy to face all those glorious things in your history, like the exalted ideals of the american revolution. The question is, can you face the dark ages of your history . And i would suggest to you we need to do that, and that studying the atlantic slave trade is part of it. Because those slave ships that brought millions of people to the americas are still sailing. Theyre ghost ships that haunt us because we live with the history that theyve created. Lets start with the ship. Im sure all of you have seen these tall ships, the replicas that have been built. Have you seen them . Theyre spectacular, arent they . The european tall ship. Its a majestic thing to see, its a beautiful thing to see, but the beauty of it, the way weve transformed it into something of a fetish, actually hides its history. Because what i would have you know about this european tall ship is that, in fact, this is the technology that allowed europeans to concur the rest of the world. This thing is a machine. What happened was, european Ship Builders found ways to load cannon on to these highly mobile ships which allowed europeans to fan out over the face of the earth to trade and to make war to enforce their terms of trade. When you look at the earths surface and see how many parts of it speak european languages, think of this. This is why it happened. But, of course, there is a limit to the romance of the sea. And were going to explore that today. Because even though we love tall ships, it turns out theres one we dont love, thats the slave ship. In fact, we find it very hard to talk about it, but talk about it we must. Now, i suspect that most of you would have no way of knowing that this particular tall ship was actually a slave ship. There is a way to tell. Because if you look closely, youll see just above the waterline on the side of the vessel in the hull, youll find holes carved into it. These are airport air ports. Now, if your cargo is textiles, if your cargo is sugar, if your cargo is timber you dont carve holes into the side of the ship. But if your cargo is 300 human beings to be brought from west africa to some port in the new world, youve got a big problem. The problem is ventilation. How to let that socalled cargo breathe. Thats how can you tell its a slave ship, because of the holes carved in the side. Well, were going to talk about the slave trade in its largest dimensions and were also going to talk about it concretely. Heres a famous image you may have seen. This is actually a real ship called the brooks that sailed out of liverpool, for about 20 years in the late 18th century. Ships like this carried over a very long span of Time Beginning around 1514 and carrying on up to about 1866, thats a span of 352 years carries millions of people into bondage. One of my points here is that were not talking about a short burst of violence. Were talking about something that lasted for three and a half centuries. You have to take that on board. Now the countries that took the lead in organizing the atlantic slave trade, first of all it was portugal. The fairly small nation of portugal was the preeminent maritime nation in the 15th century. And their voyages down the coast here you have europe. Heres portugal. This is really a tiny part of the world. Look at it. These are the countries that will form maritime empires throughout the western atlantic. But the portuguese come down the coast, going further and further over time making Contact First in the senagambia region, trading originally for ivory and then slowly more and more for human beings. And then after 1492, when europeans began coming especially to the caribbean and building their new imperial systems, more and more european nations want to get involved in this process. So portugal, spain, those are the two leaders, are followed in rapid succession by the netherlands, denmark, france, england and the United States. There is really a mad rush for the wealth to be gained in the slave trade and in the building of these systems of slavery in the americas. This is really critical. Now, we want to talk about numbers. Numbers are important, and numbers when it comes to the slave trade are very controversial. Over many years, there have been wildly varying estimates of how many people were carried out of west africa, really from senegambi down the coast to southern angola and then eventually later on into south and east africa. How many people were carried to the new world . Well, it turns out that we know quite a bit about the slave trade because the slave trade was a big business. And we have an abundance of Business Records. Those Business Records and indeed practically every kind of conceivable record has now been mined and put together in something called the tra Transatlantic Slave Trade database. I would recommend it to all of you. This is a really magnificent scholarly achievement. We now have records on something more than 33,000 slaving voyages. Most of which began in europe. Some of which began in the United States, some of which began in brazil, but which resulted in this Massive Movement of humanity across the atlantic. If you want the url is slavevoyages. Org. Or go to any particular Search Engine and type in slave voyages, youll go there, this is a website that is free and open to the public. You can do remarkable things with it. I would encourage all of you to think about using it for research purposes. In any case, the latest findings of the Transatlantic Slave Trade database are that over this three and a half centuries ive mentioned, somewhere around 10 to 10. 5 Million People were loaded on to slave ships, and somewhere between 8. 8 and 9 Million People were delivered alive on the western atlantic. Now you will note that there is a very significant difference between these two numbers, do you not . A difference of about 1. 4 million. Those are the people who died along the way, whose bodies every morning on board a slave ship would be brought up from the lower deck and thrown over the rail to the schools of sharks that would follow the vessels all the way across the atlantic. Now, thats not the end of the horror, okay . Those 1. 4 million. As we think about the numbers, we also have to bear in mind that an unknown number of people died in wars carried on in the interior of africa. An unknown number of people died after they were enslaved and were being marched from the interior to the coast. And another unknown number of people died in the fortresses and barracoons awaiting their placement on board slave ships. We have very few records about what happened in any of those circumstances. But lots of scholars think it may have required to create that 10 million, resulting in almost 9 million delivered alive, to create that 10 million it may have required an extra 3 million or 4 million or 5 Million Deaths in africa. So we are talking about a human catastrophe of truly extraordinary proportions. Again over a very long period of time, but the carnage was great. Now, lets talk for a minute about destinations. The primary destination for the slaves who were brought from west africa to the americas was the caribbean. The greater caribbean. Early on, barbados was one of the Great Centers of the slave trade. Jamaica would end up being one of the greatest. Another for the french imperial system was what was called sandomang or in todays terms, haiti. The crown jewel of the french system. To the caribbean, almost five Million People were shipped. Almost 5 million. 4. 2 million arrived alive. Thats almost half. Thats almost half the total. It is not an accident that this was the great center of sugar production. The sugar industry drove the slave trade for many, many years. It was an especially brutal regime, as you know. The second most important destination was brazil. Portuguese, brazil. Also the home of a very lucrative plantation system. To brazil, roughly 3. 5 were loaded on the ships, and 3. 2 million arrived. This is about 36 of the total, a little more than a third. So overwhelmingly the caribbean and brazil are the two most important sites for the slave trade. If youre just keeping track of the numbers as i give them to you, youre going to see that these two areas account for the overwhelming majority of the slaves shipped to the new world, right . Where does the United States come into this . As it turns out, the United States was a rather minor partner in the slave trade. The current estimates are that maybe 370, as many as 400,000 people were loaded on to vessels bound for north american ports. The greatest of which, would have been charleston, South Carolina. And somewhere around 310,000 were delivered alive. Now, thats about 3. 5 of the total. And the numbers may be a little higher across the board. Maybe 4 , okay . But dont be deceived. The fact that mainland north america received a fairly small percentage of the enslaved africans belies the fact that it is going to become one of the most powerful slave systems over the course of the 18th and early 19th century. The main difference is demographic. The slave population in north america, owing partly to climate, growing season and the kinds of staple crops produced, the population, the enslaved population, was able to reproduce itself, whereas that was very uncommon in the caribbean. So those are the numbers. What is the consequence of all those numbers . Here i would quote the great historian and activist clr james who said the result of all this was the greatest planned accumulation of wealth the world had ever seen. So these millions of africans, shipped on board these vessels across the atlantic come to the new world and create a plantation system which really is el dorado after all. Take the sugar planters for example. In british society, in which in the 18th century there were enormous accumulations and concentrations of wealth, the sugar planters from places like jamaica were widely known to be the richest of them all. Their carriages were guilded. Everything they had suggested opulence. Long trains of servants and slaves followed them through the streets of london. So this is wealth on a truly extraordinary level. Okay, so, those are the numbers. We cant rest content with the numbers. As important as they are, we have to think about slavery and the slave trade in human ways. I think sometimes we take comfort in abstract. The Great British novelist Barry Unsworth in a novel about the sa slave trade has two of his characters who are slave traders, sitting in their Lush Liverpool office, surrounded by the wealth that theyve made in the slave trade, and he says, you know, they really couldnt have pictured what was happening on their slave ship off the coast of africa at that moment. And even if they could, they wouldnt have wanted to, because picturing things can choke the mind with horror. Much better to remain safely in the realm of the abstract. To think about charts and graphs and maps. Well, this is the challenge. Weve got to keep the big picture of the slave trade in mind. But we also have to understand it in human terms. We have to try to understand the slave trade as human experience. And so for the next part of todays lecture, i want to talk a little bit about just that. The slave trade experience. Im going to be drawing here on research i did for a book called the slaveship a Human History the examples that i want to give you are drawn from the bish and american slave ships of the 18th century, beginning about 1700 and going up to the abolition of the slave trade in 18071808. Peak period of the slave trade. This is the moment when more people are shipped than any other. This is the moment of the formation of the american slave system. Okay. What i would have you try to do right now, for the next few minutes is to imagine what it would have been like to be one of the roughly 300 people who were gathered together and placed on board a slave ship. Maybe this will help you think about it. Now, imagine that the 300 are going to be drawn from a number of different cultures, a number of different language groups. Imagine or know that the 300 will have been enslaved by other africans before they got to the ship. But also understand that they did not all consider themselves to be africans, least of all members of the same race. They were mandingo, fonte, ebo and to a very large extent the people they enslaved were other ethnic groups. Typically with people who they had been fighting wars for very long periods of time. So imagine being captured in war. Imagine simply being kidnapped by roving bands of marauders. These were probably the two most common means of enslavement. Imagine then being led in a human train and marched sometimes for very long distances from the interior to the coast. Imagine being shackled to someone next to you who disease dies along the way and is just discarded. Imagine arriving at the fortress of the ship and undergoing a truly humiliating medical inspection. Youd all be stripped of your clothing, men, women and children. Ostensibly for health purposes, but also because they didnt want any place where a weapon could be hidden. Youll be treated like cattle in a market. The slave ship captain will look down your throat, look at your teeth, will inspect your muscles, will squeeze them. Youre property, youre being purchased. Imagine coming on board the ship, and imagine the moment when the vessel leaves the coast. One of the most powerful pieces of evidence i came across in my research is that when the vessel would actually leave the coast of west africa, from the lower deck like this, a wail would rise up of pain at the thought of leaving the only place you had ever known and heading to somewhere unknown to you, to a fate that you could hardly grasp. In those circumstances, slave ship captains often wrote that the women slaves sang these deep and mourning mournful songs, trying literally to remember their lives in africa. To remember who they were, to remember their families, so the struggle for memory is there from the beginning. Well, an image like this can help us understand all this. I mentioned before the slave ship brooks. This is another drawing of the same slave ship. Now, i want to tell you, its a real ship. We know a lot about it. But i also want to make sure you know, this image was not drawn by slave trade merchants. It was not drawn by slave trade captains. It was actually drawn by the people who opposed the slave trade, abolitionists who wanted to see it eradicated. So they came up with what to my mind is the truly brilliant idea of representing the ship in order to make people understand what that social reality was like. To make it real for people. Well, i had sort of the same task in this book, the slave ship, how to make it real. Lets look at this, and i want to give you the sense of the dimensions of a real slave ship. This vessel was about 100 feet long and about 25 feet wide. Now, thats not very big. Think about that. Think about the fact that into that vessel of that length, 482 men, women and children have been jammed aboard. Ive counted them. 482. But what you would need to know about this image is that this is how many people the slave ship brooks could carry after humanitarian reform had been implemented. Something called the dolben act of 1788 made it illegal to carry more slaves than was permitted under law in relation to the tonnage of your vessel. So we actually have a record of this vessel, and the voyages it took before the dolben act. On one of them, the number of human beings carried was not 482, it was 609. And these are the precise dimensions, by the way. This vessel was measured. On the voyage before that, not 609, but 638. And on one previous voyage, we know through the Business Records that the brooks carried 740 men, women and children, thats 252 more than you see right here and i want you to tell me where are you going to put them. This is the humane version of the slave trade here. Imagine bodies piled on top of bodies. Now, in order to understand how it worked. Heres the lower deck, okay . Thats what you see right there. You have to super impose this on top of this. This is actually a platform built into the lower deck so that you can get more people aboard. And heres how it looked. Theres the lower deck. Theres the platform, you see it. We know exactly what the distance was between those two decks. Five feet, eight inches. Which means that if you were under a platform or on a platform, you had about two feet eight inches head room. Which meant that for the months you would be on this vessel at night, sometimes 16 hours a day, sometimes in bad weather 24 hours a day, you were in a situation where you could not sit up and the vessel is rolling. There are a lot of descriptions in the way in which the skin would be worn off the elbows, the knees and the hips. Okay. Now, this is not easy, i warned you. Now, i also want you to imagine this reality of this many people in the tropics, in what they call the torrid zone. I want to you imagine the heat. I want you to imagine the human perspiration. I want you to imagine the smell that the human body makes under conditions of great fear. Theres a particularly pungent smell that we make. I want you to imagine the fact that people got sick. People got seasick, but there were also epidemic diseases that ravaged these decks. If this had been truly accurate, something that would have been pictured on the lower deck would have been what they call necessary tubs. The places people had to get to, stepping over bodies in order to relieve themselves. Imagine the excrement, imagine the smell of death because people died at alateraling rates. For the full 350 years of the slave trade, the average mortality was about 12 . The 17th century was considerably higher. On certain voyages, it could be 50, 60, 70, 80 . Those would be conditions epidemic. And just to try to sum this up for you, it was said in charleston, South Carolina, in the era of the slave trade that when the wind was blowing off the water a certain way, you could smell a slave ship before you could see it. So imagine that. I also want you to imagine the impact of all this on the human ability to breathe. People died of asphyxiation. I came across evidence of people grabbing hold of the hatch way, hatch ways up to the main deck, they would grab the hatch way and try to get a breath of fresh air from up above. The captain would tell them to beat them back down in the hole because they were blocking the air for everyone else. When, in fact, they were. Think of this in human terms. Consider the availability of oxygen. And consider the sounds of the slave ship. Consider what it sounded like. Consider those women sinking. Consider the shrieks of the terrified, consider the groans of the dying, consider all this and then consider this question, what would you do . What would you do in this situation . Its a very real question because people had to answer that question, each and every one of them every day when they found themselves in this reality. Im sure that some of you people are thinking to yourself, i wouldnt have accepted this. Id rise up in rebellion. And, you know, people did that, but that brings us to another part of the social reality of the slave ship. You see, the slave ship was defined by terror. It was literally ruled by terror, terror and violence were used in calculated ways by the ship captain. Usually selecting those few who might be rebellious and doing truly horrific things to them as a way of terrorizing the rest. Ruling through the horrible example. So ive argued in this book that the slave ship itself was one big instrument of terror. As such, it was made up of many small instruments of terror. One of which was the cat of nine tails. This was the ultimate instrument of authority on board a slave ship. Its a whip. It has nine tails with knots in the end so as to make the laceration of human flesh more efficient. Some captains actually threaded metal through the cords to make them cut better. This would be used in many circumstances, simply to move people around, and certainly would be used in truly terrible punishments. On this side we have a page from a book from the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson. A british man who devoted his life to the abolition of slavery. He went around in liverpool and collected this hardware of bondage. Down low we have leg shackles. Usually it was only the men that were shackled. If women showed a predisposition to resist they would be shackled. Usually it was one person to another person. Right ankle to another persons left ankle, right wrist to the other persons left wrist, which meant those two people had to coordinate their every movement down below decks or the iron would eat into your flesh. It would excorate the flesh. This is a pair of thumb screws. Standard equipment on a slave ship. It has only one purpose. Its an instrument of torture. Anyone who was found guilty of taking part in a conspiracy or rebellion might be tortured using thumb screws in order to make him or her confess. The way it works, the thumbs are slipped under the metal loops and this key is turned, producing truly unbearable agony. It literally crushes the thumb. And then theres this piece of technology. This is called the speculum oris. The speculum oris was something that was very important to the slave ship because and well say more about this in a moment there were lots of hunger strikes on board. Slave ship captains could not permit hunger strikes, because this was valuable property after all. You have to imagine these prongs in a closed position. They would be put down the throat of someone who was refusing to eat. The key would be turned. That persons throat would be opened up from within and then gruel would be poured down that persons throat in an effort to keep him or her alive to the port of delivery. Now, i asked you a moment ago, what would you do . Well, those of you who entertained ideas of rising up, i just want you to know what your fate would be. Anyone who dared try to seize the ship would be made an example before all of the rest. And i just think that it challenges the human imagination to realize what kinds of things slave ship captains did to those who rebelled. Im talking about chopping people up joint by joint. Im talking about strangling them until their eyes popped out. Nothing was too horrible to do to those who dared to resist this fate. So what would you do . Knowing all that, what would you do . So here we come, i think, to one of the most interesting parts of this history, and that is to think about the choices that people made. What did they do . And lets think about the choices that everybody on board made. Not just the enslaved. Lets think about the sailors who ran these ships. Why were they there . What choices did they make . Lets think about the captains who commanded this little kingdom . Who were they and why were they there . Well, lets think of it in human terms. This is a man named olaudah equiano. Im sure you have heard of him. He was one of the very few people to write about the slave ship and the slave trade from the perspective of an enslaved african. He recalled as a child being taken on board a ship. He was 11 or 12 years old. And he actually remembered the first moment he saw the slave ship. He said, i was astonished. He lived inland, he had never seen a ship before, and he was just amazed at this technology. Then he said, very quickly my astonishment turned to terror. Thats the reality. Why was he there . Because he was captured by a group called the arro, it was presently nigeria, taken down the rivers to the coast and loaded on board a slave ship. His voice is really important because it is so rare. Part of the violence of the slave trade is that we dont have very many records by people who knew it firsthand. I should mention there is a controversy now about whether he was born in eboland as he himself says or whether he was born in South Carolina as he himself wrote on a couple occasions. You might want to read about that. I can give you the references. For my money, he is who he says he was. I dont think there is anyway he could have known what he knew about ebo culture if he grew up in South Carolina. If he grew up in virginia, he might have known because there was a large ebo population in virginia around the time he was born. But not in South Carolina. I think he is who he says he was. So many of you have probably heard of equiano, but i suspect almost none of you have heard of this man, james field stanfield. He was a common sailor on board a slave ship. He had sailed around the world. He was actually very well educated. He had been studying to be a priest in france. He was an irishman by the way, from dublin. And he had a kind of personal rebellion against the church. He went away, he deserted the church, he went to sea, sailed around the world, and finally one time he signed on board a slave ship. We dont know exactly why he did it. I suspect he was pretty desperate for money. And this is a main reason why a lot of sailors signed on board these ships. The mortality rates for sailors were just as high as the rates for the enslaved. This is not widely known. The reasons are a little different. Much of it has to do with the malaria of the west coast of africa, which made it the white mans grave. So its not a place that people would usually choose to sail to unless they were very ambitious, knowing that mortality among officers and captains made it possible to move up in the slave trade, but also knowing that you were risking your life if you did so. The other thing you need to know about sailors and why they were there is that quite a few of them were not there by choice. Many of them had fallen into debt or thrown into jail where slave ship captains would come and bail them out, saying, ill give your advanced wages to the innkeeper if youll come with me on this voyage. So theres a very interesting way in which sailors on slave ships themselves were not agents of choice. Stanfield is interesting because what he did, he actually made the slaving voyage, it was a peculiarly deadly voyage of the 34 crew members who went out on his voyage, 4 of them made it home. He was one. He left the slave trade, he left the sea. He became an actor, but then a few years later, when the Abolitionist Movement began to emerge, Thomas Clarkson who i mentioned before, got in touch with James Stanfield and said, would you be willing to write about your experiences as a sailor . And stanfield said i would. So he wrote a series of letters describing the slave trade and describing its horrors for both the enslaved and for the sailors who were themselves victims of an extremely violent shipboard regime. I think some of the very best writing done about the slave trade are the letters that James Stanfield wrote about it. It really comes across in all its graphic horror. He was an actor, he had a sense of drama. He knew how to convey it. Hes a very important figure. The way he joined the Abolitionist Movement and educated the middle class abolitionists about what happened on those ships. Those ships. And then finally we come to a slave ship captain, john newton. Now, john nguyewton is not knowo you not by name but then something he wrote. He wrote one of the most famous hymns in all of world history, something called Amazing Grace. And theres a story about Amazing Grace out there which goes like this. That john newton was workinged in an ungodly calling in the slave trade and he had a visitation from god and then he left the slave trade and then later wrote Amazing Grace as an act of penance. Well, its a nice story but thats not how it happened. John newton did have a christian conversion while working on a slave ship, but he continued to work in the slave trade for several more voyages. In fact, he got a promotion to captain. He wept as a devout christian to west africa, he completed that voyage, he did it again, he completed that voyage, he was going for a fourth slaving voyage all the while writing letters to people saying, well, i do have a godly calling now. As he was carrying people into this killing bondage, but then before that fourth voyage he had a stroke. He was prevented from going to sea by his doctor then 19 years later he wrote Amazing Grace and 13 years after that he made hiss first public criticisms of the slave trade. So it didnt happen quite as a myth would have it, but i would also say that when john newton turned against the slave trade he was a very effective witness against it because he knew what happened on those vessels. He testified in parliament nay used thumb screws. He describes using thum screws himself on children. Now, the last three things i want do say about these figures is that you can go and read what they wrote. Through the library we have all of these documents. You can read it for yourself this is part of the excitement of doing history. Go to the library and learn. Thats my point. Okay, so we spent this part of the lecture talking about this regime of violence and terror, okay. Theres another important part of this story, and that is the resistance to the violence and terror, to the shipboard regime we must counter pose the fact that on the lower deck something extraordinary was going on. There was a kind of cooperation, a kind of communication, and a fragile process of building a new kind of Community Among the diverse africans who were onboard these vessels. Its an absolutely fascinating thing to behold. Of course we dont have evidence to study it as fully as we would like, but we do know it was going on, and let me give you some examples of how it happened. First of all, even though these africans on the lower deck 06 any given ship would have been of numerous different ethnicities and languages there was one language they all understood, and that was the language of resistance. When you fought back against the people who ran that ship everybody understood what you were doing no matter who they were. And one of the things that impressed me during my research is there was all kinds of resistance. We know this because a slave ship surgeon wrote it. He said he was called to tend to a man one night who had cut his own throat. The physician said i sewed him back up as well as i could. The next morning he had cut the other side of his throat and ripped out the stitches. The surgeon had the sailors go and search the mens compartment for a hardedged tool that he had used to slit his throat. They couldnt find anything, so what does the doctor do . He looks and finds flesh and blood under the mans fingernails. He had ripped his throat apart with his own fingernails. So they tied his arms behind his back trying to keep him alive because hes a big investment. Then he decided he was not going to eat anything. He went on a hunger strike, another major form of resistance. And nothing they could do could keep him from choosing not to be a slave. Stories like this are very common onboard the slave ship. And of course the biggest resistance of all comes in those very frequent moments when people somehow manage to get out of their chains and rise up and try to capture the ship. This resistance is very creative. It binds people together into something new, some new group. Theres another thing i would have you know about, and that is on the lower deck of these ships something is being formed there that anthropologists called fictive kinship. West african societies in this period were all kinship ordered societies. So when people were enslaved literally their worlds were shattered. So what they start doing, and i find this amazing, is knitting kinship back together on the ship with strangers. They start to call each other brother and sister. They call each other shipmate. Youre my shipmate. When ship mates go ashore whether its in virginia or jamaica or brazil, those ship mates if they marry and have children will have their children call other shipmates aunt or uncle. Fictive kinship, its extraordinary. This is going on under the most difficult of circumstances, and so thats one of the things i would have you remember. Violence, terror, extreme terror in the middle of all that somehow creativity. Human creativity, doing something new. So here in these kinds of up risings, on those holes of the ship, on that lower deck you have today what is africanamerican culture. Thats its origin. Something new built out of a motley mix of african cultures. Something new, something defiant begins on the sip. Okay, to conclude one of the questions im sure is on your mind as a normal sentiant human being is how could anyone do this the we feel a moral revulgz and rightly so when we learn about this history. How could it happen . How could it go on for 3 1 2 centuries . Well, the history of slavery and the slave trade is very complex. But this part of it, folks, is not. Theres an easy answer to that question. It went on because it created profits. It wept on because it made some people rich. It went on because it created wealth on an extraordinary scale. So when you thinkf the slave trade dont think only of black and white, think of green. Think of money. The slave ship was an economic institution. The plantation was an economic institution. Slavey itself was an economic institution. Racism grew up alongside it in an effort to rationalize its power and profit making potential. Those of you who are interested in the rise of the world market heres a crucial part of it, free trade free trade in human beings, and it still goes on, by the way. Dont think all this is safely over. There are slave trades in many parts of the world today. I urge you to learn about them. Now, there is a new view growing up among historians and i think not only historians more broadly as well that when we think about the slave trade, when we think about slavery were not just talking about an unforfortunate moment in Human History. Were not just talking about a tragedy. Were talking about something we can now label as crimes against humanity. Write that down. Crimes against humanity. A crime against humanity is something that affects an entire society over many generations. Its effects are not over when it thing itself has ended. Slavery formally ended with the emancipation proclamation, 1863. But the effects of slavery remain and i dare say they remain here now in our city of pittsburgh and throughout the country. They live on in discrimination. They live on in poverty. They live on in massive structural inequality. This is the after life of the slave trade and the slave system. Those slave ships are still sailing. They are still haupting us and this was a great drama, a violent terror filled drama but also a drama featuring heroic resistance, so lets end with the image of the slave trade created by a haitian artist who has painted the slave ship brooks. This participating is done in the year 2007. It says the brooks liverpool. You can see it right there. The crew had been depicted as animals. In the front of the vessel is the vudu diety agwe announcing the new souls to maine. In the background is his boat. It in Haitian Creole it says on the sail we are in a lot of trouble. The artist has isancy of humor. Note the eyeoffs the enslaved peering out from this dungeonlike vessel and note those who have been chained to the outside of the ship. I actually spoke to this artist about this participating. He says its a belief in haiti today that the rebellious slaves were chained to the outside to be food for the sharks. Now, i never actually came across to anyone actually being chained to the outside of the vessel in my research, but i did see people thrown to the sharks while alive in order to make a point. That point being terror, so there is a very interesting truth to this. But i would also have you know two of the people who have broken free of the chains. The artist told me this is the leader of the great haitian revolution which began in 1791 and ended in 1804. And this is a very eminent man from the same revolution who led the rising on the north plain of haiti in 1791 that inaugurated that revolution which itself marked in many important ways the beginning of the end of the institution of slavery. So with this haitian artist we see the violence and the terror but we also see the resistance, and that, folks, is the drama that w. E. B. Debois was talking about. Let me say if you have questions about a particular slide we can go back to it. You said at one time brooks had a 730 slaves buts then was reduced to about 400. Was there anyone actually reducing that at ports . Thats a very good question. Actually there was a government apparatus to check this because what they would do is make the surgeons keep reports. This was a required part of the documentation of every voyage. Now, that doesnt mean they didnt cheat, but there was also the possibility that your vessel could be intercepted by the royal navy at which point they might ask you precisely how many you had onboard. So i think there was some policing of it. I think it would be fair to say there was also quite a bit of cheating. Yes . With america how the effects of slavery still live on today how does that compare to the south american countries and the Central American countries like brazil . How does that compare with their society . Thats another good question, and its actually one that will be explored through the remainder of the course. One of the really interesting and ironic things about other slave systems is that in lets say, for example, cuba and brazil, which were the two societies that continued to have booming slave economies long after the others in other words, slavery wasnt abolished in cuba or brazil until the 1880s, 25 years after the u. S. Even though there is still a great deal of structural inequality and some members of our own History Department here have written about that and i can give you those references so you can make comparisons. Even though thats the case those countries have rather more fluid racial systems than we do in the United States. Much more racial intermixture, for example, something that goes way back, and its a very interesting question as to why this should be so. In the United States we have had a slave system which always depended on the idea of one drop of blood, meaning one drop of african blood and you would be characterized as african or africanamerican or negro or black, whatever the terminology may be. Very different systems of classification, much more complex existed in other parts of the americas. So we do have to account for both the similarity and the differences between these slave systems. Yes . What was it that made thank you. Yes, theres been a lot of debate about this. There are of course economic roots to the abolition of the slave trade, but i think the prevailing view among scholars these days is that abolition took place first and foremost in great britain, okay, need to know that. They were the first to abolish the slave trade at least of those involved in a major way. In the 18th century the british carried as many people into slivery as anybody else, maybe the portuguese carried a few more, but they were major, major slave traders. And a social movement grew up that basically brought it to an end while it was still profitable. Now, they did not yet end the slave system in the british colonies. That will take another 25 to 30 years beginning in 1834 and finally 1838, eventually slavery will abolish in britain before the United States. I think the prevailing view right now it was a social Movement Made up of many different kinds of people who brought a profitable slave trade to an end. So thats actually a hopeful thing, isnt it, that people could get together and make significant change. Yes . I was wondering as it became such a big business was it still the africanamericans running it or the africans were in control of the african sources of slave supply from the beginning to the end. And one of the main reasons for this i think there were some europeans who actually wish they could have gone ashore and handle the slave trade, and they did build fortresses, places like ghana. They did have settlements ashore, but the death rate for europeans in african societies was so high to a large extent because of malaria that it was known then as the white mans grave. So what the europeans did being unable really to go ashore and organize the trade themselves was they made deals. They found coastal groups all along west and West Central Africa who were willing to enter into an alliance with them. And frequently the elements of this trade were the europeans would provide not only textiles and consumer goods but firearms, gunpowder, which this client statewide then use to attack its traditional enemies and then bring those people back to the coast, slave those people to the slave ship captains frequently for more guns and ammunition and gunpowder, so this creates what historians call the gun slave cycle. So i think its important to realize there is a very powerful african dimension to this, but youve got to bear in mine that its organized basically through a divided rule strategy on the part of the europeans. They were very good at that. One more question. Yes . When we talked about the 310,000 slaves that were delivered to america, did that account for africa or also account for trade from the caribbean as well . Good question. This would include just direct imports from west africa but very important adeposition you niek the discussion. A significant number of slaves brought to north america were those reshipped from the caribbean. In fact, South Carolina was basically formed as a plantation economy by people who emigrate from barbados. Yes, there are a great many kind of regional slave trades which will augment that number i gave which seems rather small. The other thing to bear in mind theres a reproduction process which causes the enslaved population in the u. S. To grow by leaps and bounds in the 18th and 19th century thereby providing in that way the labor power that the slave trade had to provide in places with different demographic regimes, okay . Okay, thanks, everybody. See you next time. Youre watching American History tv. Every weekend on cspan 3 explore our nations past. Cspan 3 created by americas Cable Television companies as a Public Service and brought to you today by a television provider. Now on American History tv a conversation on colonial era diplomatic ties between indians and getsiesbering settlers. This is just under an hour. Today were going to be talking about diplomacy on the early american frontier particularly between nativeamerican peoples and european peoples. Were going to talk about some of the customs and protocols that governed that style of diplomacy and the objectives that both nativeamerican peoples and colonia
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