The Atlantic Slave Trade: What Schools Never Told You

Slavery, the treatment of human beings as property deprived of personal rights, has occurred in many forms throughout the world, but one institution stands out for both its global scale and its lasting legacy. Numbers involved in the Atlantic slave trade are truly staggering. From 1500 to 1880 CE, somewhere between 10 and 12 million African slaves were forcibly moved from Africa to the Americas, and about 15 percent of those people died during the journey. The majority of enslaved Africans were taken from six primary regions: Senegambia, Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast, the Gold Coast, the Bight of Benin, the Bight of Biafra, and West Central Africa, also known as Congo and Angola. An estimated 12.4 million people were loaded on slave ships and carried through what became known as the Middle Passage, which moved across the Atlantic and included many different destinations. Once in the Americas, the surviving slaves were sold at a market very similar to the way cattle would be sold. After purchase, slave owners would often brand their new possession on the cheeks, again, just as they would do with cattle. The lives of slaves were dominated by work and terror, embodying the horrific notion that they were not human, possessed no soul, and were merely beasts to be branded and burned with no recourse whatsoever.

The history of humanity is filled with oppression, dominance, war, and slavery since the beginning of time. People in different parts of the world have forced their fellow humans into slavery, and the tale of the Atlantic slave trade is the history of millions of Africans who were forced out of their communities by European slave traders and shipped across the Atlantic under conditions of great cruelty. When Portugal and Spain started conquering and establishing colonies in the New World in the early 1500s, they forcefully made the Indigenous populations work their plantations. However, European diseases and the violence of conquest led to the death of many of these native slaves, creating a severe labor shortage and pushing Europeans to look toward Africa for a solution. As voyages to Africa progressed alongside many expeditions by Portuguese and Spanish explorers, Africa became a major source of supply for slaves destined for Europe, the Spanish West Indies, and Portuguese colonies in Brazil, gradually replacing the native workforce.

These Africans were stripped of their identity and occupation. To refer to them simply as slaves is incorrect, because before being captured by Europeans, many of them were farmers, merchants, soldiers, musicians, goldsmiths, blacksmiths, and more. They were husbands, fathers, wives, children, and mothers with rich origins and heritage. When Europeans took over their communities, they became captives, boarded onto large ships, and dispersed across the Americas and different parts of Europe. They were forced to lead lives under terrible conditions, enduring severe labor, floggings, and extremely long hours often under dreadful weather and health conditions. The transatlantic slave trade transported between 10 million and 12 million enslaved black Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas, forming a crucial part of the Triangular Trade while the other two regions enjoyed huge economic benefits.

The first slave voyage from Africa to the Americas is believed to have sailed in 1526, though even before this period, Africans were bought as slaves directly from Europe, and native inhabitants of America were also enslaved by European explorers. Before 1518, the Spanish monarchy did not permit the transportation of African slaves from Africa, not due to a sense of moral value or humanity, but because they believed Africans were barbaric and would corrupt European society by introducing pagan and non-Christian practices. However, due to economic reasons, a U-turn occurred, and on August 18, 1518, King Charles V granted a charter to Lorenzo de Gorovad to transport 4,000 slaves directly from Africa to the Spanish-American colonies. Over time, King Charles changed the law established by his grandparents, permitting slaves to be brought into Spanish colonies in America from Africa on the condition that they would be converted to Christianity during their voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. With this new decree, there was an explosion in the number of slaves moved from Africa to America, leading to an immediate expansion of the slave trade in the Western Hemisphere.

European slave traders gathered and imprisoned the enslaved at forts on the African coast before bringing them to the Americas. Generally, European slave traders did not participate in the raids themselves because their life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa was less than a year due to widespread malaria infections. Consequently, the majority of people transported in the transatlantic slave trade were individuals from Central and West Africa captured by other West Africans and sold to Western European slave traders. The transatlantic slave trade was essential to the overall economics of the Triangular Trade route, as European colonies in America desperately needed a continuous supply of slaves for their plantations.

The Triangular Trade route was the trade structure that operated across the Atlantic region. It took goods from Europe to Africa, including arms, textiles, and wine. On the second leg of the triangle was the movement of African slaves to the Americas and the West Indies. The final leg involved the transport of raw materials such as sugar, coffee, tobacco, rice, and cotton produced on American plantations back to Europe. This system involved three continents, with Europe providing the capital, Africa providing the labor, and America providing the land and resources, ensuring a constant supply to the European market.

The voyage that transported slaves, known as the Middle Passage, was often marked by immense difficulties and high mortality rates, taking anywhere from three to six months depending on the weather. The passage was so brutal that ships not only lost the people being transported as slaves, but in some cases, the crew also lost their lives, with a mortality rate for sailors on slave ships reaching approximately 20 percent. The ships varied in size and passenger capacity, and their conditions were profoundly inhumane. African slaves were locked up below deck in cramped quarters, with only minimal opportunities to come up into the sunlight for enforced exercises like dancing to ensure they remained healthy and in good posture upon arrival. The interior of these decks was sticky and filled with the stench of dirt, feces, and urine. Research published in 1794 estimated that a man inside the deck had a space of just six feet by one foot four inches, a woman had five feet by one foot four inches, and girls had four feet six inches by one foot. The air inside was hot, stale, and saturated with the incessant smell of human excreta. The slaves suffered from severe starvation and thirst, receiving only 24 ounces of water per day—equivalent to two 12-ounce soda cans—alongside a primary diet of horse beans and rice. Captives were packed tightly in tiers below decks and chained together by their hands and feet, facing epidemic diseases, pirate attacks, and physical, sexual, and psychological abuse by slave traders and crewmen.

Historians estimate that between 15 and 25 percent of the enslaved Africans bound for the Americas died during this voyage. Conditions were so severe that only a tiny percentage of the total Africans transported—just about 4 percent, or no more than 400,000 people—arrived directly in North America. A vast majority were sent to the Caribbean and South America, with almost half of the total captured and transported from Africa, totaling about 5 million people, sent to Brazil.

While it is natural to wonder how thousands of slaves could not overpower hundreds of crewmen, there were notable instances where African slaves revolted and took over their ships. One of the most famous and chilling accounts is the story of the Amistad. In 1839, slave traders anticipated another shipment of slaves across the Atlantic, unaware of the surprise awaiting them. The slave ship Amistad carried about a hundred slaves on board. As the ship moved near the coast of Cuba, the unwilling passengers, numbering about 53 and recently abducted from Africa, revolted aggressively. Led by Joseph Cinqué, they killed the captain and cook, sparing only the Spanish Navigator so he could sail them home to Sierra Leone. However, the Navigator managed to sail the Amistad northward instead. Two months later, the U.S. Navy intercepted and seized the ship off Long Island, New York, towing it to New London, Connecticut, while the mutineers were jailed in New Haven.

This event triggered significant political and legal repercussions in the American abolition movement. The Spanish Embassy demanded that the African slaves be returned to Cuba, sparking a trial in 1840 at the Hartford, Connecticut Federal Court. New England abolitionist Lewis Tappan successfully drew public sympathy for the Africans, battling the pro-slavery U.S. government, while President Martin Van Buren ordered a Navy ship to return the Africans to Cuba immediately after the trial. The legal proceedings took a fascinating turn when prosecutors argued that the mutineers, as slaves, were subject to the laws governing conduct between slaves and masters. However, trial testimony revealed that while slavery was legal in Cuba, the importation of slaves from Africa was not. The judge ruled that the Africans were not merchandise but victims of kidnapping, granting them the right to escape their captors by any means necessary. When the U.S. government appealed the case before the U.S. Supreme Court the following year, former President John Quincy Adams successfully argued in favor of the Amistad rebels. The Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s judgment, and with contributions from private and missionary societies, the 35 surviving Africans secured passage home, arriving in Sierra Leone in January 1842 alongside missionaries and teachers who later founded a Christian Mission in the country.

While Europeans bear immense responsibility for the Atlantic slave trade, Africans were also involved in its operations. Africans participated in kidnapping adults and stealing children to sell them, utilizing European intermediaries or agents to exchange captives for merchandise or arms. In most cases, those sold into slavery belonged to an ethnic group different from those who captured them, and they were stripped of their identity, referred to simply as “other.” While African kings sought to protect their villages, thieves and criminals were sometimes sold into slavery to banish them, and many others were captured through raids at gunpoint organized by different ethnic groups or as joint ventures with Europeans. As noted by author Pernille Ipsen in Daughters of the Trade: Atlantic Slavers and Interracial Marriage on the Gold Coast, Africans on the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) also participated in the slave trade through intermarriage. The term cassare, originating from Portuguese, referred to marriages used to form political bonds and economic connections between slave traders and powerful West African families, who married off their women to European traders to strengthen their alliances.

In the initial stages, one might argue that Africans had no idea of the exact conditions awaiting those sold into the trade. However, according to Robin Law, the royal elites of the Dahomey Kingdom likely had an informed understanding, as the King of Dahomey sent diplomats to Brazil and Portugal who returned with detailed reports, and some elites had even experienced slavery in America before returning home. The only restriction the Kingdom of Dahomey placed on slavery was a law prohibiting the enslavement of a fellow Dahomey citizen, punishable by death, though they raised no objection to the institution of slavery itself. The situation was different on the Gold Coast, where elites sent their children to learn about the trade from Europeans, live in forts, or even travel to Europe and America for education. Gold Coast elites also established agreements with Dutch and British governments to rescue friends who had been tricked into slavery in America. Nevertheless, a common misconception among Africans unaware of the true purpose of the trade was that Europeans were cannibals who planned on cooking and eating their captives, a terrifying rumor that added to the distress of those locked in ships.

The transatlantic slave trade led to an uncountable loss of lives both in and outside of Africa. A BBC report indicated that more than a million people are thought to have died during transport to the New World, with countless others perishing soon after arrival due to horrific health conditions. Canadian scholar Adam Jones has characterized the deaths of millions of Africans during this period as a genocide, describing it as one of the worst holocausts in human history. While some argue these deaths were unintentional because slave owners wanted to preserve their labor force, Jones and other scholars point out that the institution was deliberately maintained and expanded by agents fully aware of the catastrophic casualties it inflicted. Saidiya Hartman, an American writer and academic, argues that the deaths of enslaved people were incidental to profit acquisition and the rise of capitalism, representing a byproduct of commerce where millions of lives were rendered negligible because human life had no normative value within the system.

Responsibility for the slave trade extends across several nations. Seven nations were actively involved and transported most slaves to their colonies in the New World: the Portuguese, British, French, Spanish, Dutch, Americans, and Danes. The presence of European slavers also altered African legal codes, as noted by Kamari Maxine Clarke and other scholars, with certain crimes traditionally punished otherwise now resulting in enslavement and sale to traders. David Stannard, author of American Holocaust, showed that 50 percent of African deaths occurred in Africa as a result of wars between native kingdoms that produced the majority of slaves. Enslaving enemy combatants and their villages was widespread in West Africa, largely serving as a byproduct of tribal and state warfare to finance future conflicts and remove political dissidents. Nations such as Igala, Kwararafa, Oyo, Ashanti, Dahomey, and the Aro Confederacy participated heavily in these practices.

Africans were undoubtedly involved and aided the trade in many ways, but the overarching incentives provided by Europeans made the activity thrive. In a powerful letter written by King Afonso I of Kongo (Nzinga a Mvemba) to King João III of Portugal, he pleaded with the Portuguese king to stop sending merchandise that fueled intertribal warfare and instead send missionaries. He wrote that traders were daily kidnapping his people—children of the country, sons of nobles and vassals, and even members of his own family—depopulating the land entirely due to an insatiable lust for foreign goods.

Despite the vast and devastating consequences of the transatlantic slave trade, worldwide apologies have gradually emerged from nations that built their economies on its foundation. In 1998, UNESCO designated August 23 as the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition, sparking global recognition of the historical atrocities. During the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, African nations demanded a formal apology, though opposition primarily from the United Kingdom, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, and the United States blocked these attempts, driven largely by concerns over potential monetary reparations. Since 2009, continuous efforts by the United Nations have sought to establish a permanent memorial honoring the victims, ensuring that the profound historical weight of the Atlantic slave trade is never forgotten and that the resilience and memory of those who suffered and resisted are permanently honored.