What are you missing? A brain, maybe? Or a heart? It's hard to tell sometimes. As you will recall from Freddy's excellent essays on the matter, however, the causes of the Civil War were complex. That does NOT mitigate the fact that slavery was a horrible practice with many victims. Here are some facts from the Museum of African Slavery. The url for this interesting site is:
squash.la.psu.edu
Calculating Aggregate Numbers
How do scholars calculate the aggregate numbers of Africans who were
enslaved and transported across the Atlantic, or determine the number of
slaves taken and kept within the African continent itself? They do so by
counting backwards. This means that every scholar who has engaged in
serious counting based on empirical data rather than random guessing
has started with the numbers of Africans who were landed alive on
American shores. Beginning with these figures, counters work their way
eastward across the Atlantic and into the African continent, increasing the
numbers to account for mortality along what one scholar has termed the
"way of death."
But how can the number of Africans who arrived alive in the Americas be
known with accuracy when historical records are neither systematic nor
even in existence? The answer is that it can not. But by employing every
kind of information available to them, from official government statistics, to
shipboard records, to the memoirs of ship captains, to the testimony of
slaves, to newspaper accounts, to rumor, and to censuses of slaves,
scholars are, however, able to come to a number known as "an order of
magnitude." An order of magnitude is an estimate based upon all available
evidence, both official and non official, and takes into account secret slave
trading and illegal smuggling of slaves. While it must remain an estimate
because we will never in fact know exact figures--ever--the order of
magnitude demonstrates the "ball park" of a reasonable figure.
Despite a great deal of sometimes acrimonious debate among scholars
about their aggregate numbers and the means of deriving them, even
those who disagree with each other most bitterly have come up with
surprisingly similar figures for the number of Africans landed alive as
slaves on the shores of the western Atlantic: between 10 and 15 million.
The lower figure is primarily based on the work of Philip D. Curtin and
published in his book The African Slave Trade: A Census (University of
Wisconsin Press, 1968). The higher figure is derived by Joseph E. Inikori
and provided in the introduction to a book entitled Forced Migration, which
is edited by him. No one who has worked with the evidence has suggested
or derived a figure higher than Professor Inikori's, or substantially lower
than Professor Curtin's. 10-15 million Africans landed alive in the Americas
is thus our order of magnitude. Figures both lower and higher seem
unreasonable.
The number of Africans landed alive on American shores, however, does
not reflect the number of people enslaved in the interior of Africa for
delivery across the Atlantic. To find this number, we must "work
backwards" to increase the numbers to reflect several "ways of death" of
the westward journey. Most people tend only to think of the "middle
passage" (i.e. the crossing of the Atlantic by ship), but there are some
other segments of the westward journey which additionally have to be
taken into account. These include the time during which slaves were
maintained at or near the coast in concentrated conditions waiting for
loading aboard ship, the forced march or journey from the interior point of
enslavement to the gathering point on the coast, and the actual place and
means of enslavement.
Each of these "legs" has differing rates of mortality associated with it, and
these rates of mortality differed over time and according to local
circumstances. Thus the further away we get from American shores, the
greater the margin of error we face in counting. Working with aggregate
averages, scholars have found that average mortality on the ocean
crossing was 15 to 20% and the average mortality in Africa (including
those killed in battle, those who died or were killed on the march to the
coast, and those who died waiting for ships at the coast) at between 15
and 30%. What this means is that in many specific cases, such as that of
the slave trade from Angola to Brazil, of 100 people enslaved in the interior
of Africa for the Atlantic trade, only about 50 of them made it alive to the
Americas. Over all, however, it is likely that of 100 people enslaved in the
African interior, about 60 of them made it alive to the Americas. That
represents a total average mortality along the entire "way of death" of
about 40%.
Our numbers for Africans landed alive on American soil must therefore be
increased by about 40% to account for the entire number of people
originally enslaved, counting those who died along the many "ways of
death." When we inflate 10 and 15 million by 40% we come up with 14 and
21 million, respectively. Therefore somewhere between 14 and 21 million
Africans were enslaved in Africa to account for the delivery of 10 to 15
million living slaves in the Americas.
But there is even more to this story. The number of slaves transported
westward across the Atlantic represented only about half of all
individual enslaved in Africa. Why was this so? Because nearly half of
all slaves generated in Africa were retained and used there rather than
traded to Europeans at the coastline. The Atlantic slave trade or slavery in
the Americas was directly linked to slavery in Africa. This is a fundamental
point.
The easiest way to illustrate the linkage is to understand the sex ratios of
Atlantic slave cargoes. Although the age and sex structure of African
populations forcibly transported as slaves across the Atlantic varied over
time and place, the overall ratio was about two men for every one woman.
Because roughly equal numbers of men and women were enslaved in
Africa, we know that the structure of the population of slaves retained in
Africa was about two women for every one man (i.e. the exact mirror
opposite of the population sold into export slavery across the Atlantic).
While male slaves were the majority in the American cargoes, female
slaves were always the majority of bondspeople in African societies.
What does this do to our numbers? To account for all slaves enslaved in
the "Atlantic system," therefore, we must double the earlier numbers (which
accounted only for those captured to be transported across the Atlantic) to
reflect everyone captured for all destinations. When we double 14 and 21
million, we come up with 28 and 42 million, respectively. Somewhere
between 28 and 42 million people, therefore, were enslaved in the Atlantic
world between about 1480 and 1880. Of these, between 10 and 15 million
were landed alive in the Americas; the rest were either retained in Africa or
died along the way to their places of enslavement.
While these numbers provide us with some degree of certainty as to a
magnitude, it should be remembered again that we will never know with
precision. People who spend their lives counting disagree with each other
over precise totals for specific times and places, over methods of counting,
and over the meaning of their numbers. Others note that the data we begin
with are so faulty and the mortality ratios for projecting backward along the
"way of death" so varying that the real number could be either much higher
or much lower than the orders of magnitude provided above. The numbers
provided here are the best ones we have that are based on evidence.
These figures are very high. They represent an annual average of between
70,000 and 105,000 people enslaved every year over a period of 400
years (because this is an average, the actual number each year was higher
or lower). What is remarkable is the length of time over which the slave
trade in the Atlantic world endured: more than 400 years. Unlike the
extermination of Jews by Nazis over a period of several years in the
mid-twentieth century, the trade in African slaves continued for what in
comparison is almost an eternity: for tens of generations.
Counting and recounting the numbers of people enslaved in Africa, kept
there, and transported westward across the Atlantic continues. A group of
scholars primarily in the United States and Britain are pooling their data
and creating a standardized computer database to store all the information
and make it available to the public. You can obtain information about this
database by clicking here.
In addition a new international effort directed by the United Nations'
Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is now
underway to restudy the slave trade and come up with new and improved
figures. The UNESCO project is a decade-long one, and encompases
more than simply numbers. Its results are highly anticipated.
(Note: These numbers do not reflect slaves transported to destinations
other than those in the Atlantic. For example, there was a slave trade
northward across the Sahara desert into the Mediterranean world and
northeastward across the desert and the Indian Ocean to the Arabian
Peninsula and Persian Gulf areas. It appears as if the Atlantic slave trade,
however, accounted for about 75% of all slaves exported from Africa, while
the other 25% can be allocated to this second form of trade into the
Mediterranean and Islamic world. This museum focuses on the 75% rather
than the 25%). |
