The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (31 page)

It’s been noted that the death rate of crews on slave ships was often the same as the death rate among slaves, a point that is sometimes used as proof that slaves were not treated all that badly. Unfortunately, this is more an indication of how badly the crews were treated. The slave trade numbed men to brutality. The crewmen on slave ships were widely considered the worst scum of the docks. They were paid the least and were more likely to settle quarrels with knives or be hanged by their captain.
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Because Europeans were especially susceptible to the fevers lurking along the coasts of Africa, th
e slave ships were considered the most dangerous assignment a sailor could get. They even sang about it: “Beware and take care of the Bight of Benin / Few come out, though many go in.”
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Disbursement

Witnesses said that you could always smell a slave ship sailing into a harbor. After weeks on the oceans, they stank of the stale urine, sweat, vomit, and feces from three hundred confined humans, and the warm Caribbean breezes spread the stench over the whole town. Slavers usually arrived with great ceremony—cannon blasts or special bells—to gather buyers and alert the authorities. They hoped to unload and disburse their dangerous cargo before the new slaves got their bearings.

After a doctor inspected the slaves for contagious diseases, they were offloaded to warehouses and sla
ve jails to be prepared for sale. New slaves were fattened up, washed, and oiled to be more attractive than the wretched skeletons that originally staggered off the ship. They would be displayed, inspected, and auctioned. When the sale was final, the slaves were often branded by their new owners with hot irons.

During the first year on the plantation, Africans were broken, trained, and acclimated. New slaves were usually assigned relatively easy jobs until they were toughened up (“seasoned”) and sent into the sugar fields for the really hard work. Even so, probably a third of all new slaves died during seasoning.
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Although Africans as a race had previously been exposed to all of the Old World diseases, developing some genetic immunity, Africans as individuals were often vulnerable. Jumbling hundreds of people from all over Africa into one crowded plantation exposed many new slaves to smallpox, measles, malaria, or yellow fever for the very first time.

It wasn’t pure biology driving the death rate. Sugar cultivation was especially brutal to the body, from hand
ling the knife-like leaves of the sugar cane in the fields to the boiling cauldrons in the refinery. Slaves were overworked, underfed, and overcrowded. Shackled if they tried to flee and beaten for any infraction, most slaves quickly acquired heavy scars around their ankles and crisscrossing their backs. Many of the folkways that had allowed Africans to avoid disease back home—proper care or isolation for the sick, proper disposal of the dead, food preparation, waste removal, clean housing, shade, rest—were a luxury in the American plantations. Only the hardiest Africans survived the shock of the first few years.
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In the deadly islands of the Caribbean, the slaves died faster
than they could reproduce, which meant the population was not self-sustaining. The workforce had to be continuously propped up by new imports. Even though 864,000 slaves had been imported into the French colony of Saint-Domingue (Haiti) between 1680 and 1791, the black population in 1789 numbered only 435,000. Despite the arrival of 750,000 slaves in Jamaica from 1655 to 1807, only 310,000 were alive to be freed when Britain abolished slavery in 1834. Compare that to the English-speaking lands on the North American mainland, where the 427,500 slaves imported from Africa had mostly survived and bred up to 1.4 million by 1810.
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Because of this constant replenishment from Africa, the islands acquired more African culture than did the American mainland. Language and religion in the Caribbean tend to be a synthesis of European and African elements in the form of creoles and voodoo, whereas black North Americans speak with a slight accent and are mostly Protestants.

The biggest consumer of slave labor was sugar production, which employed 55 percent of the new slaves arriving from Africa, but there were fortunes to be made in other tropical products such as coffee (which grabbed 18 percent of the new slaves), cotton (5 percent), and cocoa (3 percent). Of course, new slaves were assigned throughout the economy, from working in mines (9 percent) to serving as household staff (9 percent).
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Later generations of slaves born in America were often trained in urban trades such as carpentry, brick-making, or blacksmithing.

Once they were acclimated in America, the death rate eased off, but
slaves still had a life expectancy many years less than the free people of the same community.

Judgment

In both Africa and America in the early days of the trade, slavery was not necessarily considered a permanent condition. Most of the first slaves imported in Virginia were indentured servants who were released after their terms of servitude (ten years was typical) had expired. That soon changed.

Three shifts in the winds of history
made the Western slave trade stand out for its cruelty. The first was the rise of global capitalism in the fifteenth century. This broke the cultural and emotional connections between masters and slaves who had lived among each other in the same communities for generations. It turned slaves into mere commodities to be bought and sold in anonymous bulk across wide distances.

Second was racism. “We” have always been better than “them,” but through most of human history, “we” were a tiny tribe—Saxons, Athenians, Venetians, Judeans, whatever—in a big sea of “them.” The Greeks, for example, lumped all non-Greeks—black/white, literate/illiterate, clothed/naked—into the catch-all category of
barbaroi
. With so many of “them” out there, there was a limit to the amount of damage “we” could do. Only later did “we” expand to include
everyone
who looks like us, bundled together in opposition to everyone who looks different.

The slave trade largely invented racism, this division of humanity into groups organized solely by physical appearance. A feedback cycle developed where so many Africans lived as slaves in the New World that slavery seemed like the obvious, natural condition for Africans. Once Europeans began to associate dark skin with slavery, every dark-skinned person was assumed to be a slave, and if he wasn’t, well, then he should be.
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If owners liberated too many African slaves after a period of servitude, it would create a class of free blacks in which runaways could hide. The slave owners had to vigorously oppose the growth of an independent, unregulated free black community. Then they had to justify these actions by appealing to racist ideology.
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Third, the rise of liberal notions of inborn personal dignity removed many intermediate forms of inequality such as serfdom, concubinage, and apprenticeship. These diverse classes and castes had once filled the gap between the slave and the freeborn with a series of small steps rather than an impa
ssible chasm. Slavery in nineteenth-century America was no worse than slavery in seventeenth-century America, but as the rights of common citizens expanded, the contrast with slaves became more glaring.

Abolition

In 1781, the British slave ship
Zong
was lost somewhere near Jamaica, stranded in a calm and losing slaves to fevers and bad planning. The captain’s investment was draining away. Unfortunately, insurance wouldn’t cover slaves who died of natural causes on board the vessel itself, but it would pay for cargo lost at sea or jettisoned to lighten the load or conserve dwindling resources, something shippers routinely did with livestock. The captain started tossing dozens of sick slaves overboard. Over several days, 132 slaves drowned in this way. When the captain got back to land, he filed an insurance claim for the lost slaves. When the insurance company refused to pay, the captain sued.
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The lawsuit almost passed without notice, as had so many earlier cases, but a small legal notice in the newspaper brou
ght it to the attention of abolitionists, who made a fuss. This didn’t affect the case, but it helped mobilize the forces of abolition.

The very fact that there were abolitionists at all was a victory for both the Enlightenment and the Protestant Reformation. Across the previous millennia, the harshest criticism that any major religion had leveled ag
ainst slavery was an occasional suggestion to treat slaves better. Aside from that, scripture was more likely to cite slavery approvingly, as a model for the relationship between man and God. The Old Testament cursed the descendants of Canaan to slavery. Saints Peter and Paul instructed slaves to obey their masters. In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued the
Dum Diversas
, which granted Catholic countries “full and free permission to invade, search out, capture, and subjugate the Saracens and pagans and any other unbelievers and enemies of Christ wherever they may be . . . and to reduce their persons into perpetual slavery.” In fact, until well into the 1800s, most missionary societies considered slavery to be beneficial because it brought pagan Africans into the warm bosom of Christendom.
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The splintering of Christianity, however, had created a far left wing dedicated to the equality of all people. Several of these splinter groups
, first the Mennonites (1688), then the Quakers (1696), then the more numerous Methodists (1774), began to come out against the very existence of slavery. In 1775, Quakers in Philadelphia organized the first abolitionist society in America. English Quakers established their country’s first antislavery society in 1783.

This radical fringe would have been easily ignored had it not been for the wider acceptance of liberal ideals during the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Although Enlightenment philosophers usually dismissed Christianity as mere superstition, they agreed with the Quakers that all men are born free and equal. As liberalism infiltrated society, it became harder to stay silent about slavery. By the late 1700s, the leading minds of Western Civilization (Bentham, Hume, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire, for example) had recognized the injustice of slavery.

Of all aspects of slavery, it was easiest to agitate public sympathy against the slave trade, which destroyed lives, broke apart families, and subjected innocent victims to such obvious suffering and indignity. This was the first element of Western slavery to crumble to moral assault.

After years of parliamentary debate, the British finally outlawed the international slave trade in 1807, and most other civilized countries followed their lead over the next decade. Some, like Spain and Portugal, had to be bullied into it by other countries and would only pass toothless laws that they didn’t even enforce; however, even more important than placing new laws on the books, the British committed their fleet to patrolling the coast of Africa and arresting all slave traders as pirates, regardless of nationality.

For several decades, the Atlantic Ocean saw a steady game of cops and robbers, and like most activities outside the law, slaving became even more brutal. To avoid being captured with slaves aboard, some slave ships shackled their cargo to a single long chain. If a patrol boat came into view, the first slave was pushed overboard, and the chain carried all of the slaves into the ocean, one after another. The incriminating evidence would be deep underwater by the time the Royal Navy boarded the ship.
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Between 1820 and 1870, the British navy seized almost 1,600 ships and freed 150,000 slaves.
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Most of them were offloaded at Freetown in Sierra Leone because it would be impossible to return them
to their scattered, inland homelands. The much smaller American navy soon joined the slave patrol and over time offloaded 6,000 liberated slaves at Monrovia in Liberia.
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Abolition, Phase Two

Technically, that’s the end of this chapter. On my list of one hundred multicides, I count only deaths caused by the slave trade during capture, transport, and seasoning, and not the deaths of slaves after they were settled, so this megadeath ends with the abolition of the transoceanic trade; however, let’s bring the story to its full conclusion.

The day-to-day practice of slavery, which kept workers in bondage to a single owner, proved harder to eradi
cate than the international slave trade. Remember, this was the era of serfdom, workhouses, and sweatshops, so the average man in power cared little about the ordinary worker, regardless of his race or condition of servitude. As long as slavery was maintained with minimal standards of decency, and, more important, kept quiet and out of sight, most people were willing to let it stand.

Although the driving force of abolitionism was moral, it wouldn’t have made much headway without economic changes. At the beginning of the modern era, so many business ventures involved slaves at some point in the process that no one could abolish slavery without losing a lot of money. An investor who was morally opposed to profiting from slavery would be shut out of making money from shipping, textiles, tobacco, sugar, banking, insurance, and mining. Then in the mid-1700s, the emerging industrial economies began to produce plenty of money without using slaves. Suddenly, the abolition of slavery wouldn’t bankrupt as many important people, so it became a lot easier to take a moral stand.