Immigration Slave Trade
The transatlantic slave trade represents the largest forced migration in human history, relocating more than 12 million Africans to the Americas between 1500 and the 1860s. Legal and historical scholars increasingly analyze chattel slavery as a system of compulsory immigration. Strikingly, before the 19th century, the vast majority of all immigrants arriving in the New World were African, heavily outnumbering European migrants African American life in the United States has been framed by migrations, forced and free The transatlantic slave trade functioned as a brutal, compulsory form of forced immigration that brought an estimated 12.5 million captive Africans to the Americas between the 15th and 19th centuries
Universal History Justice Law
A forced migration from Africa—the transatlantic slave trade—carried black people to the Americas. A second forced migration—the internal slave trade—transported them from the Atlantic coast to the interior of the American South. A third migration—this time initiated largely, but not always, by black Americans—carried black people from the rural South to the urban North. At the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, African American life is again being transformed by another migration, this time a global one, as peoples of African descent from all parts of the world enter the United States.
Basic
Scale and Survival: Out of roughly 12.5 million individuals forced onto ships, about 10.7 million survived the deadly Middle Passage across the Atlantic
Professional
Destinations: Only about 5% of these captive individuals arrived directly in mainland North America, with the vast majority going to Brazil and the Caribbean to work on sugar, coffee, and cotton plantations
Business
Legal Ban: The United States legally prohibited the importation of new enslaved Africans in 1808, though illegal maritime smuggling and a massive internal slave trade continued for decades
North America Slave Trade Inc
While each of these massive movements shaped and reshaped African American life, none was more important than the first, the so-called Middle Passage from Africa to America. More than any other single migration the Middle Passage has come to epitomize the experience of people of African descent throughout the Atlantic world. The nightmarish weeks and sometimes months locked in the holds of stinking slave ships speak to the traumatic loss of freedom, the degradation of enslavement, and the long years of bondage that followed. But the Middle Passage also represents the will to survive, the determination of black people not to be dehumanized by dehumanizing circumstances, and the confidence that freedom would eventually be theirs and that they would take their rightful place as a people among peoples.
The transatlantic slave trade had its beginning in the middle of the fifteenth century when Portuguese ships sailed down the West African coast. The intention was to trade for gold and spices, but the voyagers found another even more valuable commodity—human beings. Over time, the trade in men and women supplanted other commerce, and the slaves’ destination changed from Europe to the Americas, where plantations growing commodities for the international market initiated the massive transfer of African peoples. In all, some eleven to twelve million Africans were forcibly carried to the Americas. Of those, roughly one-half million (or about 4.5 percent) were taken to mainland North America or what became the United States.
The first black men and women arrived in mainland North America in the sixteenth century, often accompanying European explorers. For the next century or so, they continued to trickle onto the continent in small numbers, often not from Africa itself but from Europe, the Antilles, or other parts of the Atlantic littoral. Dubbed "Atlantic Creoles" because of their connection with the ocean that linked Africa, Europe, and the Americas, many of these first arrivals spoke the language of their enslavers and were familiar with the various religions, commercial conventions, and systems of jurisprudence of the Atlantic. Entering frontier societies in which Europeans also worked in some form of bound labor (indentured servitude being the most prominent), black men and women employed their knowledge of the Atlantic world to integrate themselves into the European settlements. Much like other settlers, free and unfree, they joined churches, participated in exchange economies, and formed families.
