The 500,000 number has appeared pretty consistently in most of the sources I’ve read. I am more than willing to accept a better figure, but that is the one that most frequently appears. The use of “America” in the site to which you linked may be confusing. It is not clear that the word means what became the U.S. as opposed to all the land masses of the western Hemisphere. (I am not challenging the numbers, only pointing out the potential confusion.)
There used to be a pretty good site that dealt with all African slavery at middlepassage.org, but the domain name has lapsed and I have not yet been able to discover where the original site may have moved.
Slight mistype on Tom’s part. But the slave trade did precede the discovery of America. Portuguese ships exploring the African coast began bringing back slaves to Portugal pretty early in the game.
Just trying to get my brain around the 22,000,000 number. The last post Tom made showed approx 300,000 to the US and another 300,000 via American ships. That would appear to be a more realistic number. Even if you double that assuming a 50% mortality rate it comes out to 1,200,000 slaves via the 100 day middle voyage. I doubt the mortality rate would be that high but even at that it is a fraction of the 22 million quoted.
(This brings up a point not yet fully addressed. When Hugh and others discuss deaths above ten million, they may not actually be claiming that 1/2 of all the persons shipped actually died in transit. The numbers very likely include deaths between the point of capture and the coast, deaths in the holding pens on the coast (exacerbated by disease and periodic epidemics), deaths in the passage, and deaths among recent arrivals to the Americas among weakened slaves forced into hard labor or the breaking process with a strange diet (and, of course, more opportunity for disease).
About.com citing Transformations in Slavery by Paul E. Lovejoy, 2000:
Trans-Atlantic exports by region
1650-1900
Region Number of slaves
accounted for %
Senegambia 479,900 4.7
Upper Guinea 411,200 4.0
Windward Coast 183,200 1.8
Gold Coast 1,035,600 10.1
Blight of Benin 2,016,200 19.7
Blight of Biafra 1,463,700 14.3
West Central 4,179,500 40.8
South East 470,900 4.6
Total 10,240,200 100.0
About.com (same page) citing The Slave Trade by Hugh Thomas, 1997:
Trans-Atlantic imports by region
1450-1900
Region Number of slaves
accounted for %
Brazil 4,000,000 35.4
Spanish Empire 2,500,000 22.1
British West Indies 2,000,000 17.7
French West Indies 1,600,00 14.1
British N.A. & and U.S. 500,000 4.4
Dutch West Indies 500,000 4.4
Danish West Indies 28,000 0.2
Europe (and Islands) 200,000 1.8
Total 11,328,000 100.0
What you said about “America” occurred to me, too, except that it appears in the same sentence as when they talk about the American Revolutionary War. That seems to pretty strongly imply it was the proto-United States alone. Like I said, the assertion that 500,000 slaves came from 1) one port 2) bound for the U.S. alone 3) during the period of the Revolutionary War seems incredibly high… and credulously high, too. (If they *meant * “starting from 1776” – that seems more likely)
I would like to track down Hugh Thomas’ book to see if his estimates include instances of deaths outside the oceanic voyage in his total. You seem to think he may well be including deaths from occurances like the mortality rate at West African slave ports, I tend to doubt it, as I said when I touched on this topic in my previous post.
We know that the importation of African slaves to America was officially first recorded in 1619 near Jamestown, VA. But Hugh Thomas’ estimates don’t start until 1771. That’s 150+plus years where the numbers of imported slaves to the United States aren’t recorded by Thomas. How many blacks were imported from West Africa in that period? An additional 25,000 or so does not seem impossible.
The numbers I have seen quoted for in-transit deaths run between 10% and 15% with 13% being the most frequently quoted. You don’t get 11,000,000 deaths and 11,000,000 successful importations with a 13% mortality figure.
Again, I have no personal belief in any number; I am merely passing along the numbers I have seen most frequently. If you look over the sources I quoted, every one of them places the total successful transportations between 10,000,000 and 12,000,000 with the 500,000 number to the U.S. being pretty consistent. (The one “300,000” figure only began in the late eighteenth century.) The number of deaths are all over the place, ranging from 10,000,000 to 100,000,000, so each source would need to be evaluated both on the reliability of their number and on the points at which they began and ended counting.
No. If you count the numbers he presented that begin in 1771, you only come to 298,881 (Magiver’s 300,000), with the remaining 201,119 apparently arriving between 1619 and 1770. (Importations to Florida and Louisiana might also not show up in the “shipped direct to the U.S.” numbers while later being added to the U.S. total through the addition of Florida and Louisiana in the 1790s and 1803.)
The National Civil Rights Museum is housed in the former Lorraine Motel, the Memphis building where Martin Luther King was assassinated as he spoke from the balcony of his room.