20 questions · History
It was a business, and that is precisely what makes it so hard to take. Over roughly three hundred years European shipowners carried about 12.5 million people from the African coast to the Americas. Around 10.7 million arrived; the difference died at sea. The system had a merchant's logic known as the triangular trade: guns, cloth and brandy to West Africa, enslaved people across the Atlantic, sugar, tobacco and cotton back to Europe. No ship was to sail empty. The middle leg of that route, the Middle Passage, took six to ten weeks chained below deck, and the owners wrote the expected deaths into their accounts in advance. Most of these people did not end up where we now assume they did. Nearly five million were taken to Brazil and millions more to the Caribbean; less than four per cent of the entire trade went to what became the United States. And there was resistance from the very beginning. In Brazil, escaped people founded settlements called quilombos, the largest of which, Palmares, survived for almost a century. On the French sugar island of Saint-Domingue the enslaved rose in 1791, defeated French, Spanish and British armies in turn under Toussaint Louverture, and in 1804 founded Haiti: the first state in history born of a successful slave revolt. Meanwhile a movement grew in Europe and North America demanding the unthinkable: abolition. Olaudah Equiano, taken as a child, published his life story in 1789 and turned a question of commerce into a question about human beings. William Wilberforce introduced his motion in the British Parliament and was voted down for decades, until the trade was banned in 1807 and slavery itself in 1833, with compensation paid not to the freed but to their owners. In the United States, Harriet Tubman went back into the South again and again to lead people north along the Underground Railroad, Frederick Douglass became the most powerful Black voice in the country, and Sojourner Truth asked a hall full of women's rights campaigners whether she was not a woman too. The end came late and unevenly: Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, and in Texas the news arrived two and a half years behind: which is why Juneteenth is a holiday. Brazil did not abolish slavery until 1888, the last country in the Americas to do so. In 2001 the UN conference in Durban declared the slave trade a crime against humanity.
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The triangular trade
Guns and cloth to Africa, enslaved people to the Americas, sugar and cotton back to Europe: every leg turned a profit.
💡 Did you know? No ship was to sail empty: that single calculation is what kept the system profitable for European ports for centuries.
The Middle Passage
Six to ten weeks chained below deck, often with less room than a coffin allows.
💡 Did you know? Roughly one in eight people did not survive the crossing. Shipowners factored those losses into their accounts in advance.
About 12.5 million
Around 10.7 million arrived: the difference died on the way.
💡 Did you know? The figure comes from the Slave Voyages database, which has reconstructed nearly 36,000 individual voyages from port records.
Brazil
Around five million people: nearly half of all arrivals, more than ten times the number taken to North America.
💡 Did you know? Less than four per cent of the whole trade went to what became the United States. Slavery is far less of an American story than it is usually told to be.
Olaudah Equiano
Taken as a child, he bought his own freedom and became a sought-after speaker for the abolitionists in England.
💡 Did you know? The book went through nine editions in his lifetime: readers could no longer treat slavery as an abstract question of trade.
Haiti
The insurgents defeated French, Spanish and British forces in turn and Napoleon's expeditionary army as well.
💡 Did you know? France only recognised Haiti in 1825, and demanded an enormous indemnity for doing so. The country paid off that debt for more than a century.
Toussaint Louverture
Once enslaved himself, he was freed and turned out to be a brilliant general and statesman.
💡 Did you know? Napoleon had him seized under false pretences in 1802 and shipped to France, where he died in a mountain prison. The revolution won anyway.
Quilombos
Palmares in north-eastern Brazil held out for almost a century and at times had tens of thousands of inhabitants.
💡 Did you know? Its last leader, Zumbi, was killed in 1695. The date is now Brazil's Black Consciousness Day and a public holiday.
William Wilberforce
He brought his motion forward again and again from 1789 and was voted down again and again: until the ban finally passed in 1807.
💡 Did you know? News that slavery itself would be abolished reached him three days before his death in 1833.
1833
Around 800,000 people in the Caribbean, South Africa and Canada were freed by it.
💡 Did you know? It was not the freed who were compensated but the slaveholders: 20 million pounds, a fifth of the national budget. Britain only finished repaying the loan in 2015.
The Underground Railroad
No tracks, no engine: the name was code. „Stations“ were barns and cellars, „conductors“ were the guides.
💡 Did you know? After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 escapees had to reach Canada: even in the free North they could legally be seized.
Harriet Tubman
She returned some thirteen times and guided about seventy people out, including her own parents.
💡 Did you know? She later said she never lost a passenger. During the Civil War she also led an armed raid that freed more than 700 people.
Frederick Douglass
His 1845 autobiography was written so well that opponents claimed no former slave could possibly have produced it.
💡 Did you know? As a boy he was secretly taught to read by his owner's wife: until her husband forbade it, saying reading made a slave unfit for slavery. Douglass took the point immediately.
Sojourner Truth
She spoke at a women's rights convention in Ohio and pointed out that the chivalry being invoked had never once been extended to Black women.
💡 Did you know? Born Isabella Baumfree, she chose her new name herself: a traveller, and the truth: she intended to walk the country and preach.
Uncle Tom's Cabin
300,000 copies sold in the first year alone: an astonishing figure for the time.
💡 Did you know? Lincoln is said to have greeted the author as „the little lady who started this great war“. The quote is unproven, but it captures the effect.
The Emancipation Proclamation
It applied only to the seceded states: precisely where Lincoln had no power to enforce anything.
💡 Did you know? The effect was enormous all the same: a war about the Union became a war about slavery, and some 200,000 Black soldiers joined the Union army.
Juneteenth
On that day in 1865 a Union general read the order of freedom aloud in Galveston, Texas; the proclamation was already two and a half years old.
💡 Did you know? The name is a portmanteau of „June“ and „nineteenth“. Juneteenth became a federal holiday in 2021.
The 13th Amendment
Only this made abolition permanent and nationwide: Lincoln's proclamation had been a wartime measure.
💡 Did you know? One exception remains in the text: forced labour „as a punishment for crime“ is still permitted. That clause is argued over to this day.
The Lei Áurea
It ran to two sentences: slavery is abolished, all provisions to the contrary are revoked. Around 600,000 people were freed.
💡 Did you know? Princess Isabel signed it as regent. Eighteen months later the monarchy was gone: the disappointed landowners had withdrawn their loyalty.
As a crime against humanity
The UN conference against racism in Durban stated that slavery and the slave trade always were such a crime.
💡 Did you know? Slavery is formally abolished everywhere: Mauritania was the last country in the world to do so, in 1981, and only made it a criminal offence in 2007.
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