The Need for a New Labor Force
European diseases had a devastating effect on the Native American population.
Measles, smallpox, and typhuswere common in Europe. As a result, most adult
Europeans were immune, or had a natural resistance, to them. Native Americans,
however, had never been exposed to such diseases and had no immunity to them. As
a result, many Native Americans became terribly sick after their first encounters with
Europeans. Many of them died in the years after Columbus reached the New World.
No one knows how many Native Americans died from European diseases, but the loss
of life was staggering. Spanish author Fernando de Oviedoreported in 1548 about the
destruction of the Native Americans of Hispaniola. He reported that of the estimated 1
million Indians who had lived on the island in 1492, “there are now believed to be at the
present time...five hundred persons [left].” In North America the Native American
population north of Mexico was about 10 million when Columbus arrived. This number
would drop to less than a million. The drop in the native population played a major role
in the emerging need for an alternative labor force.
Plantation agriculture was a mainstay of the colonial economic structure. Spain
and Portugal established sugar plantations that relied on large numbers of native
laborers. In the 1600s English tobacco farmers in North America also needed workers
for their plantations. With a lack of Native American workers, they, too, needed another
source of labor. Plantation owners in both North and South America wanted a cheap
workforce.
Some colonists, including Spanish priest Bartolomé de Las Casas, suggested
using enslaved Africans as workers. Africans had already developed immunity to
European diseases. The colonists soon agreed that slaves from West Africacould be
the solution to their labor needs.
The Slave Trade
In 1510 the Spanish government legalized the sale of slaves in its colonies. The first full
cargo ship of Africans arrived in the Americas eight years later. Over the next century,
more than a million enslaved Africans were brought to the Spanish and Portuguese
colonies in the New World. The Dutch and English also became active in the slave
trade.
Middle Passage
Enslavement was a horrible experience for the slaves. Most enslaved people had been
captured in the interior of Africa, often by Africans who profited from selling slaves to
Europeans. The captives were chained around the neck and then marched to the coast.
This journey could be as long as 1,000 miles. The Middle Passagewas the voyage
across the Atlantic Ocean that enslaved Africans were forced to endure. Africans were
packed like cargo in the lower decks of the slave ships. The slaves were chained
together and crammed into spaces about the size of coffins. The height between the
decks was sometimes only 18 inches.
In this confinement, disease spread quickly, killing many Africans. Others
suffocated or died from malnutrition. Some slaves took their own lives to end their
suffering. It is estimated that one out of every six Africans died during the Middle
Passage.
African Diaspora
Between the 1520’s and 1860’s about 12 million Africans were shipped across the
Atlantic as slaves. More than 10 million of these captives survived the voyage and
reached the Americas. The slave trade led to the African Diaspora(A diaspora is a
scattering of people.) Enslaved Africans were sent all across the New World.
More than a third of the enslaved Africans, nearly 4 million people, were sent to
Brazil. Most of those slaves were forced to work on Portuguese sugar plantations.
Nearly 2 million slaves went to the colonies of New Spain. Some worked on plantations
in the Caribbean, while others were taken to the mines of Peru and Mexico. Some 3
million slaves worked in British and French Colonies in the Caribbean and Latin
America. More than 600,000 slaves went to Britain's North American colonies that later
became the United States.
Colonial leaders across the Americas developed laws that regulated slave
treatment and behavior. Slaves were given few rights in the colonies. The law
considered enslaved Africans to be property. In some colonies, a slaveholder was not
charged with murder if he killed a slave while punishing him. Enslaved Africans, on the
other hand, received harsh penalties for minor offenses, such as breaking a tool.
Runaways were often tortured and sometimes killed.
The treatment of enslaved Africans varied. Some slaves reported that their
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