Why did the Atlantic slave trade start?

Answer 1

In order to operate huge tracts of land as effective farms, the white land owners of the New World, which included what later became America, the Caribbean, and South America, sought slaves from Africa to do the work required to make the white men rich. Slave trade between Africa and the Americas began soon after Columbus arrived in the New World, but it grew slowly at first. For about the first hundred years, starting in the early 1500s, it was mainly indentured white servants brought from Europe, and native Americans, who worked the farms, partly because slaves were too expensive at the time to be bought in mass numbers. Slavery had already existed worldwide for thousands of years, including in Africa, before the first slaves were brought to America. Black slaves in the millions were captured by other blacks, as well as by Arabs and others, in the interior of the African continent, and sent to other countries, largely to Muslim nations. Though Africans had also enslaved other Africans for thousands of years before slave trade with the Americas, and slaves living in Africa were sometimes subject to abuse and death that non-slaves were not, it was not marked by the same kind of lifelong servitude as occurred to African slaves outside Africa. Slavery as practiced by Africans was originally similar to European serfdom, which was the condition of most white Europeans at the time. Slaves could marry, own property and even own slaves, and slavery usually ended after a certain number of years of servitude. Also, African slavery was never passed from one generation to another. However, since the slave trade between Africa and other countries was rather different from European serfdom, largely because slaves were less often allowed to become free, were more often considered property, and it was practically impossible for them to return to their home countries, along with the color of their skin setting them apart from non-African populations, it set the stage for accentuating perceived power differences between light-skinned and dark-skinned people worldwide, and helped fuel the further abuses to follow. Slave trade specifically between Europe and Africa began about 50 years before Columbus came to America, started by Portugal and Spain, with the Dutch joining in soon after; England was the last to join in this trade. Slaves were sent to west coast ports in Africa, and shipped to other countries, mostly to Spain and Portugal. Soon after European settlers arrived in the New World, the slave ships began transporting some slaves to North and South America and the Caribbean islands. Only a little more than 3 percent of the total number of slaves exported to the Americas were traded between about 1500 and 1600. Even at this early stage, they were sold as property, like horses and cows, the men and women were kept on the plantations, and in return for their labor, received meager food and housing. During this first hundred years of European agriculture in the New World, during which natives throughout the Americas were robbed of their lands (due to the mentality of greed that the riches of the New World fostered in many Europeans, and set the stage for what was to follow), farms eventually expanded to massive size, requiring far more workers than could be supplied by indentured servants and natives; also, massive numbers of natives had died due to diseases brought by Europeans, further reducing their "contribution" to the work force. The slave trade served as the source for replacement workers. During the next 100 years, between about 1600 and 1700, about 16 percent of the total number of slaves sent to the Americas were traded. In 1642, Massachusetts became the first colony to legalize slavery, though it already existed without significant opposition. Expansion continued at an even faster pace for the next hundred years. More than half of all slaves from Africa to the Americas were exported between about 1700 and 1800. Crammed by the hundreds into ships, under conditions that killed as many as a fifth of the people on each voyage, slavery to the Americas grew as never before, and became far more brutal than ever. Many were prohibited from learning to read, for fear that they would become too educated to control. Many slaves were treated well physically, due to their expense, but at an average price of 10 to 20 dollars each, many or most male adult slaves could be worked for at least 20 to 30 years before they were "worked out" and died, usually of malnutrition, overwork and bad treatment, which continued even if they managed to live into their old age. Women could be worked in the fields too, and also could be trained to work in the house, as cooks and cleaners, and baby nurses. Children were the future workers of the plantation, so the owners encouraged lots of births, both for use at the plantation, and for sale to others, since slavery in the Americas, as in ancient Rome, included a clause that the children of slaves were also considered slaves, and thus property. Around the mid-1700s, opposition to slavery began to grow in many parts of the world, including in what was soon to become the United States. Many of the US's founding fathers owned slaves, mostly to work on their plantations, but many, if not most, of these founding fathers were uncomfortable with slavery, since they realized it was contradictory to the ideals that they were founding the US on, and began to call for its end. In 1780, Pennsylvania became the first state to abolish slavery. In the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 (also known as the Freedom Ordinance), written by the Continental Congress, slavery was abolished in the territories north of the Ohio River, but not yet in the East. Importation of slaves into the southern states and territories was not yet banned. The importation of slaves into the entire US was banned on January 1, 1808, but not slave trade within the borders of the southern US, nor involvement of US citizens in the international slave trade between Africa and other countries in the Americas. The remaining 28 percent of all slaves exported from Africa to the Americas arrived after 1800, though most were sent to countries other than the US (Brazil, the Caribbean, etc.). Soon into the 1800s, the friction between the free northern US states, and the slave states of the south, grew larger, into a massive political, cultural and economic struggle. In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska act created the territories that these states were named after; this act stated that it was up to the inhabitants to decide whether to be admitted to the Union as slave states or free states. Shortly after this, armed conflict over the issue broke out in Kansas Territory. This eventually led to a brutal civil war between the southern slave states and the northern free states, during which Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, consisting of two executive orders, one in 1862, and another in 1863, which freed most slaves, but it was not until the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution on December 18 1865, eight months after Lincoln's assassination, that slavery was finally ended throughout the US.