Africans in the Atlantic World
Although its enslaved population grew substantially, this mainland destination received only a small percentage of Africans transported directly across the Atlantic.
North America
This Atlantic crossing was the second stage of a forced journey that began with capture in Africa and continued with sale and transportation in the Americas.
The Middle Passage
Revolts, testimony, and slave ship diagrams helped advance this movement, which sought to end slavery rather than merely change its conditions.
Abolitionism
By making seed removal faster and cotton production more profitable, this invention encouraged expanded planting and increased demand for enslaved field labor.
The cotton gin
This constitutional provision increased slaveholding states’ representation by counting a portion of their enslaved populations without granting those people political rights.
Three-fifths compromise
These two destinations received the largest shares of enslaved Africans transported across the Atlantic.
Brazil and the Caribbean.
Tight-packing aboard ships maximized the number of captives transported, while auction prices reflected their age, health, and skills. Both practices illustrate this process of reducing of human life to economic value.
Commodification
Joseph Cinqué led a revolt aboard this vessel in 1839; its African captives later secured recognition of their freedom in the U.S. Supreme Court.
La Amistad
Rising cotton profits drove the forced relocation of enslaved people from the Upper South to the Deep South, a journey known by this name.
The Second Middle Passage
This 1857 Supreme Court decision denied U.S. citizenship to African Americans, whether enslaved or free.
Dred Scott v. Sandford
Africans who spoke multiple languages served in this role, making communication possible between expedition members and the peoples they encountered.
Translators / interpreters
European merchants used these sites along the African coast to exchange goods, purchase captives, and hold them until ships were ready to depart.
Alongside organized uprisings, captives also used this form of individual resistance aboard slave ships.
Hunger strikes / Refusing to eat
Issued in French Louisiana in 1724, this legal code regulated slavery, mandated Catholic instruction, and restricted the lives of enslaved people.
Code Noir
By restricting movement, gatherings, weapons, and literacy, these laws protected enslavers’ power and attempted to prevent resistance.
Slave codes
Africans and their descendants formed communities throughout the Americas and beyond. This term refers collectively to these populations living outside Africa.
The African diaspora
Captives could be exchanged for these European goods, which strengthened a state’s ability to raid neighboring societies and acquire additional captives.
Firearms
Accounts by Olaudah Equiano and Solomon Northup belonged to this literary genre, which used firsthand experiences to assert Black humanity and challenge claims that slavery was benevolent.
Slave narratives
While cotton dominated much of the Deep South, enslaved workers in the coastal Lowcountry cultivated this crop, drawing on agricultural knowledge brought from West Africa.
Rice
This founding document legally protected slavery without explicitly naming the institution.
The United States Constitution (1789)
This free African conquistador participated in Spanish expeditions, including an expedition to present-day Florida in 1513.
Juan Garrido
Although far fewer Africans arrived directly in mainland North America than in Brazil or the Caribbean, captives from these two African regions made up nearly half of those transported directly to mainland North America.
Senegambia and Angola
Beginning in this year, federal law prohibited importing enslaved people into the United States, while allowing the domestic slave trade to continue.
1808
In Southern cities, enslaved people worked as blacksmiths, carpenters, and bricklayers, occupations collectively described by this term.
Laws defining enslaved people as property and making their status lifelong and inheritable established this form of slavery.
Chattel slavery