Arrival did not end the ordeal. Survivors were sold, often after being oiled and inspected like livestock, and taken to mines, cities, households and, above all, plantations. What happened next depended greatly on where they landed and what crop they were forced to grow.
Where captives went
Of roughly 10.7 million Africans who survived the crossing, Brazil, under Portuguese rule, received the largest share, close to half of all arrivals. The British and French Caribbean islands came next, then Spanish America. Mainland North America, the future United States, received only about 390,000 people, under 4 percent of the total. Enslaved Africans mined gold in Brazil, grew rice in South Carolina, raised cattle on the plains of Venezuela and worked as porters, sailors and artisans in port cities from Havana to New York.
Sugar and the population puzzle
Sugar was the great engine of demand, and it was a killer. Harvest meant months of cutting and milling around the clock, with gangs driven by the whip. Planters often found it cheaper to buy new captives than to improve conditions. In much of the Caribbean and Brazil, the enslaved population could be kept up only by constant imports.
North America was different. Tobacco, rice and later cotton were grown in healthier conditions, food was more plentiful, and sex ratios were more even. The enslaved population of the United States grew to about four million by 1860 because births outnumbered deaths, not because of imports. This natural increase did not mean kindness. It meant that enslaved families were bred, bought and sold as a form of wealth.
The law of bondage
Colonial governments wrote detailed slave codes. Barbados passed a code in 1661 that gave masters near-total power and imposed brutal punishments. The Barbados code of 1661 became a model for slave codes in Jamaica and South Carolina. In 1685 Louis XIV of France issued the Code Noir for French colonies. The Code Noir required that enslaved people be baptized as Catholics, forbade selling young children apart from their parents, and set limits on punishment, though these were often ignored, while it also prescribed mutilation for runaways.
Cotton and the second slavery
In the nineteenth century slavery expanded rather than faded in three places: the cotton South of the United States, sugar-rich Cuba and coffee-growing Brazil. Historians call this the second slavery. Eli Whitney's cotton gin of 1793 made short-staple cotton profitable to grow inland, because it separated seeds from fiber quickly. Cotton spread across Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, and it fed the mills of Lancashire and New England. To supply labor after the United States banned imports in 1808, traders moved people from the older states. The domestic slave trade forcibly moved about one million enslaved people from the upper South to the Deep South between 1790 and 1860, tearing apart countless families.
Resistance
Enslaved people resisted in many ways. Day to day, they worked slowly, broke tools, feigned illness, stole food and kept alive languages, religions, music and family ties. Some ran away. In mountains and forests, communities of escapees called maroons fought colonial armies. In Jamaica, after years of war, the treaties of 1739 granted the Maroons land and self-rule in return for returning future runaways, a bargain that won freedom for some at the expense of others.
Open revolts were rarer, because they were so dangerous. The Stono Rebellion of 1739 was an uprising of enslaved people in South Carolina, many of them from Kongo, who marched south toward Spanish Florida, where freedom had been promised. Tacky's Revolt in Jamaica in 1760 and Nat Turner's rising in Virginia in 1831 were crushed, and each was followed by harsher laws.
Worked example: Jamaica and Virginia compared
Set two colonies side by side around 1770. Jamaica is a sugar island. Most enslaved people live on large estates with a hundred or more workers and a handful of white overseers; whites are a small minority, perhaps one person in ten. Deaths exceed births, so planters keep buying newly arrived Africans, and African languages and religious practices remain strong. Rebellion is a constant fear.
Virginia grows tobacco on smaller farms. Most enslaved people are born in the colony, speak English, and live in families that can be split by sale or inheritance at any time. Whites are the majority. The enslaved population grows on its own, and planters such as George Washington count rising numbers of children as rising wealth.
Which system was worse? The question has no clean answer, and it is not the most useful one. The comparison shows that slavery took different shapes depending on crops, climate and law, but that everywhere it rested on the same principle: that one person could own another and everything that person's body could produce, including children. Seeing both the variety and the common core is the key to understanding slavery in the Americas.