Question

Create a strong argument (thesis statement) for the following question: What are the differences between "The South American Slave Trade vs. The North American Slave Trade? when and why did it begin? when and why did it end?

Answer 1

Over one-third of the 10 to 16 million Africans who survived the journey to the New World landed in Brazil and between 60 and 70 percent ended up in Brazil or the Caribbean sugar colonies. In what is now the United States, just 6 million arrived. Yet by 1860, about two-thirds of all New World slaves were living in the South of America. Southern slavery in Latin America, where the Catholic Church claimed that slaves had the right to marry, seek relief from a cruel master, and purchase their freedom, was widely assumed for a long time to be harsher and crueler than slavery.

It was believed that Spanish and Portuguese settlers were less tainted by racial prejudice than North Americans, and that Latin American slavery was less prone to the stresses of a dynamic capitalist economy. By fact, Latin American slaves were not given any protection by either the Church or the courts. In Latin America, access to liberty was greater, but in many cases masters freed sick, elderly, crippled, or simply unneeded slaves to relieve themselves of financial responsibility.

Demographic was the biggest difference between South and Latin America's slavery. In Brazil and the West Indies, the slave population had a smaller proportion of female slaves, a much lower birth rate, and a higher proportion of Africa's recent arrivals. Southern slaves, in striking contrast, had an equal sex ratio, a high birth rate, and a population predominantly American-born. In the Caribbean, death rates among slaves were one-third higher than in the South, and suicide seems to have been much more common. Unlike slaves in the South, in their "free time," West Indian slaves were expected to produce their own food and care for the elderly and the sick.

In the United States, slavery was particularly unique in the slave population's ability to increase their numbers by natural reproduction. In the Caribbean, Dutch Guyana, and Brazil, the death rate for slaves was so high and the birth rate so low that without imports from Africa, slaves could not sustain their population. The average number of children born to a southern slave woman at the start of the nineteenth century was 9.2 times the number in the West Indies.

Another significant difference between Latin America and the U.S. was race conceptions. A complicated system of racial classification has arisen in Spanish and Portuguese America. The Spanish and Portuguese were much more accepting of racial mixing compared to the British and French, an approach facilitated by a scarcity of European women, and accepted a wide range of racial gradations, including black, mestizo, quadroon, and octoroon. In contrast, the American South adopted a two-category race system in which anyone with a black mother was automatically regarded as black.

U.S. and Brazil's trading actions were largely disconnected at the turn of the nineteenth century. Each had their own independent branches of transatlantic slave trade, with Luso-Brazilian slave traders mainly operating south of the Equator (with the exception of an extremely strong link between Salvador and the Bight of Benin), and their U.S. counterparts largely limited to the northern hemisphere (although also gradually occurring in the South Atlantic). Interestingly, half a century later, as a result of the prohibition of trade in the former and its re-creation as contraband in the latter, the past of the United States and Brazil became intertwined.