Crossing the Atlantic

Over nearly 350 years, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade displaced more than 12 million Africans, as European traders captured and sold men, women, and children to supply labor in the New World. The Atlantic crossing, known as the Middle Passage, subjected captives to horrific, inhumane conditions over months at sea, and many died before reaching destinations primarily in Brazil and the Caribbean, while more than 480,000 arrived on the North American seaboard. In early Maryland and Virginia, colonists first relied on indentured white European labor, and some Africans in the early 1600s also labored as indentured servants, sometimes gaining freedom, acquiring land, conducting business with whites, and even enslaving others. By 1665, rising tobacco demand and fewer English immigrants pushed Virginia's large plantation owners to seek a cheaper, more reliable labor force, drawing on the Barbados plantation model and established Atlantic trade routes. By 1670, direct shipments of African captives were arriving in Virginia to work large tobacco plantations, and slavery became central to the colony, so that by the dawn of the 18th century Virginia was wholly committed to it. In the Chesapeake, captives were sometimes sold directly from ships traveling up the rivers to plantation owners, and in the early 1800s smaller boats carrying enslaved Africans within Virginia arrived at Rockett's Landing and Manchester Docks in Richmond. From 1830 to 1860, Richmond became the largest source of enslaved blacks on America's east coast in the downriver slave trade, sending many on to New Orleans and other Deep South ports while others were marched across the James River in coffles into the city's slave markets, auction houses, jail, burial ground, and African American religious community.

Richmond, Virginia · United States