Summary: The African Slave Trade

When we learn about slavery in grade school, we are told that black individuals were brought over from Africa, to work for white men in America. They were often beaten and worked until they couldn’t work anymore, when they would be beaten again. They were traded and sold like they were animals, and it was all because white men wanted them for cheap labor. We were taught that the African Slave Trade was a black mark on North America’s record, that it was inhumane, and did nothing good for society. When I was given the opportunity to research this topic further, I learned that there was so much more to the story, and what a broad generalization that was. Before this assignment, I had never gone into detail about how the Africans were brought …show more content…
Only about nineteen percent of free adult men owned slaves in the south, because slaves were expensive! I had always thought that everyone had at least one slave and that having a slave was something that every white man did. Come to find out to buy one slave cost a man roughly four hundred dollars, which is a substantial amount of money today, but was worth so much more in the 1800’s. Samuel H. Williamson from the University of Illinois and Louis P. Cain from Northwestern University say, “The real price of $400 in 1850 would be approximately $12,000 in 2011 prices…but hardly anything we could spend $12,000 on today was available 160 years ago. $400 in 1860 would have purchased 4,800 pounds of bacon, 3,000 pounds of coffee, 1,600 pounds of butte, or 1,000 gallons of gin.” I found that particularly neat to think about due to the fact that $12,000 is a lot of money to just go out and spend on a whim, even if it is to purchase another human. Of course, prices varied based on gender, height, health, skills and other beneficial traits. Jenny Bourne from Carleton College says, “Prices peaked at about age 22 for females and age 25 for males… Infant slaves sold for a positive price because masters expected them to live long enough to make the initial cost of raising them worthwhile…People sometimes paid more for intact families.” Again, I don’t believe that slavery was acceptable, but it is heartwarming to …show more content…
There is so much more to the story than what I though was easy “cheap” labor. After researching this topic, I will take away new knowledge of how the Africans came to North America, and how much on slave could actually cost. It is fascinating to me that slaves sold for nearly $12,000 in modern money. I always assumed they were taken from Africa from the term, “African American” but I didn’t know that it was by force and that they were traded by other Africans. Although the African slave trade was humanely wrong, it influenced the North American economy dramatically. The legacy it left behind is ugly, but its impact, positive and negative is still a factor in today’s