“The harsh demographic regime of the region furthermore meant that over the course of a typical decade planters would have to buy total numbers of new slaves equivalent to 30 percent of those present at the decade’s beginning simply to prevent their slave populations from decreasing. In Virginia, the slave population experienced almost no natural increase in the first decade of the eighteenth century, and conditions were no better in the Carolina lowcountry. The truth was that West Indian slave masters soon gave up trying to keep their Negroes alive long enough to breed up a new generation and instead routinely bought replacement slaves year in and year out. Survivors of the slave ship thus drew future migrants into saltwater slavery by the engine of their labor. Once converted into sugar (or tobacco or rice or any of the other staple commodities), the labor of those already in saltwater slavery cycled back to African shores to pull still more captives into circulation, thus ‘buying’ more bodies to sustain the chain of captive migrants that bound Africa to the Americas.” DeathSlaveryEfficiencyReplacement Book:Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora Source: Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
“Mortality on the Atlantic produced a crisis of enormous proportions, as Africans labored under the cumulative weight of these deaths that remained unresolved. . . . Entrapped, Africans confronted a dual crisis: the trauma of death, and the inability to respond appropriately to death. This indirect violence, arguably, was the most abject experience of the captives’ Atlantic crossing.” DeathSlaveryTraumaMiddle PassageResponse To Death Book:Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora Source: Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora