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A chilling Smithsonian exhibit brings alive the voyage of African slaves to the United States and shows how their forced labor helped create this country's prosperity.
By CARL HARTMAN, Associated Press
March 16, 2003
WASHINGTON -- Torn from their land and hauled to a strange one, Africans are shown in a Smithsonian exhibit as cogs in a forced labor system that helped build the foundations of America's economic might.
The exhibit at Washington's Anacostia Museum, "Captive Passage: The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Making of the Americas," illustrates the horrors of the slave trade, from the dangerous trip to the dismal lives of those who survived to reach these shores.
A diagram illustrates how slaves often were placed on ships: stretched out, side by side, with each person's head to the feet of his or her two neighbors. That enabled captors to save space and crowd more slaves into each ship. Some images show men and women brought on deck to dance, apparently as a form of exercise. The exhibit also includes images of terrified captives throwing themselves into the sea. Some did so after hearing that their white masters were going to eat them.
A magnificent sunset by English painter J.M.W. Turner depicts a ship in one corner and in another, black bodies in the water.
Many slaves died aboard the ships, from disease and ill treatment. The strongest lived and fetched high prices in America. On the eve of the Civil War, a "prime field hand" could sell for as much as $1,800, about $25,700 now.
An estimated three slaves out of every five brought to America worked in the cotton fields and at the cotton gins that fed the mills of Britain's industrial revolution. Other slaves grew tobacco, sugar, indigo and other valued exports that earned the cash that began building the U.S. industrial empire of today.
Slave owners also made money by hiring out their slaves to industry. The city of Charleston, S.C., issued badges for those slaves so they could be distinguished from free blacks, in return for a fee and an oath that said:
"I do solemnly swear, that the Negro or Negroes is or are my property and that the employment of every such slave when working on hire is to be no other than such as is now mentioned by me, so help me God."
Of the 12-million Africans hauled across the Atlantic more than 350 years ago, scholars estimate that only 700,000 went to what is now the United States. About 4-million went to Brazil, where slavery survived almost a quarter-century after it was abolished in the United States. Many worked the rich mines of Latin America.
It was a triangular trade. Ships left Britain, France, Spain and Portugal with goods to appeal to Africans: beads, cloth, little bells, knives, guns, rum and brandy. In Africa, tribal leaders traded men, women and children for the goods.
The voyage across the Atlantic could take 90 days.
The exhibit preserves the words of one young American, Richard Drake. He went on a slaving expedition with his uncle in 1808, not long after their native Britain declared the traffic illegal and sent its navy to catch slavers off the West African coast.
At first the groans, cries and deprecations of the captives kept young Drake, lodged in rooms above them, from sleeping.
"They kept up a mournful chanting all night, in spite of repeated lashings by their keepers," he wrote.
He changed his mind during the voyage.
"The blacks are shackled down in tiers, on the decks, sitting between each other's legs, fore and aft," he wrote later. "The blacks are strung across in gangs of six or eight, according to size, and their ankle bolts are secured. I think the arrangements for the slaves are excellent. This slave trade is not such a bad thing after all. My uncle says it is a necessary evil. I think he is getting rich."
"Captive Passage: The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Making of the Americas," is at the Smithsonian Institution's Anacostia Museum, 1901 Fort Place SE, Washington, D.C.
Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily through Aug. 31. Admission is free.
FOR MORE INFORMATION: Call (202)287-2060 or visit anacostia.si.edu/Exhibits.htm.