Exercise:  The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas


Instructions: Navigate to the “Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas” website and click on “Explore the Collection,” and then closely examine and analyze the images in the following categories:

• “Slave Ships and the Atlantic Crossing (The Middle Passage)”
• “New World Agricultural and Plantation Labor”

Then answer the questions below.

Visit URL: The Transatlantic Slave Trade

Question 1:  The Transatlantic Slave Trade: What do the images tell us about the transatlantic slave trade? Using the images, reconstruct the chain of events that a slave might have experienced from initial capture to arrival in the Americas. Do you think these images represent “typical” experiences for the slaves? Why or why not?

Question 2:  The Transatlantic Slave Trade: From your examination of the images, describe how Europeans managed the slave trade. What techniques and practices did the slavers employ? In your assessment, in what specific ways was the slave trade similar to—and different from—other forms of transatlantic commerce?

Question 3:  The Transatlantic Slave Trade: What do the images tell us about New World slavery as a system of labor? What seem to have been the predominant types of labor in which slaves found themselves working? What specific elements of a typical “day in the life” of a slave can you reconstruct from these images? What are some of the “clues” from the images that you could use in this type of reconstruction?

Question 4:  The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A predominant theme of these images in the stark degree of violence involved in the system of chattel slavery. Some of this violence originated from slaves attempting to resist their conditions, whether on a slave ship bound for the Americas, or within enslavement already. What do the images tell us about the use of violence on the part of both slaveholders and the enslaved? What forms of resistance do the images suggest were available to slaves? And what obstacles tended to prevent successful large-scale slave resistance?

Question 5:  The Transatlantic Slave Trade: Look at the provenance of the various images; from what type of sources do most of them originate? How is this provenance significant—what does it tell us as historians about how we might approach the image as a piece of historical evidence? What are the advantages and limitations of visual evidence as primary source material? What types of things should we look for when assessing a source of this nature?