Africa: We studied the great Nile River Civilization of Egypt in northeastern Africa and the early kingdoms of West

Africa: Ghana, Songhay and Mali

The Sahara Trade Routes: Merchants in camel caravans traded cotton, gold, diamonds, and other goods

The Sugar Trade: Trade & Slavery the selling and stealing of humans in Africa
Slave manacles from early days in the American colonies The Sugar Trade the Triangular Trade:

FROM AFRICA TO THE AMERICAS

In the 360 years between 1500 and the end of the slave trade in the 1860s, almost 12 million Africans were forcibly taken to the Americas. This largest forced migration in human history relocated some 50 ethnic and linguistic groups.

The Triangular Trade brought slaves from Africa to the Caribbean and to North and South America
Only a small portion of the enslaved - less than half a million were sent to North America. The majority went to South America and the Caribbean. In the mid-1600s, Africans outnumbered Europeans in nascent cities such as Mexico City, Havana and Lima.

A TERRIBLE TRADE
The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade is called a Triangular Trade for its three-legged route that began and ended in Europe.

The TransAtlantic (across the Atlantic Ocean) Slave Trade The ship lined with African people who were also stacked on top of each other

Sugar Trade Slave Trade = Triangular Trade

European vessels took goods to Africa, where they were exchanged for slaves. The ships then sailed to the Americas to trade slaves for agricultural products - extracted by slave labor. These products: sugar, cotton, iron ore, gold and more were sold in Europe.

Slaves to the Americas Sugar, tobacco & cotton to Europe Textiles (cloth) & rum to Africa

 Freedom in Spanish Florida The part of Florida held by the Spanish, south of St. Mary's River, became a destination for escaped slaves. To antagonize the British both militarily and economically, Spain welcomed slaves from the British territory, declared them free and set up the first free, all black settlement, Fort Mose, north of St. Augustine in 1738.

 Europe after the return journey. an vessels took goods to Africa, where they were exchanged for slaves. The ships then sailed to the Americas to trade slaves for agricultural products extracted by slave labor - which were sold in EuropSuccessful escapes were rare. As the country expanded westward with acquisitions such as the 1803 Louisiana Purchase and inventions made cultivating certain crops more profitable, the demand for slave labor increaseA New Cash Crop Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin in 1793 ushered in the new cotton economy. This new machine vastly multiplied the profit potential for America's planters, making it possible t

 de afCotton Fuels a Second Middle Passage Cotton plantations spread in the "Deep South." According to the Federal census, in 1790 approximately 650,000 slaves worked with rice, tobacco, and indigo. By 1850 the country had 3.2 million slaves, 1.8 million of whom worked in cotton. By the middle of the 19th century, the southern states were providing two-thirds of the world's supply of cotton.

 returForced migration and the separation of families happened within America, just as it did between Africa and the New World. The burgeoning agricultural economy not only created an enormous new region for slavery in the Lower South, it turned the Upper South into slaveexporting states, where families and individuals were at constant risk of being sold away from whatever stable base they had. Families that had been intact for generations along the Atlantic coast were forever separated.

 ESCAPED AND FREE BLACKS RUNAWAY JOURNEYS Since the earliest days of slavery, African Americans risked everything to find freedom. Escaped slaves made their way to Canada, Mexico and areas of the United States where they could live free.

 Not run by any one person or organization, the Underground Railroad was a large network of safe houses and routes that escaped slaves used to travel to the North, often covering 10 to 20 miles each day. Harriet Tubman, who escaped from slavery in 1849, is famous for her work as one of the many "conductors" on the Underground Railroad. She journeyed often into the South to help slaves find their way. FREE IN THE NORTH AND SOUTH Although Southern states made life for a free black difficult, whether denying residency or threatening re-enslavement for minor criminal offenses, more free blacks lived there than in Northern states, even through the Civil War.

 When slavery was abolished at the end of the Civil War in 1865, the greatest increases in the black population of northern cities were in Cleveland, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. In 1860, free blacks numbered 488,070, about 10 percent of the entire black population. Of those, 226,152 lived in the North and 261,918 in the South.

 Early Westward Migration Between 1850 and 1860, 4,000 blacks settled in California. Half chose San Francisco and Sacramento, creating the first English-speaking, black urban communities in the far West. The closest western state to the Old South that allowed blacks to homestead in the 1870s was Kansas. Between 1870 and 1890, some 30,000 blacks settled there. In Oklahoma, by 1900 African American farmers owned 1.5 million acres, the peak of black land ownership there, which began to decline by 1910. The first African Americans in California had arrived much earlier, from Mexico. In 1781, African Americans comprised a majority of the 44 founders of Los Angeles. They were joined by more blacks from Mexico when slavery ended there in 1821.

 Though blacks made significant moves north and west, at the turn of the 20th century, over seven million of the nation's almost nine million blacks lived in the South.