t in the 1680s, "the mainland colonies underwent a massive shift from indentured to slave laborö (p. 11). Native Americans, difficult to enslave on their own turf and poor Europeans, arriving in America under indenture in ever decreasing numbers, created a void in the highly agricultural economy of the colonies (Kolchin, 1993, p. 12).
In order to fill this void, African slaves began arriving in earnest. The harrowing Middle Passage across the Atlantic, first utilized en masse by Christopher Columbus during his conquest and deportation of Caribbean natives, became the superhighway of the slave trade (Foster, 1992, p. 6). The majority of American slaves were taken from the coastal region of West Africa, where they were loaded into ships ready to take them to the colonies. Men were typically chained and put in the hold of the ship with the women and children; slaves were often crammed together so tightly as to impair virtually all movement (Kolchin, 1993, p. 20-22).
It is estimated that roughly 650,000 slaves were imported to the American colonies from West Africa (Kolchin, 1993, p. 22), a relatively small beginning considering nearly 4 million slaves were thought to be living in the U.S. by the start of the Civil War (Hayes, 1998, p. 11). Not a graveyard to slaves, the United States witnessed an excess of births over deaths within the African population; this is often credited to an American self-sufficiency in food, the absence of tropical disease, and unusually high-fertility rate among slaves. As a result, by the time of the Revolutionary War, already the vast majority of African slav
...