If you are like me, you have grown up hearing terrible stories about the African slaves who were captured and transported in brutal slave ships to America.   You may even have thought that all of the slaves were taken from Africa directly to the United States, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. 

By examining shipping records, scholars and historians have a reasonably accurate count of what happened. In the years preceding 1866, approximately 12,500,000 Africans were shipped via the Middle Passage from Africa.  Some 2,000,000 souls died in transit.  Only a small percentage, about 6% of the total, or just under 400,000 slaves arrived in North America.   So, what happened to the other 10,300,000 slaves? 

They went to South America and the Caribbean. Brazil alone received almost 5,000,000.    Slavery wasn’t abolished in Cuba until 1886, and in Brazil until 1888, some 23 years after it was officially ended in the U.S.

It turns out we white Americans were just a small part of the problem, but what we lacked in volume, we enthusiastically made for in cruelty and hatred.

Go America.