Half a century before Columbus reached the Americas, a Portuguese sea captain, Antam Goncalves, made the first European landing on the west coast of sub-Saharan Africa. If he had traveled inland, Goncalvas would have encountered a rich diversity of African peoples and cultures engaged in forms of trade, spirituality and social structure.

As in Europe and parts of the Americas, most Africans tilled the soil. Their skill in farming was derived from the development of iron production, which may have begun in West Africa while Europe was still in the Stone Age. Iron implements increased agricultural production that in turn spurred population growth. By the time of European contact with the West Coast of Africa, a number of large empires, such as the Kingdom of Ghana, had risen. The development of large towns, skillfully designed buildings, elaborate sculpture and metalwork, long-distance commerce and complex socio-political systems (that included slavery) marked the Ghanaian kingdom.

The Atlantic Slave Trade

The circumstances that gave rise to the Underground Railroad were based in the transportation of Africans to North America as part of the Atlantic Slave Trade, along the path known as the Middle Passage. Almost five hundred years ago ships captained by Europeans began transporting millions of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas. This massive population movement helped create the African Diaspora – or dispersal of Africans to the New World.

A large majority of slaving activities took place along the West African coast, chiefly between the Senegal River to the north and the Bight of Biafra in the south, though some slaving expeditions stretched around Cape Horn to today’s Tanzania. Slaving forts, such as James Fort, Sierre Leone and Cape Coast were a vital feature of the slave trade, and served as a central clearinghouse where slavers could exchange material trade goods for human chattel. Thirty-six of the forty-two known slaving fortresses were located in Ghana. Aside from Ghana, Africans were shipped from eight African coastal regions, later dubbed the "slave coast," including Senegambia, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast and Liberia region, Gold Coast, Bight of Benin, Bight of Biafra, Central Africa, and Southeast Africa (from the Cape of Good Hope to the Cape of Delgado, including Madagascar).

Thus, the slave trade had the greatest impact upon central and western African. West Africa supplied 3/5ths of the slaves for exportation between 1701-1810. Existing evidence indicates that half of the kidnapped Africans were exported to South America, 40 percent to the Caribbean Islands, 7 percent to British North America, and 3 percent to Central America. Overall, at least twelve million Africans -- numbers vary widely and no estimate can be made with certainty -- were kidnapped, sold into slavery in Africa and shipped to the Americas from 1450 to 1850. This figure reflects only the numbers of Africans exported to the New World who arrived alive. Perhaps one-third of all kidnapped Africans perished before being forced onboard a slave vessel, and perhaps another third died on the voyage across the Atlantic.

Following a triangular route between Africa, the New World and Europe, slave traders from European countries delivered Africans in exchange for products such as rum, tobacco, and especially sugar, the products European consumers desired, and to fill labor shortages in the Americas. African kingdoms, eager for European trade goods, warred against each other to gather captives to supply a portion of the Africans demanded by European slavers.

Slavery enters North America

Historically, the entry of Africans into British North America is dated from the 1619 sale of 20 Africans from a Dutch ship in Virginia. For the first few decades the status of Africans in the colonies was uncertain. Some were treated as indentured servants and freed after a term of service. Some were kept in servitude because their labor was invaluable. It is difficult to discern when race became a factor in enslavement, but by the 1640s, court decisions began to reflect a different standard for Africans than for white colonists, and to accept the notion of lifetime bondage for African Americans. In the 1660s, Virginia decreed that a child would follow the condition of the mother, thus making lifetime servitude inheritable. This legal standing soon became the standard wherever slavery existed.

In a scene replayed innumerable times, slave traders displayed Africans on the trading block. As one freedom seeker testified,

"He [the slave trader] would make us hold up our heads, walk briskly back and forth, while customers would feel up our hands and bodies, turn us about, ask us what we could do, make us open our mouths and show our teeth…Sometimes a man or woman…was taken, stripped, and inspected more minutely."

This indignity was thrust upon African men, women and children each time they were sold, not only upon arrival in the New World.

Slavery becomes firmly entrenched

Though the United States withdrew from the international slave trade in 1808, the internal slave trade between slaveholding states became a multi-million dollar industry during the nineteenth century. Between 1830 and 1860 an estimated 300,000 Virginia African Americans were sold further south. Many slaveholding states attempted to regulate this trade, though efforts were poorly enforced and usually short-lived. Further, the reason for outlawing this trade was far from humanitarian. Slaveholders in the Deep South had a fear of a rapid increase of "unmanageable," African Americans shipped south. Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana all banned the importation of the enslaved via interstate trade after the 1831 Nat Turner Revolt. However, all three states permitted interstate trade again during the profitable cotton trade of the 1850s.

Despite the Congressional interdiction on U.S. participation in the international slave trade, many thousands of kidnapped Africans continued to be smuggled to North American well after 1808 ban. Sabine Lake, in eastern Texas, was a focal point in this illicit trade during the nineteenth century. Many of the Africans brought to Sabine Lake were kidnapped British freemen from Barbados, African indentured servants from the same region, or were kidnapped from Spanish slave ships. James Bowie, later of Alamo fame, realized a $65,000 profit from illegally transporting and selling 1,500 Africans from Sabine lake into Louisiana.

Slave traders like Bowie purchased African Americans from privateers like Jean Lafitte. Privateers would capture Spanish slave ships, imprison the Africans in slave pens, such as on Lafitte’s Galveston Island, Texas, stronghold, then sell them to the highest bidder. American slavers continued the profitable traffic in Africans until the end of the Civil War. As late as 1865, the American slave ship "Huntress" was known to have escaped the African coast with a human cargo, though evidence indicates this ship probably landed in Cuba. The United States Navy maintained a Slaving Squadron off the coast of West Africa with the intention of intercepting slave ships and arresting captains, but these vessels were often obsolete and manned by incompetent officers and crew.

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