The Welsh and American Slavery

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• The Slave Trade
  • Whose ships were Used?
  • Who bought Slaves?
  • Captain Thomas Phillips
  • The Pwllheli Ship
  • The Second Middle Passage
  • The Slaves
  • Slave Owners
  • Abolitionists
  • Places to visit

The Slave Trade

The Second "Middle Passage"

The "Middle Passage" was the term for transporting slaves across the Atlantic.

Many of them would have been seized far away from the sea and forced to walk to the European ships that waited for them on the coast of Africa.

After reaching America, they could expect another long journey from the harbour to the plantation.

So this is the reason for describing the journey across the Atlantic as the middle passage. It is difficult to imagine the atrocious conditions on that journey which brought half a million Africans to America.

The second "Middle Passage"

But between 1790 and 1860 over a million slaves were sold from their homes in the Upper South (Virginia and Maryland) to work in the cotton and sugar plantations which were increasing towards the west. Due to the length of this new slave journey, and because so many died on the way, people started to refer to it as the second "middle passage"

Depression

Crops such as tobacco drained the nutrients from the land over the years and the plantations became less productive.

The agricultural depression was so great in Virginia in 1832 that consideration was given to releasing the slaves over a period of time, as had already been done in New York and Pennsylvania. The proposal was rejected by 73 votes to 58.

Even if agriculture was experiencing a downward trend in Virginia, it was on the up in the Western states, and so the slaves could be sold there rather than released.

Trauma

Families were split, and people were uprooted from their home areas...once again. If the secret routes of the "underground railroad" ran towards the north with its "stations" and "conductors", there were other, more public routes in the slave states which ran towards the west, with their "trader yards" and "slave pens". After the plantations, this new trade in human beings was the most profitable trade in the Southern states.