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expanded into these areas as well. The Portuguese, who settled in Brazil, brought slaves to the Americas from their colonies in Africa. During the sixteenth century,

a trade triangle formed. White Europeans would transport African slaves across the Atlantic to the Americas. They exchanged them in the various colonies for gold and silver, or for valuable raw goods such as

DID YOU KNOW ? The first recorded slave revolt in the Americas began on Christmas day in 1521, when slaves belonging to Diego Colón, the son of Christopher Columbus, rose up on the island of Hispaniola. The rebellion lasted one week before it was suppressed.

sugar, tobacco, or cotton. These were shipped to Europe, where they were sold for a profit, or traded for finished goods that African chiefs wanted. The ships then returned to Africa, where they traded the desired goods to acquire more slaves. From the sixteenth through the nineteenth century, more than 12 million Africans made the “middle passage”—the trip across the Atlantic Ocean—in crowded slave ships. A relatively small percentage—about 450,000 Africans—were sold to the British colonies in North America, between 1619 and 1808. At first, these unwilling Africans were not considered slaves; instead, they were indentured servants , required to work for seven years—just like poor whites who had been sent to solve the British colonies’ labor shortage. Within a generation, however, a system of permanent slavery emerged in the British colonies. In 1641, the Massachusetts Bay Colony became the first to legalize slavery. Other colonies soon followed Massachusetts’s lead, enacting laws that legalized and regulated slavery.

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Fighting Back Against Slavery