Second middle passage
As Second Middle Passage (Engl. Second Middle Passage ) is in the history of the United States after the Revolutionary War onset (1775-1783) deportation of hundreds of thousands of African-American slaves from the American northern states in the South called. The background to this forced migration movement , in the course of which many of these slaves were separated from their relatives, was the gradual relocation of the plantation economy from the Upper South of the USA to the Lower and Deep South and the abolition of slavery in the northern states.
The expression was coined by the American historian Ira Berlin . In his work on slavery in the United States Berlin compares this migration movement with the transatlantic slave trade , for the English, the term "Middle Passage" ( Middle Passage ) is common. For the slaves, whose lives were shaped by the Second Middle Passage, Berlin also created the term “ migrant generations ”.
History and details
The Second Middle Passage arose from the "Georgia Trade", which began shortly after the American Revolutionary War, in the course of which thousands of slaves from the Chesapeake region , from Virginia , North Carolina and South Carolina to the south (initially mainly Georgia ) and to West ( Kentucky and Tennessee ) were abducted, but this was interrupted in 1812 by the British-American War .
In the further course of the 19th century, the domestic slave trade developed into the most profitable branch of the southern state economy, which was only surpassed by plantation production. In the second decade of the 19th century alone, around 120,000 slaves were deported west and south from the Chesapeake region and the Virginia lowlands; in the 1830s it was almost 300,000 and again in the 1850s almost 250,000. With its extensive use of transportation, finance and publicity, the slave trade was one of the most modern industries in the south. He created his own language with terms like prime hands , bucks , breeding wenches and fancy girls . The infrastructure of this branch of industry comprised a network of stations, warehouses and auction houses along the transport routes, where slaves and slave traders could stay overnight and slaves could be sold.
A small proportion of the slaves traveled by sea, mostly between Norfolk and New Orleans . However, the great majority of slaves covered the distance by land and on foot. Due to the exertion, mortality was high and many slaves also committed suicide. Only gradually did the slave traders improve the infrastructure and transport the slaves on flat boats , steamers and later also by rail. Nevertheless, Berlin characterized these slave tours as mourning processions, the involuntary participants of which were largely homesick, lonely and demoralized.
A key difference between the Transatlantic Passage and the Second Middle Passage was that the slaves who experienced the latter shared a common language and could easily communicate with one another.
For the affected slaves, the Second Middle Passage was an unprecedented tragedy. Ira Berlin estimates that a third of the slaves who were married lost their partner as a result of deportation; a fifth of all children under the age of 14 have been separated from at least one parent. In the slave-exporting regions (especially Delaware , Maryland , Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina) the proportion of the enslaved population not only fell, but also its composition changed, because a disproportionately large number of old people and a disproportionately large number of women remained behind.
Individual evidence
literature
- Ira Berlin: Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America , Belknap Press, new edition 2000, ISBN 0674002113
- Ira Berlin: Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves , Cambridge, London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003, ISBN 0-674-01061-2
Web links
All the web links listed are in English: