The
rising European demand for sugar
helped create fierce competition for
slave labor on the new sugar plantations. Harvesting sugar
cane
was labor
intensive, and required large numbers of strong bodied workers.
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| From the 1500's to the 1800's, the Europeans shipped at least 12
million slaves
from Africa to the Western Hemisphere. Nearly 2 million of
these
slaves died on the voyage.
About 65 percent of the slaves were brought to the sugar colonies of
Brazil,
Cuba, Jamaica and Haiti. There the life expectancy of slaves
was
less than one year, because of overwork and malnutrition.
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| North America got
about 6 percent
of captured Africans. By 1860,
African slaves made up nearly a third of the
population of
the southern states. But only about a fourth of the whites
owned
slaves. The wealthiest planters owned most of the slaves. The
large
African labor force supported tobacco and cotton plantations. |
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