If demography is destiny, the Atlantic Slave Trade transformed the destiny of the entire Western Hemisphere. Between 1500 and 1800, five times as many Africans as Europeans were carried to the New World. Thanks largely to the recent work of British historians, who have created a digital database that provides the most accurate account ever assembled of the African diaspora, we now know much more precisely the scale and size of the Atlantic Slave Trade and where the enslaved Africans ended up.
Between 1550 and 1860, European vessels embarked with 12.5 million African captives and landed 10.7 million in the New World.* During the notorious Middle Passage, 1.8 million enslaved Africans died from some combination of disease, malnutrition, mistreatment, and suicide. Of the 10.7 million survivors, 4.8 million went to South America, 4.7 million went to the Caribbean, 800,000 went to Central America, and 400,000 went to North America. (An additional 60,000 entered North America indirectly from the British West Indies.) In effect, only a small percentage of the enslaved Africans, about 4%, were deposited in the future United States.
As a result, the Southern Hemisphere was destined to become a multiracial society including a population with African origins. The Northern Hemisphere was destined to become a predominately white society with a substantial African minority.
*Another African diaspora in the other direction was occurring at the same time, even larger than the Atlantic Slave Trade. Between fourteen and sixteen million Africans were carried east, across the Sahara, over the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. Africa was plundered from the west by Christians and from the east by Muslims.
-Joseph J. Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding
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