By 1776, South Carolina was the number one exporter of rice to England, the number one supplier of salted meat to the Caribbean, and had the highest per capita income in the British colonies.19 And the colony that had intended to recruit white people to grow citrus was now majority Black. In the five years before the American Revolution, South Carolina had imported more enslaved Africans than all the other ports in all the other American colonies combined.20 Over the life of America’s legalized transatlantic human trafficking system, 40 percent of this country’s human imports passed through
...more