How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

by Clint Smith

The British in New York became increasingly dependent on the transatlantic slave trade to find new workers, importing an average of 150 enslaved people each year from Africa and the West Indies. According to historian David Brion Davis, around 40 percent of households in British Manhattan owned enslaved people. But the mortality rate of Black people in New York skyrocketed, as enslaved people were made to work harder than ever before and as an increasing number of Africans with little defense against new diseases were brought to the New World. Even before they arrived on the shores of New York, the death toll was staggering. According to historian Jill Lepore, for every one hundred people taken from Africa, only about sixty-four would survive the trip from the region’s interior to the coast. Of those sixty-four, around forty-eight would survive the weeks-long journey across the Atlantic. Of those forty-eight who stepped off the ship in New York Harbor, only twenty-eight to thirty would survive the first three to four years in the colony. Berlin and Harris referred to New York at this time as “a death factory for black people.”