Slave vessels dispatched from Northwest Europe were larger and more heavily armed than their Iberian and American counterparts. The barricado, a heavy wooden barrier located midship, separating off men-slaves, was a central feature not found among slavers in the South Atlantic. The Portuguese operated vessels in which many crew were Black, including some enslaved. These were able to talk to captives in their own language and provide some assurance that they would not be eaten on arrival and would have some familiarity with their new environmrnt. Rebellions of slaves on Portuguese vessels were unusual. The Portuguese/Brazilians also did very little ship trading. Instead, they used bulking centers on land to hold slaves prior to their embarkation en masse. This reduced the time a captive would spend on board, which was already shorter than those of their Northwestern European rivals because of the shorter voyage times to Brazil from most parts of Africa. The Portuguese were thus the most efficient of all national slave traders. The bulking centers in Upper Guinea and Angola were connected to trade routes through to the interior and manned by lançados, usually half-African and half-European. The shipping part of their system was adopted by all slave traders in the nineteenth century.

This chapter centers on a plot by three generations of slaves, led by the elderly matriarch, to murder their owner. This Virginia enslaved family used an ax, shovels, and fence posts to end their owner’s abuse.

This chapter examines the case of a teenaged term slave named Cloe who used her hands to strangle her owners’ young daughters a week apart in rural early nineteenth-century Pennsylvania.

Enslaved mothers appear as pastoral figures within depictions of the Caribbean plantation as an imagined idyll in the works of George Robertson and James Hakewill. Yet planters’ journals and histories also emphasize the need for the productive and reproductive labour of enslaved women. This essay examines Caribbean images of enslaved women and their children to trace the ‘past in the present’ (Christina Sharpe) as slavery’s legacies persist in the US. Black women in the US are 243 per cent more likely to die from pregnancy or childbirth-related causes than white women and black babies are twice as likely to die in their first year as white babies. By analysing the range of incompatible discourses that constructed and consumed the slave mother’s body in early Caribbean slavery, this essay exposes the persistence of such devastating discursive forces in the present that have real impacts on the lives of black mothers and their children.