Restore the People to the Record

Your starting point

Explain what records of the Middle Passage reveal and obscure about enslaved people.

The Middle Passage was the forced transatlantic transportation of enslaved African people to the Americas. It was part of a system of violence and exploitation that connected traders, states, investors, and plantation economies. Enslaved people were human beings with families, languages, knowledge, and lives; commercial records often obscured that humanity by treating them as property.

Many surviving shipping and financial records were created by those operating or regulating the trade. They can document routes, institutions, and transactions, but their categories reflect the enslavers’ purposes. Accounts by formerly enslaved people, evidence of resistance, and community histories can help address perspectives that commercial records omit. Colonial laws helped build racialized slavery. In Virginia, a 1662 law made a child’s status as enslaved or free depend on the mother’s status. Within this developing system, children of enslaved women inherited enslavement rather than choosing a labor arrangement. Legal categories made oppression enforceable; a law’s existence did not make its denial of freedom just.

This is a source investigation, not a simulation of captivity or a competition about survival. You will examine paraphrased descriptions of records, distinguish forced migration from voluntary movement, and write a respectful explanation. No task asks you to price a person, optimize a slave voyage, or pretend that completing an activity recreates an enslaved person’s experience.

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