Spirits of the Passage: The Story of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
The Frazier History Museum
Through June 16
There are myriad exhibits celebrating the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. But "Spirits of the Passage: The Story of the Transatlantic Slave Trade," at the Frazier History Museum, has taken a different tack, looking at the business of slavery before, during and (somewhat) after the Proclamation.
Using maps, dioramas, informative panels, audio stations and artifacts in 4,000 square feet of gallery space, the special exhibit tells this story. The show is curated in partnership with the Mel Fisher Maritime Museum in Key West, Fla., so many of the original objects, such as shackles and other hardware of the slave trade, have been recovered from sunken slave ships discovered by the famed explorer.
The show opens by explaining the politics and culture of western Africa before the Europeans arrived to trade in raw materials, luxury items and, eventually, human beings. Focusing almost exclusively on Congo, Dahomey (Benin) and Calabar (Nigeria), we're told how these African empires were primarily polytheistic, fought and traded with one another, formed alliances, arranged marriages and, yes, took slaves among themselves as spoils of war. Among the notable objects here are two hand-carved Mbari figures and a headdress made of glass beads and cotton.
When the Europeans showed up, they brought Christianity with them—the Congo king converted in 1491—and a strong need for cheap labor to work the lands in the New World. In 1493, Pope Alexander VI divided the world between the Spanish and the Portuguese, with the latter given the rights to all the African continent had to offer, including the slave trade.
The museum hits its stride when it gets into the details of human trafficking. What's refreshing about this exhibit—and makes it well worth seeing, no matter how uncomfortable it sometimes may make you feel—is the curators' dispassionate examination of the slave trade. Was it horrible and cruel? Of course it was. But rather than look at slavery through the 21st-century prism of a more enlightened society, this exhibit presents the facts, stripped of any moral or political commentary, and looks at the business of the slave trade.
It explains that the Americas were not the only world market for slave labor in the 15th and 16th centuries. The exhibit, using maps, journals and ship logs, shows how Muslims sold Christians—an estimated 1.5 million Europeans—into slavery in North Africa.
Another central theme is that slavery was not a product of bigotry, but of business needs. Europeans required vast amounts of cheap labor in the Americas. Ship captains needed a well-paying cargo to haul back to the Americas after having delivered sugar and tobacco to Europe. And African kingdoms—themselves teeming with slave labor and very much active participants—needed a place to get rid of the strongest and most unruly among the slave class, lest they foment rebellion.
The commercial mind-set of the endeavor is explained best in a panel about Capt. James Smith, one of the few slavers convicted of violating U.S. and international law. When asked in 1857 why he continued to haul slaves from Africa to the sugar plantations, he simply said: "My brig cost $13,000 to fit her out completely. My last cargo to Cuba was worth $220,000."
One display case, called "The Price of a Life," brings the whole business down to a microeconomic scale, and features perhaps the most disturbing artifacts. Using historical prices in Calabar in 1699-1700, and objects recovered from a shipwreck, it explains exactly what a human life was worth. An iron bar, about 12 inches long by 2 inches wide, brought nine to 13 slaves at market; a four-pound pewter basin, 10 to 14 souls; and a gun, only 1½ to 2½ permanently indentured servants. There are also weights and measures from about 1700 that were used to sell human beings by the pound.
The slavers tried to keep their costs of business down, feeding the slaves just enough to keep them healthy for the auction block in the Americas. And while most every ship had a doctor, he wasn't there to heal the sick—30% or more of the slaves died en route. Rather, he was there to write up the death certificates so the ship's owner could file his insurance claims.
England, at the center of the slave trade for decades, is estimated to have profited the most. And while there was a strong abolitionist movement in England, it was the Industrial Revolution, and its mechanization that did away with the need for vast amounts of cheap labor in the colonies, that eventually turned England against the slave trade. The museum notes that the slave trade was abolished in the English colonies in 1807 and in the U.S. in 1808; slavery itself was outlawed by England in 1838 and by the U.S. in 1865.
All of this is told chillingly well here. There's a re-creation of a slave ship's hold, complete with a display of shackles. But, as a panel explains, it is impossible to give visitors a real sense of what it was like because the decks of slave ships, containing anywhere from 200 to 500 people, were often no more than a now inconceivable 18 inches high.
Mr. Yost is a writer in Chicago.