European Slavery: Horrendous, Unsanitary In The United States

From about 1525-1866, over 12 million Africans were captured and taken against their free will by Europeans in the Atlantic slave trade. The experience that the slaves had to go through was horrendous, unsanitary and over all a terrible time in their lives. The middle passage was when the slaves were taken from Africa to the Americas. After they arrived in the Americas, they were sold and forced to work for their new owners. Due to the strong force of other countries, slaves experienced dehumanization through being captured from their villages and tortured, living with awful conditions on ships and being sold against their will to Americans who they then had to work for.
African villages were invaded out of nowhere by the Europeans; the Africans
When the Europeans sold the slaves to the Americans, “The price of slaves depended on the age and condition of the slave...But also on the period of slaving and the location of the trading post” (Meltzer 33). To Europeans slavery was a business and they wanted to make as much money as they possibly could. The price for a slave depended on how old they were and how strong they were because the Americans did not want a weak, old slave working for them. After the slaves were sold, they were taken to their new masters home where they would work for them. Some slave masters were more harsh on their slaves than others were. Slaves had to work so hard everyday in the hot sun against their
It was very hard to be a slave because it “...included many different experiences: as Equiano implies, slave life in Africa was less harsh than plantation life for slaves in the Americas” (Waldstreicher 17). Some masters let their slaves have a little more freedom than others and some even taught them how to read and write. Physical labor was the hardest because it took a huge toll on the slave’s bodies which had already been through a lot on the ships. Slaves had to work long, hard hours and they did not deserve to; they were not treated like humans, they were treated like property. In most cases, slaves earned nothing for their hard work. Sometimes slaves were punished if the job they did was not exactly the way their master wanted it to be or if it was not completed in a certain amount of time. Since most slaves hated working and being enslaved, they tried to