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with horrific efficiency, inviting the complicity
of anyone who stood to make a profit by its
commerce in human misery—African slave
traders; European owners and captains of
slave ships; sugar, tobacco, and cotton planta-
tion operators throughout the islands and
countries of the Western Hemisphere; and the
factory and mill owners of Europe, where the
Industrial Revolution accelerated in the late
1700s. By 1800 abolitionists in the United
States and Europe wereopenly challenging
the legality of slavery, but the institution
would not be declared illegal in all of the
Americas until late in the 19th century. The
Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution
banned slavery in the United States in 1865.
Abolition came a generation later to Cuba
(1886) and Brazil (1888).
Apart from the immeasurable suffering
caused by the slave trade, Africans brought to
the Americas against their will had literally
changed the face of the New World by 1800.
The Spanish presence in Mexico and Central
America had created people and cultures that
were distinctly mestizo, a mixture of Native
American and European elements. The racial
composition of the Caribbean was similarly
changed by the slave trade, creating people of
mixed African and European ancestry, called
mulattos. By 1800 patterns of distinctly
African speech, religion, music, art, and other
cultural elements were firmly established in
the Caribbean, South America (particularly
Brazil), and the United States.CREATING A NEW WORLD
Three tumultuous centuries of exploration,
conquest, and colonization helped much of
the world forget about Christopher Columbus
after his final voyage. In the wake of the revo-
lutions that swept the Americas in the late
1700s and early 1800s, however, people across
the Western Hemisphere began trying to
understand how they fit into the course of
world history, not simply as colonists or slaves
from other parts of the globe, but as people
with a unique heritage. Around 1800, histori-
ans in the Americas began rediscovering
Columbus, as they began discovering a new
sense of themselves.
By 1800 the patterns that would determine
life—and exploration—in the 19th-century
Americas were in place. Terrible new conflictsIn this detail from a 1780s etching, captured Africans are crammed into the hold of a British slave ship, the
Brookes,similar in design to many others used to transport slaves.(Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs
Division [LC-USZ62-44000])
(^180) B Discovery of the Americas, 1492–1800
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