A Healthy Skepticism "I told them how I saw a sea of a million black men, and yet just think, 10 to 20 times that many died on the slave ships to America." (10/22/95, D1) The claim that as many as 20 million slaves died on the infamous Middle Passage has been in the air recently. It was, unfortunately, only a matter of time before it showed up in The Oregonian. It belongs to the same class of unquestioned claim as the recent assertion that wife beatings went way up on Super Bowl Sunday. It's a rhetorical point that has innate appeal to those who would use it for rhetorical purposes. But like the Super Bowl claim, it is pure fiction. We should always be skeptical of such claims. And we should avoid passing them along without correction, even in direct quotes. The figure is immediately suspect because it is so large relative to world populations during the 150 years when the slave trade thrived. At the time of the Revolution the largest American city, Boston, had only 50,000 residents. In 1810, two years after the legal importation of slaves into the United States ended, the total American population had reached only 7.2 million. And only 1.2 million of those were slaves. So a figure of 10-to-20 million deaths on the Middle Passage is way out of reasonable proportion from the start. In fact, the African American Almanac reports that the best estimates of TOTAL slaves brought to all points in the Americas -- not just the United States -- was 10 to 20 million. The best estimate of how many died aboard the slave ships was 15 percent -- 2 to 3 million. That's still a terrible number, of course. And this observation is in no way intended to demean it. The point is that a newspaper should get its numbers right. And it should never uncritically accept numbers promoted by ANY interest group in the promotion of ANY cause.
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