BLACK SOCIAL HISTORY: sLAVERY IN SOUTH CAROLINA :

The slave traders discovered that Carolina planters had very specific ideas concerning the ethnicity of the slaves they bought no less a merchant than Henry Laurens wrote. In other words slaves from the region of Senegambia and present day Ghana were prefered. At the other end of the scale were the Calabar or Ibo or Bite slaves from the Niger Delta who Carolina planters would purchase only if no other were available in the middle were those from the windward coast and Angola. Carolina planters developed a vision of the idea slave - tall, healthy. male, between the ages of 14 and 18 free from blemishes and as dark as possible. For these ideal slaves Carolina planters in the eighteenth century paid on average, between 100 and 200 sterling. In todays money that is between $11,630 and $23,000.

Many of these slaves were almost immediately put to work in South Carolina rice fields, there was no harder or more unhealthy work possible.  In fact Carolina rice fields is a death warrant for black slaves as malaria and other diseases took a toll on the slaves and there off springs particularly the infants as feebleness at birth and mothers own chronic malaria made constant death among the slaves one of the worst death rates in the slave states of America.