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There's something of a popular narrative - one that keeps appearing in people's attempts to answer this question here - surrounding Caribbean slavery, and it's one that I tend to call the 'death camp' narrative. The death camp narrative is based around the idea that slavery in the Caribbean was uniquely horrific compared to slavery in the United States, which is held to somehow be a more benign and gentle institution. Slavery in the United States is portrayed as being harsh and evil, but paling in comparison to the plantations of the Caribbean, which are held to be almost like extermination camps where people essentially are worked to death incessantly and relentlessly. This is a narrative that has huge traction in American popular culture and history - and it's also one that's really just not very accurate. There's a kernel of truth to it, but it's much, much more complex than the death camp narrative implies. Before I get to that though, I'll talk a little bit about the broader relationship between slavery between and within the two regions.

Slavery was it was practised in the New World was not a monolithic system. It is complex, multi-faceted and characterised by remarkable variety and variation from context to context. In broad terms, scholars tend to draw distinctions between the systems as they were introduced to the New World by European colonial powers - that is to say, French slavery is distinct from Spanish slavery, which is distinct from British slavery, which is distinct from Dutch slavery and so on. Although each of these systems share common defining features that allow us to group them all under the heading of 'New World slavery' - most importantly that they justify the ownership of Human beings as property on the basis of racial prejudice - they are distinct and studied separately. But scholars also draw a distinction between slavery as it was practised in the independent United States and the British Caribbean. Both obviously begin as part of the same colonial power structure, but by the time of American independence, we can draw real distinctions between the two - distinctions which become particularly pronounced in the 19th century.

The defining distinction that is usually made in popular discussions about slavery is that in the United States, the slave population reproduced itself - as in, there was natural population growth each year - whereas in the British Caribbean, the slave population was in decline from year to year, slavery only being sustainable because of the constant importation of new slaves from Africa. This certainly reflects a demographic reality: only about 400,000 slaves from Africa made to it to the United States directly in the entire history of the transatlantic slave trade, compared to an astounding 2.3million people who arrived in the British Caribbean (and it is worth pointing out that the trade to both was abolished in the same year, making a meaningful comparison possible). Despite that, the United States in 1860 had 4million slaves - about 700,000 more people than the total population of the West Indies Federation (a short-lived country made up of most of Britain's former Caribbean colonies) had one hundred years later. So clearly, there's something fundamentally different between the experience of slavery in the United States and the British Caribbean.

The death camp narrative generally holds that this is because of the unique and extreme cruelty of Caribbean slavery, using slave labour in the most horrendously exploitative way people, working people to death and then replacing them with new slaves from Africa quickly. The reason for this difference is generally attributed to the fact that Caribbean slavery was dominated by plantations growing and harvesting sugar as a cash crop. The farming of sugar is an intense and exhausting practice compared to growing, say, coffee, and also was for most of slavery's history and intensely profitable one - encouraging slave owners to maximise how much sugar they could grow. But when we look at contemporary plantation records, we don't find much evidence at all for the idea that these sugar plantations were comparable to death camps. By the 1830s, sugar estates in Jamaica had a mortality rate 35 in every 1,000 - in other words, 3.5% of the work force would die each year. But Jamaica stands out in the British Caribbean because it wasn't what we call a sugar monoculture, or monopoly, colony; only have of its slave population worked on sugar estates year round. On plantations and farms that weren't growing sugar, we find the death rate still averaged 2.3%.

Both of those death rates are extremely high; the population death rate in the general population of the United States is about 0.8% in the modern world. But in the 18th and 19th centuries, mortality rates were significantly higher in the western world in general. So it's very important to keep this in perspective: yes, the death rate on sugar estates was dramatically higher than it should have been for the time period, and this does reflect the sheer intensity with which people were worked, but they're also clearly far from being death camps. Crucially to your question, when we look to slavery in the United States as a point of comparison, the death rate we observe in Jamaican plantation records is by no means exceptional. We find that where US plantations were also farming crops that required intense labour to maximise profit, the death rate is comparably high to the British Caribbean's sugar estates. There is evidence, for instance, that rice plantations in the southern United States - rice had been grown in places like Carolina since the colonial period - may have had higher mortality rates than Jamaican sugar estates in excess of 4%. In contrast, the mortality rate in mid-19th century Virginia - a state where cash crop farming was less intense, not being focused on goods like cotton or rice - has been estimated at about 1.8%. I should point out at this point that all of these figures are probably marginal under-estimates of the actual death count, but still broadly useful.

So what historians have really found is that there is considerable diversity in slave treatment, at least in terms of mortality, based not so much on where a slave lived so much as what kind of work they engaged in. Different crops require different intensities of labour, and it may well actually be that whilst overall farming in the Caribbean was more intense than in the United States, the worst estates for slave mortality may have in fact been American rice plantations. The area where we find the most important distinction to be made is child mortality. Contrary to popular belief, the slave population in the Caribbean did naturally reproduce itself, and building a vibrant family and community life were just as much as part of enslaved resistance in the Caribbean as they were in the US. In 1830s Jamaica, plantation records indicate a birth rate of 23.6 per 1,000 people across the island among slaves, a figure that only falls to 22.7 per 1,000 on sugar estates. In other words, on non-sugar estates the slave population was in fact increasing naturally.

On plantations that grew crops requiring unusually intense labour to maximise profitability, we find the least concern for the well-being of slave children. Spending time providing for mothers and children is, in essence, seen as a waste of resources by owners and overseers. Although women were treated especially terribly under slavery in general, pregnant women and women with very young children could generally expect better treatment on plantations growing crops like coffee, tobacco, cherry pepper or food for domestic consumption, where there was less urgency to get women back to work in the fields as soon as possible (although across all plantations there is variation depending on the time of the year; harvesting season was usually the worst time to be a pregnant woman). On estates where demand for labour was intense and exhausting, little time would be given for the relief of pregnant women or working mothers - in fact, in many cases women in those circumstances would be given only lighter work. With less time and energy to care properly for their children, they were especially at risk of dying from disease, malnutrition or accident. The most dangerous time in any slave's life was infancy, and that was especially true for infants on estates growing crops like sugar or rice.

This leads me in turn to focus on another aspect of popular history concerning the difference between slavery in the two contexts. Eugene Genovese famously advocated the view that American slaveholders subscribed to a philosophy that he termed 'paternalism', and that this led to significantly improved circumstances for slaves in the United States compared to the British Caribbean. According to this perspective, southern white slave owners in the United States developed a complex and sophisticated ideology that combined white supremacy with a flawed, but somewhat genuine, concern for the well-being of their slaves. Southern slave-owners saw themselves as fathers at the head of an extended family, with responsibility to care for and provide for their slaves who were held to be naive and child-like. They argued that slavery was a moral good because without it, African Americans weren't fit to live free and independent lives - they were too unintelligent, too easily gave in to temptation and too unruly. It was in their best interests to be enslaved, and white slave owners had a moral responsibility towards them. Genovese argued that this philosophy served as a check and balance on exploitation and abuse by slave owners, encouraging them to treat their slaves in a more gentle and benign fashion.

Some of the slave plantations in the Caribbean were notoriously harsh. The average lifespan of a slave on a sugar plantation in Jamaica was only two years. On the other hand, in Virginia slaves lived long enough to have families and children, to the point where Virginia was able to export slaves to other colonies. Slaves in Georgia and the Carolinas lived under harsher conditions than in Virginia, but not so harsh as was on the sugar plantations in the Caribbean. Also there was still slavery in the Northern colonies; however the North did not have the harsh plantation-style slavery due to the agricultural differences.

It is true that slaves in the American colonies were threatened with being sent to the Caribbean for severe disobedience or attempting to escape slavery. However this was not a likely outcome - they would more likely be sold within the colonies.

There was a great fear in the Southern colonies of a slave revolt. One of the main factors in the Southern states' willingness to ban the importation of slaves was the fear that the slave population would outnumber the white population in some areas. The violent (and successful) slave revolt in Haiti especially shocked the South. As a result, slaves suspected of rebellion were dealt with very harshly - public lynching, etc.

Source - "The Slave Trade" by Hugh Thomas (1997)