Building a DBQ on the Atlantic Slave Trade: Which Documents Belong?
A teacher is assembling a document-based question on the Atlantic slave trade for a 60-minute essay. Students must use at least four of seven documents. The teacher has three candidate documents. Document A is an excerpt from a 1685 ship captain's log: it records 312 enslaved Africans embarked and 278 arrived, notes that the crew lost nine men to disease, and describes the survivors as 'cargo in good order.' Document B is a 1790 abolitionist pamphlet that describes the Middle Passage as a 'scene of horror' and gives a mortality figure of one in three but cites no source. Document C is a 1930s oral history in which a descendant recalls a family story about a great-grandmother who survived the crossing and 'never spoke of the ship.' The teacher worries that Document A's language is dehumanizing, that Document B's number may be exaggerated, and that Document C is separated from the event by generations. The class must still learn to reason from evidence.
1. Evaluate the usefulness and limitations of each document for a question about the experience of the Middle Passage.
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Document A is strong for scale and mortality: 312 embarked and 278 arrived implies about 34 deaths, roughly 11 percent on that voyage. It is weak for experience because the captain's phrase 'cargo in good order' dehumanizes the captives and reveals the ship's commercial logic, not their feelings. Document B is useful for abolitionist argument and for publicizing horror, but its one-in-three figure is uncited and its purpose is persuasion, so students must ask what route, years, and definition it uses. Document C is useful for memory and family silence, not for direct experience; it is separated by generations and shaped by what a descendant chose to repeat. Together they show why no single document can answer the question: the log counts, the pamphlet campaigns, and the oral history remembers.
2. Explain how the teacher could pair two of the documents to help students test a claim. Identify the claim and the reasoning.
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Pair A and B to test the claim that Middle Passage mortality was about one in three. Document A gives a specific voyage with about 11 percent mortality, which does not prove the pamphlet wrong but shows that mortality varied by voyage, route, and year. Students can calculate A's rate, then ask whether B's figure is a rough average, a worst case, or a rhetorical rounding. The reasoning is comparative: one case cannot establish a general rate, and a pamphlet's uncited figure cannot either. Students should seek the pamphlet's source, compare other logs, and distinguish between mortality during the crossing and mortality in the first year after arrival. The pair teaches that testing a claim requires defining the measure and checking multiple cases.
3. The teacher is considering dropping Document A because of its dehumanizing language. Recommend a decision and justify it.
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Keep Document A, but frame it carefully. Dropping it would remove primary evidence of how slave traders thought and wrote, and it would make the dehumanization of the trade harder to see. The phrase 'cargo in good order' is not incidental; it is evidence of a commercial worldview that treated people as goods. The teacher should tell students that the document's language is offensive, explain who wrote it and why, and ask students to analyze the language rather than adopt it. The lesson should not ask students to imagine the captain's feelings. Used with B and C, A lets students compare the ledger's perspective with abolitionist rhetoric and descendants' memory. The ethical risk is real, but sanitizing the archive is a worse historical lesson.