Caribbean and South American slaves had far higher mortality than US slaves, probably due to climate and the nature of sugar production. It's why the US only received 4% of the slave trade - there wasn't the same need for replacing the dead.
In other respects, the US did take racial ideology to greater lengths.
Caribbean and South American slavery differed in some important respects from the North American colonies.
In the first place, none of those places ever made any claim to respecting democratic rights. But they also didn't forbid survivals of African cultural practices- in particular, they didn't ban the drum. Whereas the North Americans did (except for New Orleans, with its Spanish/French heritage.) The Europeans of Latin America didn't make nearly as much of a big deal over interracial relationships, compared with the North American colonists. Also, the wild geography of much of Central and South America favored the ability of plantation workers to escape into the untamed countryside, either living on their own, establishing autonomous communities, or amalgamating with indigenous tribes. This happened in the North American South, too- runaways were able to find refuge in wild, inhospitable areas like the Everglades. That's where the Seminole Indian tribe lived; the Seminoles were multiracial ("Seminole" is a mispronunciation of the Spanish word "cimarron, "runaway.") This happened with some other North American tribes, too. But not to nearly the same extent. The physical geography is different. The challenges were different. It's difficult to answer a question like "who had it worse" as a group. To a great extent, humans succeed or fail individually, as a combination of luck, local circumstances, and their own resourcefulness. Although if you're enslaved, you typically can't succeed but so much, and there is no shortage of ways to fail.
The enslaved peoples of the Caribbean colonies of Jamaica and Santo Domingo (now Haiti and the DR) won their freedom as a result of armed rebellions. This was followed by Great Britain abolishing slavery in its colonies, and a move by the UK for an international treaty to ban the slave trade- which was signed by the US.
And that's when things got weird, in the early decades of the 19th century. Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin to separate the seeds out of cotton bolls, and suddenly cotton became the big labor intensive cash crop- much more so than rice, indigo, tobacco, and sugar cane. That increased the need for a large slave population very soon after the treaty forbidding the international trade. That's when the laws were passed to keep African Americans and their descendants in perpetual slavery. Some of the southern plantation states already had laws to forbid the teaching of literacy and other self-sufficiency skills, and to restrict the movements of African slaves; they followed that up with bans on manumission- in many places it was no longer possible for an African to buy their way out of slavery as part of a contract- they had to be freed by the person who owned them.. And domestic slave breeding began to be a big business, in order to replace the supply of human chattel formerly imported from Africa. Free black people were vulnerable to being captured and enslaved- it didn't happen often, but it did happen. The worst features of slavery began to loom larger and draw bolder lines of separation between enslaved black people and free white people, the more the pro-slavery faction sought to entrench it as an accepted and permanent feature of American society. Which eventually led to the American Civil War.
Caribbean and South American slaves had far higher mortality than US slaves, probably due to climate and the nature of sugar production. It's why the US only received 4% of the slave trade - there wasn't the same need for replacing the dead.
In other respects, the US did take racial ideology to greater lengths.
Caribbean and South American slavery differed in some important respects from the North American colonies.
In the first place, none of those places ever made any claim to respecting democratic rights. But they also didn't forbid survivals of African cultural practices- in particular, they didn't ban the drum. Whereas the North Americans did (except for New Orleans, with its Spanish/French heritage.) The Europeans of Latin America didn't make nearly as much of a big deal over interracial relationships, compared with the North American colonists. Also, the wild geography of much of Central and South America favored the ability of plantation workers to escape into the untamed countryside, either living on their own, establishing autonomous communities, or amalgamating with indigenous tribes. This happened in the North American South, too- runaways were able to find refuge in wild, inhospitable areas like the Everglades. That's where the Seminole Indian tribe lived; the Seminoles were multiracial ("Seminole" is a mispronunciation of the Spanish word "cimarron, "runaway.") This happened with some other North American tribes, too. But not to nearly the same extent. The physical geography is different. The challenges were different. It's difficult to answer a question like "who had it worse" as a group. To a great extent, humans succeed or fail individually, as a combination of luck, local circumstances, and their own resourcefulness. Although if you're enslaved, you typically can't succeed but so much, and there is no shortage of ways to fail.
The enslaved peoples of the Caribbean colonies of Jamaica and Santo Domingo (now Haiti and the DR) won their freedom as a result of armed rebellions. This was followed by Great Britain abolishing slavery in its colonies, and a move by the UK for an international treaty to ban the slave trade- which was signed by the US.
And that's when things got weird, in the early decades of the 19th century. Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin to separate the seeds out of cotton bolls, and suddenly cotton became the big labor intensive cash crop- much more so than rice, indigo, tobacco, and sugar cane. That increased the need for a large slave population very soon after the treaty forbidding the international trade. That's when the laws were passed to keep African Americans and their descendants in perpetual slavery. Some of the southern plantation states already had laws to forbid the teaching of literacy and other self-sufficiency skills, and to restrict the movements of African slaves; they followed that up with bans on manumission- in many places it was no longer possible for an African to buy their way out of slavery as part of a contract- they had to be freed by the person who owned them.. And domestic slave breeding began to be a big business, in order to replace the supply of human chattel formerly imported from Africa. Free black people were vulnerable to being captured and enslaved- it didn't happen often, but it did happen. The worst features of slavery began to loom larger and draw bolder lines of separation between enslaved black people and free white people, the more the pro-slavery faction sought to entrench it as an accepted and permanent feature of American society. Which eventually led to the American Civil War.