Wednesday, August 4, 2021

The 1st slave owner in America was black

 


 

Throw out the concept that slavery began in America started in 1619. It did not.

Although black people arrived at Jamestown that year, they were considered indentured servants like many Europeans brought over from the Old World. This meant they served a period of time and were supposed to be set free.

Legal slavery started in 1654 when free blacks, Anthony Johnson and his wife Mary, filed a court petition to require their indentured servant, John Castor, to become a slave for life.

Despite the rhetoric we get from black activists these days painting American slavery as a white vs black cultural holocaust, in truth, a greater percentage of free blacks owned slaves than white people in the south leading up to the beginning of the Civil War. Only about 3 percent of southern whites actually owned slaves, whereas about 60 percent of free blacks did.

The 1860 census showed that of the 490,000 free blacks living in the United States, more than 260,000 of them owned slaves. More than 1,000 Native Americans also owned slaves. Free blacks also owned white slaves, although this was a far fewer number than the estimated 4 million slaves living in the United States at the outbreak of the Civil War.

Most slave owners, white or black, owned between one and five slaves. Owners and slaves generally worked in the fields or shops together, often resided in the same houses, often ate meals together. To own more than 50 slaves was to be a member of the elite minority, the high-living slave owners often depicted in propaganda films such as Roots, and the founders of the so-called White Supremacy society often referred to by modern media. The problem is some black slave owners were among this elites. One black woman in Louisiana owned 152 slaves, another in the same state owned more than 100. New Orleans – which was the capital of the slave auction block – had more than 3000 free blacks, who owned 28 percent of the slaves in that city.

This is not to say slavery was good, although treatment of slaves tended to be far less abusive than activists would lead you to believe. This is part of the reason butcher John Brown failed to inspire an uprising of blacks.

But the illusion that whites alone were responsible for slavery would be a gross overstatement, when historically, black were largely responsible for enslaving African blacks.

Critical race theory and the 1619 Project tend to blame Europeans for the international slave trade which fed Western slavery – claiming the Portuguese, Dutch and English (all white people) invented it.

Enslaving blacks by blacks goes as far back as Ancient Egypt, but International Slave Trade was largely invented by the Arabs, who began transporting black slaves across the Sahara from Central Africa in in 700 A.D., to serve as household and worker slaves to prominent Arab families, only later engaging in the sale of slaves to Europe.

Of the 25 million blacks shipped out of Africa during the international slave trade, 15 million went to Moslem countries with about 10 million going to the west, mostly to the Caribbean, Central and South America. Most of the slaves that arrived in the United States came over about a 50-year period that ended when the United States outlawed slave trade in 1807 (Thomas Jefferson tried to get it ended with the formation of the U.S. Government, but eventually conceded to a compromise with slave owners north and south for the later date.)

The Portuguese learned about the slave trade from the Arabs, and later, the Dutch and English took it up. The American slave trade – operating out of Rhode Island, New England and New York – accounted for a tiny fraction of the industry.

Slave trade, however, could not have become as prominent as it did without the help of African blacks, who sold their enemies, friends, even family members into slavery, infatuated then with the vast wealth Arabs and later Europeans offered, black kings selling black bodies into bondage, sometimes even their own children.

Although activists blame white people for perpetuating the industry, it was not blacks who halted the slave trade, but laws passed by mostly white European governments such as England and eventually America – even though the slave trade continued in South America two decades after Juneteenth freed the slaves in the United States.

The big fear in both the North and the South concerning freeing the slaves prior to the war is how ill-prepared slaves were to make their way in the world if they were set free – few could read or write – despite the efforts of Southern leaders like Stonewall Jackson to open schools for slaves. But then, 56 percent of Southern whites could not read or write either, better than in the north where only 43 percent of the population were illiterate.

Many leaders north and south believed blacks should be shipped back to Africa – some were, but most American slaves in 1865 had not come from Africa and were as American in culture as the whites were.

Most freed slaves were abandoned by the north left to fend for themselves. Many former slaves returned to the plantations they had worked on prior to war. Others wandered north or west. But of the 4 million slaves freed in 1865, more than one million died of starvation, disease or exposure, wandering homeless in cities in the north where they thought they might find jobs, but for which they lacked the skills to perform.

Some southern leaders – such as Robert E. Lee -- actually gave a stipend to former slaves in hopes this might keep them alive until they could find employment.

 




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