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.
