Myths of American Slavery

by Walter Kennedy

  The quality of a slave's life in the Roman Empire was more or less dependent upon the good will of his master. Although some laws were passed to protect the life of a Roman slave, he could be sold, mutilated, tortured, or killed by his master. With the slave population being so large, a constant fear existed among the slaveholding class concerning slave uprisings. To prevent such occurrences, Roman law dealt harshly with any slave participating. in a revolt or attack upon his master. The most notable slave uprising in Roman history was led by a Thracian slave named Spartacus. After a surprisingly difficult struggle, the Roman army was able to put down the revolt. As a consequence of the uprising, the Roman officials put to death, by crucifixion, more than six thousand slaves who had been captured after Spartacus's defeat. But more than just slaves who revolted against their masters were put to death. Often, innocent slaves were put to death as a warning to other slaves when a slave master had been attacked or killed by his slaves. After the murder of a particular slave master by one of his slaves, the killing of four hundred innocent slaves was ordered by Roman officials. Commenting on this incident, Roman historian Tactitus noted, ". . . you will never coerce such a mixture [slaves] of humanity, except by terror." M

  Eventually slavery was eliminated in Italy by the slow process of the manumission of slaves as well as by slaves buying their own freedom. Although this event took place at around the time of the rise of the Christian Church, Christianity itself took little direct action to abolish slavery. Rather, it was a Christian emperor, Justinian, who gave slavery its legal foundation in Rome. This system of laws regarding slavery became the basis upon which latter-day European nations established their legal system of slavery. It should be noted that the laws of slavery that were brought to the New World had Roman antecedents."

  Although reprehensible to the mind of modern man, slavery carried little or no moral revulsion in the ancient world. For thousands of years, slavery was an integral part of life on earth. By contrast, slavery under Europeans lasted only 383 years in the Western Hemisphere, and only 222 years in the United States. This of course does not take into consideration slavery as practiced by the various Native Americans of North and South America.

  In ancient as well as more modern times, slavery was a universal risk of all mankind and not merely a risk confined to one race. Vikings made slaves of various Europeans, Romans made slaves of Germans and Greeks, the English made slaves of the Scottish and the Irish, Moslems made slaves of Christians, Christians made slaves of Moslems, and the list could go on ad infinitum.

  Most Americans will admit that slavery was a color-blind institution in the far gone days of ancient civilization. But when it comes to more modern times, Americans are reluctant to accept the notion of slavery in any other terms than "white masters and black slaves." Nevertheless, historical records abound with proofs of white slavery both in Europe and in America. Even in the age of political correctness, a few daring souls have come forward and challenged the notion that only Africans were held as slaves in the Americas. Writing in the New York Times Review of Books, David B. Davis, a prolific investigator of the slave trade, noted that slave markets from the Black Sea to Egypt maintained a brisk commerce in white slaves throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Davis also noted that in the seventeenth century white slavery was not uncommon from Virginia to Barbados.12

  So great was the enslavement of British subjects that in 1701 it was estimated that of 25,000 slaves in Barbados, were white. Many of these "slaves" were indentured servants who had been illegally or at least "extra-legally" taken from their English homeland. Speaking of the indentured servant, Dr. Hilary Beckles, a contemporary English authority, states that "the ownership of which could easily be transferred, like that of any other commodity ... as with slaves, ownership changed without their participation in the dialogue concerning transfer."13 Describing the indentured servant as a "White proto-slave," Beckles gives modern readers a more accurate picture of indentured servitude in early America. Early in the history of the English colonies in America, the institution of white slavery provided the bulk of the labor supply. For the most part, prior to 1640 most of the sugar grown in English colonies was produced by forced white labor. With life expectancy reduced for the indentured servant, a five- to seven-year indentureship was often tantamount to slavery for life.

  White slavery was not anything new for the English. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England, as more and more people were removed from their land, a class of poor whites grew at an alarming rate. So great did their numbers become that laws were passed to "control" these poor whites. From these laws, many poor white folks were sold into actual slavery or proto-slavery both in England and the Americas. The most degraded and offensive (to modern sentimentalities) of this class were the children of poor white people. Many of these urchins were "sold" to workhouses, where they worked from twelve to sixteen hours each day. In one 1765 report, it was established that the workhouses in one district had a 90 percent mortality rate for children. It should be noted that these children ranged in age from five to sixteen years. How much abuse and criticism would have been placed upon a Southern plantation that had such a record? The lack of a moral outcry by the abolitionist crowd caused many English labor leaders to question the sincerity of abolitionists' criticisms of the evil institution of slavery. Bemoaning the lack of sympathy for the white slave children of England, Rev. Richard Oastler, a Methodist minister in York, England, stated,

  Thousands of our fellow creatures ... are this very moment ... in a state of slavery more horrid than are the victims of that hellish system `colonial slavery' . . . the very streets which receive the droppings of the Anti-Slavery Society' are every morning wet by the tears of innocent victims at the accursed shrine of avarice, who are compelled, not by the cartwhip of the negro slavedriver, but by the dread of the equally appalling thong, or strap, of the overlooker [in the South an overlooker was known as an overseer] to hasten, half dressed, but not half-fed, to those magazines of British infantile slavery-the worsted mills in the town of

  Thanking Rev. Oastler for his efforts on behalf of the slave children of Bradford, a delegation of labor leaders questioned the "conduct of those pretended philanthropists and canting hypocrites who travel to the West Indies in search of slavery, forgetting there is a more abominable and degrading system of slavery at home.""5 In yet another account of the horrors of white child slavery, there is the account by Charles Shaw, a former child labor slave, who managed to live through the experience:

  Fortunes were piled up on the pitiless toiling of little children, and thousands of them never saw manhood or womanhood. Their young life was used as tillage for the quick growth of wealth ... these little White slaves were flogged at times as brutally, all things considered, as Legree flogged Uncle Tom. Nearly all England wept about thirteen years later for Uncle Tom, especially the `classes,' but no fine lady or gentleman wept for the cruelly-used [English] children.16

  Although white slavery, both in ancient and more modern times, is a provable fact, Africa has the dubious distinction of being the continent from which more slaves have been taken than any other continent. In antiquity, all the major civilizations have taken their share of slaves from Africa. In more modern times Arab slave traders carried on a brisk traffic in black slaves during the days of the Trans-Sahara slave trade. From the ninth century until the advent of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, around the middle of the fourteenth century, Arab Moslem slave traders were responsible for an estimated ten million slaves taken from Sub-Sahara Africa. Most of these slaves were transported to areas around the Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean.» Although the TransSahara slave trade did decrease after the commencement of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, it never ceased. In 1840 the ruler of Egypt, a Moslem, carried on a brisk traffic in slaves from Nubia. A virtual army of more than twenty-seven hundred men armed with rifles, lances, and cannons, struck into the interior of Africa, destroying crops an
d making slaves out of more than a thousand Africans.

  In this way, the men carrying the sheba [a wooden instrument attached to the neck of one slave then to another], the boys tied together by the wrists, the women and children walking at their liberty, and the old and feeble tottering along leaning on their relations, the whole of the captives are driven into Egypt, there to be exposed for sale in the slave-market. Thus negroes and Nubians are distributed over the East, through Persia, Arabia, India, & Co.)s

  At this juncture, two points should be clear to all about the institution of slavery. Slavery was neither a European nor a Christian plot; nor was slavery an institution which exclusively oppressed black people as many in the politically correct community maintain. Indeed, as will be demonstrated in upcoming chapters, even in America, slavery crossed racial boundaries. In the nineteenth century, white men were sold into slavery, black men owned black slaves, and Native Americans owned black and red slaves. The myth that slavery was solely a black problem is a position that cannot be supported by historic fact.

  MYTH: Slavery is an institution that oppressed only black people.

  REALITY: From ancient times to the early part of the nineteenth century, slavery has existed across racial boundaries. The English word "slave," according to the Oxford World Dictionary, is derived from the word "Slav," a Caucasian ethnic group. These people were so often taken into slavery by conquering armies of the Ottoman Empire, that from the name "Slav" grew the word "slave."

  MYTH: The institution of slavery was a creation of the Christian world.

  REALITY: As we have noted, slavery existed from as far back as the earliest record of man's progress. It is foolish to assert that Christianity, which grew from the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth some two thousand years ago, is responsible for the institution of slavery. Most people who espouse this theory merely mean that Christians were responsible for the Trans-Atlantic African slave trade and thus slavery in America. This fact is true, but it overlooks five hundred years of the Trans-Sahara slave trade of the Moslems. This slave trade was responsible for as many African slaves as the Trans-Atlantic trade. If one is to condemn Christianity because of five hundred years of African slave trade, one must also condemn Islam because of five hundred years of the Moslem Trans-Sahara slave trade.

  CHAPTER 2

  Slavery Comes to the New World

  There is no record of either pirates or highwaymen ever having been regarded as persons following an honest calling; whereas, the slave trade, until the early part of the nineteenth century, was a perfectly legitimate business and those engaged therein were considered as respectable as any other

  Ernest H. Pentecost in George Dow

  Slave Ships and Slaving

  Even while acknowledging slavery as a historical fact in the ancient world, most Americans still think of slavery in the New World as Southern slaves working in fields of cotton. Yet, as we will see, slavery existed in the Western Hemisphere for more than a hundred years before its arrival in Dixie. Even more shocking to modern minds, it was sugar and not cotton that simulated the introduction of African slaves into the New World.

  The Trans-Atlantic slave trade had its beginning some fifty years before the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus. Looking for gold for his treasury, Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal led the way to the exploration of West Africa during the early part of the fifteenth century. As it turned out, the yellow gold he discovered was not nearly as valuable as the black gold he discovered-slaves. Early in the history of the slave trade, slaves were obtained by the simple but crude method of raiding the coast of Africa. It soon became apparent to Europeans that this method would not provide the number of slaves desired. A better system of providing slaves was instituted by the Portuguese, that of peaceful trading with local African slave traders.2 At first, trading from its ships was adequate, but in 1445 Portugal established a land-based slave trading post, known as a slave factory, fort, or barracoon. This establishment represented the first permanent slave-trading outpost in Africa by a European power. Over the next five hundred years more than fifteen million African slaves flowed from these and other similar factories. During the earliest days of the slave trade, most of the slaves taken from Africa were sold in European markets. Many were used by the Portuguese on their newly established sugar plantations. This one crop, grown at that time along the coast of Africa and in Portugal, was to be the great stimulus for the flow of Africans from their ancestral homeland to Hispaniola, Cuba, and Brazil.4 George F. Dow, author of Slave Ships and Slaving, noted, "Captivated in tribal wars and kidnapped in times of peace, uncounted millions of Negroes were closely stowed in the holds of all kinds of sailing craft and carried to the West Indies and America to be sold as slaves to work the sugar plantations"

  As has been demonstrated, the Trans-Atlantic slave trade had its origins before the exploits of Columbus. Indeed, "Columbus did not take slaves to America but he took the As governor of Hispaniola, Columbus ordered the enslavement of the indigenous peoples. Unfortunately, the local Indian tribes were unable to cope with the requirements of slavery, and their numbers steadily decreased. Starting with a native population of 1,000,000, over one fifteen-year period, the population was reduced to just over 60,000 people.? For those who condemn the South for the harshness of Southern slavery, the fate of Native American slaves in the Caribbean Islands should give them pause to reconsider their illgotten notion. Nothing in the annals of Southern slavery comes close to the mortality rates seen in Hispaniola.

  In an effort to ameliorate the suffering and deaths of the native population,Queen Isabella of Spain authorized the introduction of Negro slaves into Hispaniola. The queen's humanitarian effort is just one of many examples of well-intentioned people attempting to do good and ending up doing harm. As will be demonstrated, the law of unintended consequences (results) often plagued those who were attempting to end suffering and slavery. Queen Isabella and the world would soon learn that good intentions do not always produce good results. As African slaves were introduced into the New World, the Native American population became less valuable and soon virtually disappeared. As sad as that result was, even worse, the African slave trade was given a boost that would not subside for the next 250 years-good intentions, bad results.

  The individual who is credited for the introduction of African slaves into America was a Catholic missionary by the name of Bartolome de Las Casas. Although there were African slaves in the New World before Las Casas, it was he who convinced Queen Isabella that Negroes were more suited for the work at hand in Hispaniola than the indigenous population. It is of interest to note that at this time Cardinal Ximenes opposed the plan by Las Casas and Queen Isabella. Cardinal Ximenes felt that the Negroes would find Hispaniola too favorable and reproduce faster than the Spanish and become a threat to Spanish rule on the island. History would prove Cardinal Ximenes correct.

  SLAVERY IN THE SOUTHERN UNITED STATES

  From 1503, the date of the introduction of the first African slaves into the New World, it would be another 117 years before African slaves were introduced into Virginia and subsequently New England. In 1620, thirteen years after the settlement of Jamestown, Virginia, the first African slaves were sold in what was to become the United States of America. It should be noted that the first African slaves were sold in Virginia more than 117 years after African slavery had been established in the New World. Virginians (i.e., Southerners) did not invent African slavery. Yet, because this form of slavery was introduced first in Virginia, Southerners are often blamed for all the evils of American slavery. Nothing could be more incorrect than the idea that Southerners are responsible for slavery in America. Nevertheless, due to the unique form of agriculture practiced in the South (that is, labor-intensive plantation agriculture), by 1833 the South was the last English-speaking section of the world in which slavery had not been abolished or was not in the process of being abolished. It should not be forgotten that even after the end of slavery in the South, sl
avery existed in Cuba under Spanish rule for another ten years and in Brazil under Portuguese rule for another twenty-two years. Also it should be remembered that the United States was on the most cordial of relations with both countries during this time. Even in the face of these facts, Northern propagandists, both before and after the War, continued "to paint the South to all the rest of the world, in the blackest colours of misrepresentations, so as to have us [Southerners] regarded as a semi-barbarous race of domestic tyrants, whose chief occupations were chaining or scourging negroes, and stabbing each other with It has been more than 130 years since noted theologian and defender of the South Rev. Robert L. Dabney made the preceding comment; yet, the vicious anti-South propaganda continues unabated even today.

  As will be demonstrated, early in the history of the United States, the South led the nation in efforts to limit the African slave trade and promote the end of slavery. Southern historian Francis B. Simkins states that, "In the period of the American Revolution the interest of the South in slavery 9 passing of the Northwest Ordinance in 1787 offers positive proof of this decreased interest in slavery by the South. Virginia, the state that was most responsible for the acquisition of the Northwest Territory during the War for American Independence, ceded to the Federal government all that territory that would later form more than five new states. With the passage of the Northwest Ordinance by Congress, slavery was disallowed in all of that territory. Virginia and all other Southern states in existence at the time voted for the bill that limited slavery in the Northwest Territory. If, as many politically correct folks maintain, the South is the one entity in America that is responsible for slavery, why did Virginia's and all the other Southern states' representatives in Congress vote for the Northwest Ordinance's limitation on slavery?