A sign commemorating the arrival of the first Africans is displayed at
Chesapeake Bay, in Hampton, Va., August 24, 2019. (Michael A. McCoy/Reuters)
Posted on 09/05/2019 12:12:35 PM PDT by Perseverando
A sign commemorating the arrival of the first Africans is displayed at
Chesapeake Bay, in Hampton, Va., August 24, 2019. (Michael A. McCoy/Reuters)
It didn’t begin or end in the United States. The same people most obsessed with slavery seem to have little interest in the full scope of its history.
There has been an effort for decades now — although with new momentum lately, as exemplified by the New York Times’ 1619 project — to identify the United States and its founding with slavery.
To the extent that this campaign excavates uncomfortable truths about our history and underlines the central role of African Americans in our nation, it is welcome. But it is often intended to undermine the legitimacy of America itself by effacing what makes it distinctive and good.
Yes, slavery and racial prejudice were our great original sins. It would have been better if we had, like the British, been leaders against the slave trade and for abolition (the representation of slaveholders in Congress and the rise of King Cotton forestalled this). But we didn’t invent slavery, even in its race-based form.
Slavery didn’t make us unique, which is obvious if we consider its history in a little broader context. Critics of the American Founding don’t like to do this because it weakens their case and quickly brings them up against politically inconvenient facts that they’d prefer to pass over in silence.
Let’s dwell, then, on a few things they don’t tell us about slavery. None of these are secrets or are hard to find, but they are usually left out or minimized, since they don’t involve self-criticism and, worse, they entail a critical look at societies or cultures that the Left tends to favor vis-à-vis the West.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
As much as claim to hate it, they can't wait to get everyone back on their 21st century plantation where only the masters and their minions will have guns and freedom of speech.
And let’s not forget planned Parenthood was founded on the eugenic theory that non whites were inferior
I Don’t Care!
We would not survive the slavery they would have in mind for us.
More akin to nazi slave laborers who had almost no chance of surviving.
Nazi slaves didn’t cost money and replacing them was free.
They would go that route with us if they had the chance.
Another thing, there is no white person alive today that ever owned a slave. So the reparations mongers can go pound sand.
Bookmark
The country’s founding fathers didn’t have the power to abolish slavery in their time; it would have torn the country apart. Even several decades later it still did, and we had a civil war. Those who say they were racist for not doing it are ignorant of history.
I agree with you. They are dehumanizing Republicans and Conservatives. It’s a logical next step.
nazi slave laborers
My ex wifes grandfather was french and a school teacher, after France let the Nazis in they would pick him up every spring, have him come farm in Germany then after harvest they would send them home so they would not have to care or feed them and then round ‘em up again in the spring. This went on for 4 years.
You’re right.
And they are depending on us not doing much along the way because I, for one, don’t want to change my comfy life and go and fight.
But getting dragged out of your comfy life by armed men in the middle of the night isn’t any better!
The Soviet Union was built on slave labor.
SMH
The horrors that men do.
And the only TRUE way to stop them sucks.
First black slave in what was to become the USA, was Esteban the Moor. Shipwrecked off Florida in 1527 on the Spanish Narváez expedition, he was with Cabeza de Vaca in their trek and subsequent enslavement by various Indian tribes, to Texas.
Later, freed from Indian slavery by the Spanish he accompanied Frey Marco de Niza back into New Mexico where he offended the Indians and was killed.
In 1776 - there were more white Christian Slaves in the Middle East than Black African Slaves in the US.
The word Slave is a derivation of the word SLAV, because Islam took so many white slaves from Eastern Europe.
For whatever reason the Brits were the ones most open to Luther's teachings of the 5 solas. So much so that much of the rest of Europe often referred to them as "Protestant England". This encouragement that it's mainly up to the individual to further his own relationship with God led many to get closer to God, which led them to loving their fellow man more, which led them to wanting to get rid of slavery. It was an organic revolution pushed from the ground up, not a top-down imposition forced onto the culture by elites. The farthest you can find this is in the early 17th century, particularly among the Quakers on both sides of the ocean.
That England abolished slavery in 1833 when they were still very much an empire, even the top dog of the world, is quite remarkable. No other empire had done that. Not the Egyptian Empire. Not the Assyrian Empire. Not the Medes-Persian Empire. Not the Babylonian Empire. Not the Greek Empire. Not the Aztec Empire. Not the Roman Empire. Not the Ottoman Empire. The game changer was the English Empire. And it was a cultural thing, with other Anglo majority nations doing the same (U.S. a few decades later, and the newly starting Canada starting out slave free.)
And what did they do with their influence? After WW1 England's geographical footprint was the largest it had ever been (because the Allies let England control what had been left of the old Ottoman Empire after the OE lost in the war). The allies had asked various people groups within the OE to fight back against their oppressors in exchange for the Allies allowing the different groups to control their own areas -- hence the nations that exist today in the much of the Middle East. Before they changed hands, though, the Brits outlawed slavery in those lands for the first time in their history.
Meanwhile, England and the U.S. used their trade and military allegiances to discourage slavery in other nations, with the U.S. taking on more and more of the lion's share of the global abolitionist movement as the U.S.'s influence rose, after WW1 and most especially after WW2.
If you want to pick someone to give credit for the worldwide abolitionist movement, credit should go to God Almighty. But if you don't like doing that and want to pick a group of people to give credit to, then ironically it should go to the group that's most vilified for slavery as though we invented it instead of ended it.
One thing left out of this article that SCREAMS for inclusion is *WHY* slavery, a societal NORM all of the way back into pre-history, is now an anathema and major crime in the majority of the world! That evil was made UNECONOMICAL by those evil mercantilists of Europe and their descendants (USofA being a main one here)! Machines like the harvesters and tractors changed agriculture while the steam engine drove factories and production.
Human beings under stress and heavy labor are fragile but a slave was an expensive investment. Consider “The Ballad of John Henry” and his competition with a machine. Yes he won the contest but the use of strictly human labor for this job was at an end!
A true irony here of very recent news is how the University of Glasgow (UK-Scotland) has committed to paying 20 million British Pounds into a joint venture with the University of the West Indies as a “programme of ‘reparative justice’ over its links to the slavery during the British Empire.” This was based on a lengthy report showing how grants to this University from slave traders and profiteers computed to 200 million British Pounds in modern value. Included in this academic report was the fact that “[James] Watt worked for his father as a mercantile agent in Glasgow during the 1750s. Furthermore, Caribbean planters who needed to process sugar cane were significant consumers of James Watt’s steam-engines. [thus] ‘It is certain that Watt profited from slavery and its commerce, but exact quantification is impossible.’”
The irony here is quite sublime!
Well done Mr. Lowry. Well done.
At the time of the Revolution, African slavery was legal throughout the British Empire. The Revolution was not fought to avoid the British declaring slavery illegal.
The British did not render slavery illegal for more than 50 years after the Revolution began.
The British made the slave trade illegal in 1807, which the U.S. did in 1808.
It is fake history to claim the US parted from Britain to preserve slavery. Most of the founders thought that slavery would just fade away. They didn't and couldn't foresee the invention of the cotton gin and the fabulous profits Southerners could make selling cotton to British mills.
I,as a strict originalist and conservative,always struggle with this fact. Dealing with this at the convention would have saved this country from much of the mess we have now. Don't ask me how it could be done in a agricultural and pre-Industrial Revolution society. It would be nice if life begins at conception written into the Constitution also but the Founders had no concept of a mother who murders her baby but for hanging her if she did.
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