Timothy Birdnow

Here is a decent article at American Thinker about slavery and the slave trade (and the idiot actress who trashed the British for slavery with absolutely zero knowledge of the issue). He makes some good points but there are more and I would like to add them here.

He rightly points out that African warlords would enslave the losers in a war and then sell them on the coast. Very true. But he doesn't stress enough that the warlords were selling them not to white slavers but to Arabs, who in turn sold them to the whites. Not always; sometimes the Africans did the selling, but more often than not it was the Arabs making the deals.

It should also be pointed out that the British did not just enslave black people. In Barbados and Montserrat and other Carribean islands there are large numbers of mixed-race people who can trace their ancestry to not just African slaves but IRISH slaves.The British send the more incorrigible Irish resistance fighters to these sugar islands as slaves, working alongside the Africans in the cane fields. And unlike Australia they sent no women so these men interbred with the African slave women. This is why you will see many light-skinned islanders to this day.

Then there is American slavery. Did you know the first slaveholder in America was a black man? Slavery started in Jamestown when a black settler and former indentured servant himself named Anthony Johnson had an indentured servant named John Casor. Casor served out his term and wanted to be set free but Johnson wouldn't let him go. Johnson argued in court that Casor was not just his indentured servant but his property. The Virginia colonial court sided with Johnson and Casor because the first slave in the English colonies.

(For those who do not know when poor people wanted to come to America and couldn't afford passage - few could in those days - they agreed to a labor contract, to work usually for seven years but the contracts varied. Ship captains who did not fill their holds with this "cargo" would often go to Africa and buy people from Arab middlemen and take the unwilling "colonists" to the New World. Usually they were not the best workers around - why should they be? So planters and farmers did not like them and to keep their business they began offering longer and longer contracts. That is why Johnson was able to argue successfully that Casor was his property.)

At any rate the first slaveholder was black, and there were quite a few black slaveholders after that. In the Antebellum South the largest slaveholder in Louisiana was black. When you confront liberals with this they excuse it thusly "they were trying to protect the slaves". But if you suggest Washington or Jefferson were doing likewise they will shout you down.

Another point; the U.S. was decidedly in the middle of the pack for abolition. Yes, the Brits abolished slavery first, but it persisted in the Dutch and French and Spanish colonies, and in fact Brazil was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to end it - in 1888, 23 years after the United States.

Native Americans enslaved each-other all the time and then white people and their black slaves. That is why many Indians fought on the side of the Confederacy during the Civil war; slavery wasn't an issue for them.

Often Columbus is accused of "wrecking paradise" particularly in Cuba when he conquered the Taino Indians. But the Taino were not so clean; they held lots of slaves. The main reason they were so friendly to Columbus was they wanted guns and allies to fight their bitter enemies the Caribe'.

It was extremely rare for plantation owners to beat slaves. There was an ethos against it - slaves were the most vulnerable of people and while the society was willing to let them be used for labor they didn't approve of a guy beating them. But more importantly if you marked a slave he lost his resale value. Slaves could run up to a hundred thousand dollars, and that in antebellum money. If your slave is scarred everyone knows he's probably a problem and won't buy him. It would be like taking a bullwhip to your Ford F150.

Most abuse of slaves was psychological; they all had families and if a slave caused trouble his master could just sell him and he'd never see his family again.

BTW this actress who was so exercised about British slavery apparently was unfamiliar with slavery in the countries her parents immigrated from - India and Pakistan. See here for an article about slavery on the Indian subcontinent.

Everyone has either a slave or a slaver or both in their family tree somewhere; it was an ubiquitous human institution.

It was the Western World that ended slavery, and in particular it was the British, and in particular it was George Wilberforce.

One final note; one of the charges made against King George in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence was that he promulgated slavery in the colonies. Ben Franklin talked Jefferson into removing that out of fear it would start a big fight over slavery, something they just couldn't afford at that time.

Most people are woefully ignorant about slavery and how it started and how it developed until it finally died. Ignorance is our most expensive fault. There really is no excuse for this not being taught in schools, but it's easier and more usful to the Left to blame America and the White Man.

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