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00:01For more than half a century, anti-American propagandists have waged a demoralization
00:06campaign against us. Generations of Americans have been force-fed lies designed to beat us
00:12into a state of submission and self-loathing. We've been taught to hate ourselves, to hate the
00:18West, and to hate the figures, mostly white, mostly male, who built America. We're all familiar with
00:24their narrative. America is uniquely evil because of racism, slavery, colonialism, imperialism,
00:30and so on. They've waged intellectual warfare against our founding fathers and national
00:35heroes. They desecrated their reputations, tore down their statues. Their rewriting of history
00:40is such flagrant propaganda that it would make Pravda blush. That doesn't mean that it's
00:45not pervasive or successful. One professor from the University of Wisconsin spent 11 years
00:50administering historical literacy tests to his students, he discovered that they overwhelmingly
00:55believed that slavery began in the U.S. was almost exclusively an American phenomenon. A
01:01view shared, by the way, with at least one United States senator who attended Harvard Law.
01:05The United States didn't inherit slavery from anybody. We created it.
01:09Despite almost total ignorance on the topic, one Washington Post poll found that a 67% majority
01:15of the public says the legacy of slavery affects American society today.
01:19That question every Black person gets, which is slavery was a long time ago, why don't
01:23you get over it? How do you get over something that is as foundational to your society as anything
01:28can be foundational?
01:30We've been told that the history of slavery is straightforward and uncontroversial. We've
01:35been told that Black slaves were mostly captured by whites, that white colonists in the Americas
01:40were routinely enslaved, free Black men, and that more Black people were enslaved than whites.
01:45And we've been told that we're not allowed to question any of that.
01:50Well, enough is enough. We're launching a monthly series setting the record straight on various
01:54historical topics. We'll give you the facts that the propagandists and idiot school teachers
01:59have left out of the mainstream curriculum. And we'll start today by taking on one of the central
02:04claims of modern anti-American mythology. This is the real history of slavery.
02:12History. Historians and political pundits spend a lot of time talking about the transatlantic
02:21slave trade, the 350-year period in which an estimated 12.5 million slaves were brought
02:26to the Americas. But what we don't learn in school is where those slaves actually went.
02:32Just under half of them, an estimated 5.4 million, went only to Brazil. And many more went to the
02:38Caribbean. 1.2 million went to Jamaica, more than 900,000 to St. Dominique, and 889,000 to Cuba.
02:46The grand total of slaves brought to the future United States was about half the number brought
02:52only to Cuba. 472,372, or 3% of the total. The ones who came to the 13 colonies were
03:02the
03:02lucky ones. In the context of global slavery, getting put on a ship to New Orleans was really
03:08a best-case scenario. If you think American slavery was bad, wait until you see what happened
03:13to the ones who didn't make it here. And we'll show you that over the course of this video.
03:18But first, we start with a West African country you've likely never heard of, the Kingdom of
03:23Dahomey. Now, Dahomey was not a peripheral player in the Atlantic slave trade. It was central to it.
03:28The Kingdom's wealth, its military power, and its cultural splendor were built entirely on the
03:35systematic capture, sale, and export of human beings. By the end of the Kingdom, an estimated
03:401.9 million slaves came from West African coastline controlled by the Dahomey. The Kingdom obtained its
03:47slaves by waging perpetual warfare upon its neighbors. In the 19th century, a Dahomeyan king named Gezzo
03:54described the slave trade as the ruling principle of my people. It is the source of their glory and
04:00health. Their songs celebrate their victories, and the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of
04:06triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery. Now, in many cases, the Kingdom of Dahomey obtained these
04:12slaves by deploying an all-female military unit called the Dahomey Amazons. They were the chief slave
04:19catchers of the empire. The Amazons would raid nearby towns and return with large contingents
04:25of slaves, along with the heads of anyone who resisted. One missionary who visited the country
04:31in 1861 described some of Dahomey's soldiers as equipped with three-foot-long straight razors,
04:37which they held two-handed, and which were supposedly capable of splitting a man into two halves.
04:42According to one historian, quote,
04:43When Amazons walked out of the palace, they were preceded by a slave girl carrying a bell.
04:49Sound told every male to get out of their path, retire a certain distance, and look the other way.
04:54If the men didn't get out of the way, they stood a very good chance of being split in half.
04:59The Dahomey Amazons ran roughshod over the region. An American missionary named Jacob Bauer
05:05discovered 18 depopulated towns over 60 miles near the territory of Dahomey.
05:10The death toll was massive. Gezo, the king we mentioned earlier, built a palace called the
05:17Singbo-ji, which used human skulls for bricks and human blood as mortar. His throne sat on the
05:25skulls of four enemy chiefs. Assuming you survived a Dahomey raid, which wasn't likely, and were taken
05:32captive, it was far preferable to be sold to Europeans than to remain in Dahomey. Slaves they couldn't sell,
05:39or that they didn't want anymore, were subjected to torture and public executions. That's because
05:45the Dahomeyans believed that they could communicate with the gods through human sacrifice. On average,
05:51they dispatched about 500 people a year. Roughly 10% were killed at the annual custom, a yearly mass
05:59slaughter. In 1893, the Sacramento Daily Union reported, quote,
06:03Hundreds are annually put to death with the most savage tortures. They are dismembered limb by limb.
06:09They are tied to posts, and hounds are set to worry them to death. They are securely fastened to
06:15the ground near the nests of the ferocious ants of the country that attack them and tear their flesh
06:20bit by bit away. The spectacle of a still living man with his body half eaten by the ants being
06:25not
06:26infrequently seen. Near the royal palace, there are long avenues, and when the king desires to receive
06:32an embassy with unusual pomp, gibbets are erected, and on these are hung head downward dozens of
06:38hapless slaves, there to remain, guarded by the king's soldiers, until death puts an end to their
06:43sufferings. Even before the breath has left the body, however, the vulture, in Dahomey's sacred bird,
06:49begins his work, and the screams of the sufferers torn to pieces by the greedy birds render the
06:55vicinity of the palace hideous. Such gruesome accounts were an ironic outcome of European
07:01powers ending the slave trade decades earlier. Unsellable slaves were only useful as human
07:06sacrifices. But the annual mass execution festivals weren't even the most brutal event in Dahomey.
07:13According to the Sacramento Daily Union, they were, quote, far surpassed by the scenes which take
07:18place when the new monarch is crowned. 500 to 1,000 men are put to death in order to provide
07:23the
07:23deceased king with a suitable retinue in the other world. Then, blood flows in streams. On the
07:30accession of a present ruler, so great was the number of those wantonly slain that a large trench
07:36was made in the ground in which a canoe was placed. The blood of the murdered men was conducted by
07:40conduits into the trench until its quantity was sufficient to float the boat. This was the level
07:47of barbarism that defined the intra-African slave trade. The Dahomey literally sailed canoes in the
07:54blood of their slaves. They butchered thousands of slaves as an offering to their king. Slavery and
08:00barbarism were a fundamental part of their culture. Now, it's worth noting here that although black
08:06Africans themselves did have slaves and routinely sold slaves, they weren't big players in the
08:11trans-oceanic transportation of slaves. They also didn't participate in the raids on the coast of
08:16Europe that we'll address later in this episode. That's because, quite frankly, they just didn't
08:20have the technology to do that. But that's never addressed by mainstream historians, nor are the
08:26details on the enslavers in Dahomey. Consider, for example, Ken Burns' recent PBS documentary on the
08:32American Revolution, where he uses passive voice to creatively skirt the question of who exactly did the
08:39enslavement. Tens of thousands were from West Africa, captured from what is now Senegal, Gambia,
08:46and Gabon, Angola, Congo, and the Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Ghana. It would be inconvenient
08:55for propagandists like Burns to point out that the slaves were already enslaved by other Africans,
09:01mostly women, by the way. That reality makes the white guilt narrative a little less straightforward.
09:06And if they did mention it, they'd also be obliged to point out another inconvenient fact that the
09:12horrors of Dahomey ended in 1894 because French colonizers invaded the country and burned the royal
09:19palaces. The French, who freed their slaves in 1848, built hospitals, schools, instituted social
09:26services, mostly through Catholic missionaries. In other words, they brought civilization to some of the
09:32the most savage people in human history. Slavery's roots go back at least ancient times in Babylonia,
09:44Egypt, Greece, and Rome, as well as the Amerindian empires of Mexico and South America. One of the
09:50earliest references to slavery comes from this clay tablet from a Middle Eastern city called Uruk, dated
09:56back to around 3300 BC, which gives us a look into Babylonian slavery, for example. On one surface of
10:03the tablet, there's a notation showing that at least 213 people were designated by the sign combination
10:10Sal Kerr, which means female and male slave, respectively. Young slaves, and specifically infants,
10:17were considered the most valuable. Poor parents often sold their own children into slavery.
10:22The historian Amanda Potany writes in her book, Weavers, Scribes, and Kings, quote,
10:27A woman named Kuei made what must have been a heartbreaking decision. She would sell her
10:32daughter. We've encountered this phenomenon before in the Ur III period, when a family had to sell a
10:38child into slavery because that was the only way that the child would be able to be fed and to
10:42live,
10:43that the parents could survive. The price of the baby was 30 shekels. A thousand years later,
10:49Ur-Nammu, the leader of the Sumerian dynasty of Ur in southern Mesopotamia, issued a legal code
10:56with different penalties depending on whether you were legally classified as free or a slave.
11:01A more famous ancient reference to slavery comes from the Code of Hammurabi, which established slaves
11:07as property, set rules for interactions between slaves and their owners, included penalties for
11:12harboring fugitive slaves, and had class-based punishments for crimes based on whether the perpetrator
11:17was free or slave. Slavery was so common in ancient Greece that most classical scholars agree that
11:24Plato simply assumed that there would be non-Greek slaves in the ideal city in the Republic.
11:30In Aristotle's politics, he openly declared, quote,
11:33Some men are by nature free and others slaves, and that for these latter, slavery is both expedient
11:39and right. Indeed, in ancient Athens, slaves comprised more than 35% of the population.
11:46Athenian slaves were private property and could be bought and sold. Slaves who worked domestic jobs or
11:52skilled crafts had a decent shot at acquiring freedom, but there were also slaves who were sent to the
11:58mines. They were leg-ironed, routinely starved, savagely beaten, seldom saw daylight, and were worked to death
12:05with a typical life expectancy of about four years. Athens, by the way, was the best place to be a
12:11slave
12:11in the ancient world. In Sparta, slaves known as helots outnumbered citizens seven to one, and one thing
12:18that made them unusual is that they were public, not private property. But because they vastly outnumbered
12:23citizens, Sparta used brutal secret police to intimidate the slaves and gave the secret police power
12:29to execute slaves who seemed strong or rebellious. Sparta was a total apartheid state and banned helots
12:36from using the same roads as Spartan citizens. Every year, Sparta's leaders would declare war on the
12:41slaves. Killing them was not considered homicide. In the late stages of the Roman Republic, there were an
12:47estimated two to three million slaves, including roughly a third of the population of Rome. Roman slaves
12:53were chattel, the full property of their owners. Some worked in agricultural chain gangs. The punishment
13:00for runaways was often crucifixion. After a slave rebellion in 71 BC, the Roman general Marcus Licinius
13:07Crassus crucified 6,000 slaves on the road from Capua to Rome, a dead slave mounted to a cross every
13:14100
13:15feet or so. The word slavery itself provides some insight into just how ubiquitous slavery has been
13:20throughout history. Slave comes directly from the ethnic term Slav, because the people who lived
13:26in Central and Eastern Europe, Slavic peoples, were so frequently captured and sold into slavery from
13:31the 8th to 11th centuries. Slavery was widespread outside of Europe too, of course. According to the
13:36anthropologist Pierre van den Berg, war captives and slaves were systematically humiliated and often
13:42tortured to death in some North American Indian societies. Among some South American groups of the Amazon
13:48rainforest, slaves were well fed, but only in preparation for a cannibalistic feast preceded
13:53by a mock battle in which the slave would be clubbed to death. Often slavery was a simple function of
13:59power dynamics. As countries rose and fell, they'd shift from enslavers to the enslaved. Consider the case
14:06of the Irish in the early 5th century. As the power of Rome declined, Irish marauders frequently raided the
14:12British coast for loot and slaves. Thousands of men, women, and children were taken. In one raid on the
14:18village of Bonneveme to Bernier, near modern-day Wales, Irish raiders kidnapped a 16-year-old boy
14:24named Suckat. Suckat spent six years as a slave at a sheep farm in Northern Ireland. He later escaped,
14:31returned home, became a priest, and came back to the land of his captivity as a missionary. And we know
14:35him today as St. Patrick, patron saint, Vireland. By 795 AD, the tides had turned, and now Vikings were
14:43enslaving the Irish. Along with many other Northern Europeans, Viking slaves were seen as cattle, or as
14:50advanced domestic animals, who typically lived in the darkest end of the longhouse with the other
14:55domestic animals. After Oliver Cromwell conquered Ireland in the mid-17th century, the situation
15:01reversed and the Irish were at the mercy of their former captives. The new English regime forced
15:06the relocation of roughly 80,000 Irish men, women, and children to sugar colonies in the Caribbean,
15:12where they were held in bondage and forced to work in the fields. Not easy to do with an Irish
15:17complexion, by the way. It's a statistical reality that every living white person has ancestors who were
15:30enslaved. But a great deal of white slavery was not done by fellow Europeans. This is the town of
15:36Baltimore in County Cork, Ireland. The tranquility of its rocky shoreline was shattered on the night of
15:43June 20th, 1631. That evening, at precisely two o'clock in the morning, Islamic pirates, led by a
15:50commander named Morat the Younger, arrived banging war drums and screaming in Arabic. They arrived on two
15:57large raiding vessels flying crescent moon flags, one 300-ton flagship equipped with 200 men and 24
16:04pieces of ordnance, including 12 cannons on each side and a smaller, more maneuverable 100-ton ship
16:10with six iron guns on each side. It came as a shock to the Irish villagers who were mostly fishermen.
16:16According to a book called The Stolen Village, quote, none of these untraveled fisher folk would ever have
16:22seen anything like the Turkish warriors with their flashing scimitars, their swirling flowing robes with
16:27distinctive cowls, the torchlight glistening on the sweat of bare arms, which they contemptuously left
16:33unprotected by armor. Storm them, my brave ones, some of the Janissaries would have been yelling,
16:38while others responded with shouts of Allah, Allah. These pirates were Janissaries and they were raised
16:44from a young age to become fearsome monk-like fighters for the Ottoman Empire. Their story offers a good
16:49look into the proliferation of slavery. The forced levy of Christians to become Janissaries is called
16:55the Devshir Meh system, and it involved the kidnapping of hundreds of thousands of Christian boys
17:01over the 300 years that it was in place. After they were kidnapped, they were forcibly converted to
17:07Islam. They were extraordinarily disciplined and well-equipped. They carried muskets and pistols,
17:12carried in a red scarf tied around their waist, as well as their signature double-curved blades.
17:18The Janissaries had spent weeks sailing to Baltimore from Algiers,
17:221200 miles away, preparing silently for precisely this moment. And when that moment arrived,
17:28the Janissaries were prepared. The villagers were not. Outnumbered 10 to 1, the citizens of Baltimore
17:35never stood a chance. Neither did the British Navy, which was responsible for patrolling the coast and
17:40protecting villages like Baltimore from attack. The British knew through good intelligence gathering in
17:44Algiers that the Janissaries were planning an attack, but expected it to happen at a much larger and
17:50wealthier town called Kinsale, 50 miles away. Through a captured and likely tortured fisherman,
17:56the Janissaries learned that the British fleet had left Baltimore unguarded and they planned to move
18:01into the interior of the country to collect more Irish slaves. But Irish ingenuity claimed the day.
18:08Resourceful villagers gathered nearby, collected firearms and rum and started making as much noise
18:13as possible. This convinced the pirates that an English army was marching on them and they were
18:18treated from Baltimore, limiting themselves to around 100 slaves. The raid on Baltimore is unique
18:24because of where it happened, but such raids into Europe were fairly common. In 1627, for example,
18:30Corsairs took five ships in a raid on remote Heimei Island in Iceland. With total ferocity,
18:36they killed and maimed, they raped the women and girls, dismembered infants, desecrated churches,
18:42and slaughtered a priest at prayer. They burned and looted everything in sight and, quote,
18:48settled down to a long, unhurried orgy of rape, mutilation, and murder,
18:52which seems to have been motivated by nothing more than sadistic sport.
18:56One account tells of the Corsairs cutting people in half and callously snapping the necks of infants.
19:02Anyone unable to keep up with their pace was cut down, and in their madness for blood,
19:07these villains then chopped and hacked the bodies into small pieces with the greatest enjoyment and
19:12lust for blood, wrote one eyewitness. In that particular raid on Iceland, the Corsairs kidnapped
19:17half the island's population. They murdered one in 12 villagers, including several priests.
19:23All in all, they returned to Algiers with roughly 400 slaves taken from the coast of Iceland.
19:28And along the way, they would seize church bells and attach them to the mass of their ships as trophies.
19:33They destroyed crucifixes and mocked Christians by destroying the Eucharist at every opportunity.
19:38According to the book The Forgotten Slave Trade, historian Simon Webb described this shocking,
19:43contemporaneous account, quote,
19:45they began to set fire to the houses. There was a woman there, could not walk, whom they had captured
19:50easily. Her they threw on the fire, along with her two-year-old baby. When she and the poor child
19:56screamed and called to God for help, the wicked Turks bellowed with laughter. They struck both child
20:01and mother with the sharp points of their spears, forcing them into the fire, and even stabbed fiercely
20:06the poor burning bodies. In just seven days, the historian Des Ecken writes, the typical medium-sized
20:13Corsair ship usually seized five vessels, enslaved nearly a hundred Englishmen, and stole roughly 60,000
20:20pounds. Victims who weren't killed, in many cases, became galley slaves. Since the Roman era, galley slaves
20:26were considered the most effective way to keep the galleys moving, since they required coordinated
20:30rowing. If anyone took a break, they'd make the ship much less efficient. Webb notes that after a
20:36naval battle in 1571 between the Ottoman Empire and the Holy League, which includes Spain and Venice,
20:42became evident just how many Christians had been forced to row boats for the Ottomans,
20:46and what horrific conditions these galley slaves had to endure. Following the battle, the Holy League
20:52discovered that more than 12,000 European Christians had been forced to row the galleys for the Ottomans.
20:57They were shackled 24 hours a day. They were not afforded the opportunity to lie down to sleep,
21:02not that there was any room to do so in any event. Webb writes that, quote,
21:06a typical galley might have 25 oars on each side, and perhaps three to five rowers for each oar.
21:13The slaves were shackled in place and were therefore physically unable to move from their designated
21:17positions. It was said in the 16th century that a galley crewed by slaves can be smelled from as far
21:23away as a mile. This was unlikely to be an exaggeration. Imagine, if you will, hundreds of
21:28men confined in a narrow space and compelled by nature to open their bladders and bowels where
21:33they were seated, day in and day out, for years at a time. There was no provision for washing.
21:38The only prospect of escape for the Ottoman galley slaves was if ships of a Christian nation defeated
21:43the Ottomans. A more dreadful fate is difficult to imagine. But not all slaves were forced to row the
21:49galleys. After returning to Algiers, some slaves, men, women, and children, were put up for the
21:54auction. Children as young as 12 years old were sold as concubines. In a normal auction, children
21:59younger than seven could sell for over 100 pounds, roughly double the asking price for an attractive
22:04woman. Between 1500 and 1800 AD, the Ottomans and their North African corsairs, also called Barbary
22:10pirates, likely enslaved roughly a million and a half people from Christian Europe. Unlike the
22:16transatlantic slave trade, which was driven by pure profit, the Barbary raids on Europe were
22:21motivated by bloodlust and hatred. One historian described it as revenge, almost a jihad, for the
22:28expulsion of Muslims from Spain in 1492, for the centuries of crusading violence that had preceded them,
22:34and for the ongoing religious struggle between Christians and Muslims. In the first half of the 17th
22:39century, Barbary slavers were sailing through the English Channel and into the Thames estuary,
22:43plundering local shipping and coastal towns such that, as the minutes of parliament put it,
22:49the fishermen are afraid to put to sea and were forced to keep continual watch on all our coasts.
22:55By 1640, at least 3,000 British nationals were enslaved in Algiers alone.
23:00In just the seven-year stretch from 1609 to 1616, 466 English ships were, quote,
23:07boarded and the crews taken to North Africa as slaves. In April 1625, three ships from Cornwall
23:14and one sailing from Dartmouth in Devon were captured by Corsairs and the crews taken.
23:21In August 1625, a raiding party landed at Mounts Bay in Cornwall. The villagers saw the ships at anchor
23:27and fled for safety to a local church, but this was not enough to save them. The slavers dragged 60
23:32people out of the church, loaded them onto their rowing boats and took them on board the waiting
23:37ships. They all ended up in the slave markets of North Africa. On the 12th of that month,
23:42the mayor of Plymouth wrote to the Privy Council in London. He pleaded for assistance from the Navy
23:47because in 10 days, 27 ships had been taken and all of the men on board, over 200 of them,
23:53had been made slaves. As bad as it was to be in British waters, it was worse in Southern Europe.
23:59Muslim raids on the northern shore of the Mediterranean were almost annual events of
24:04terror and pillage. In 1544, in the Bay of Naples, Algerians took 6,000 captives. 6,000 more
24:11Italians were taken during the sack of Vieste in Calabria. In 1566, they took 4,000 slaves in Granada,
24:18Spain, in a single raid. They described it as reigning Christians in Algiers. The list goes on. In 1617,
24:251,200 men in Madira. In 1636, another 700 in Calabria, Italy. Then 1,000 more in 1639 and 4
24:34,000 more
24:34in 1644. In 1683, the French military attempted to free some of the slaves being held in Algiers.
24:41The Algerians didn't take kindly to it. Quote,
24:44Infuriated at their helplessness and the face of such an attack, the Algerians decided to vent their
24:50anger upon those Frenchmen who were at their mercy, including Jean Lavachet. Algiers had at the time
24:56the most powerful cannon in the whole of the Mediterranean. It weighed 12 tons. A 23-foot
25:01long gun had a range of three miles. The unfortunate French consul was pushed partly into the barrel,
25:07the cannon then being discharged with a load of shrapnel, blowing him to pieces. The Algerians
25:12found 22 other Frenchmen and tied them to the muzzles of other guns and killed them the same way.
25:22Now, for the most part, these slaves, unless they were ransomed or executed inside a cannon,
25:27spent the rest of their lives in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire, which incidentally is one of
25:32those colonial empires that no one on the left seems to mind, assuming they're even aware of it.
25:38One of the most shocking slave trades did not involve Europeans at all. It involved an Arab-run
25:43slave trade operation in East Africa, roughly around the same time as the Middle Passage was
25:48bringing slaves from places like Dahomey to Brazil. But unlike slaves arriving in the New World,
25:53Arabs frequently castrated male slaves to prevent them from breeding. The castration process was,
25:58in some cases, so brutal that 80 to 90 percent died during the operation.
26:03It wasn't just castration leading to mass deaths. Conditions were so brutal that three out of four
26:09died before even getting to market. The East African slave trade included legendary traders like the
26:14black ivory merchant Hamed bin Mohammed Almerjbi, also known as Tipu Tip, who organized the removal of
26:22between 50,000 to 100,000 slaves from the Congo to move ivory to markets on the coast. Almerjbi earned
26:29his
26:29nickname Tipu Tip from the sounds his men's guns made during their raiding parties into the Congo.
26:35When he finally brought his slaves to the African coast with their ivory, they were then auctioned
26:40off to the highest bidder. So many slaves moved through East Africa that Zanzibar became the biggest
26:46slave market in the world. By some estimates, as many as 17 million East Africans were sold into slavery
26:52over 1300 years, dwarfing the transatlantic slave trade. Many of them worked spice fields and plantations
26:59in East Africa, and the practice wasn't abolished until 1909. Once again, because of colonizers, this
27:06time from Britain. The reality is that the East African slave trade, which exceeded the West African
27:11slave trade in its duration, barbarity and quantity of slaves, has received relatively little attention from
27:17academics and journalists. That's because it's not a useful tool for a demoralization campaign against
27:22white Americans. White Americans, by the way, whose ancestors were enslaved as well.
27:32On the morning of June 14th, 1786, Captain James Moore's family woke up on what seemed to be a normal
27:38day
27:38in southwest Virginia. But as they left the family's cabin to tend to their farm animals, the fearful war
27:44whoop was heard, and a raiding party of Ohio Valley Shawnee Indians rode down a ridge line and attacked
27:50them. Captain Moore was shot seven times before being tomahawked and scalped. The Indians then murdered
27:55three of his children, leaving only his family members who were locked inside the cabin. Much like
28:00the Barbary pirates, the Indians broke into the house, shot the dogs, plundered and burned the home,
28:06killed the livestock, and took Moore's wife and surviving children captive. The raiding party stole horses and
28:12embarked on a journey to Detroit, which was then an open-air market for humans captured by Indians.
28:17To give you a sense of the savagery of the Indians, when one of the surviving sons, John,
28:22fell behind on the journey, an Indian split his head open with a tomahawk and then told John's mother
28:27what happened with her son's bloody scalp hanging in his waistband. They reached Detroit in December,
28:34where, in a drunken frolic, one of the surviving daughters, Mary Moore, was sold into slavery for a
28:40few gallons of rum to a man named Stogwell, who had been an active Tory during the war and had
28:46removed to Canada after it closed for fear of losing his life if he remained in the United States.
28:51Three years later, she was rescued by her brother and returned to the United States.
28:54Stories like Mary Moore's were common in the early frontier period in America,
28:58and often the stories became nationwide bestsellers. The vast majority of white slaves in the United
29:03States were owned by fellow whites. Somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of white immigrants to
29:08the American colonies arrived in bondage, often involuntarily. An estimated 350,000 arrived between
29:151620 and 1776, in numbers that likely far exceeded the number of black slaves who arrived in the 1600s.
29:23Mortality rates on the journey to the colonies often exceeded 20 percent. Many of them were legally
29:28classified as indentured servants under British law. Indentured servitude was, in theory, a contract
29:35entered between a poor person and a sponsor, in which the sponsor pays for the poor person's transit
29:41across the Atlantic in exchange for a set period of bondage. That, however, is the textbook definition.
29:47Reality was much harsher. In the early colonial period, there were not substantial differences between
29:53indentured servants and black slaves. Many were subjected to conditions of such brutality, duration,
29:59and heritability that historians increasingly regard slave as the more accurate term. There's no
30:06question that indentured servitude was slavery. Some indentured contracts literally used the term
30:11slave, and ads issued for runaway servants asked for them to be returned to their masters. Some of them
30:18were held in bondage for life. Many of them were sent here against their will. At the outbreak of the
30:23revolution in 1776, more than 50,000 convicts were sent to the colonies as slave laborers. There were
30:29all sorts of sources of white slavery. They were the convicts, the urban poor, political prisoners,
30:36thieves, prostitutes, vagrants, prisoners of war, anyone designated undesirable by the British government.
30:43In the winter of 1650, 150 ragged Scottish prisoners of war arrived at Massachusetts Bay Colony,
30:50where they were sold as indentured laborers for 20 to 30 pounds each. And colonial America,
30:56white and black slaves often bonded, according to NPR, which admits America's first slaves were white.
31:03According to some African-American historians, there was no sign or little sign of racial tension between
31:10the English servants, which we reckon were slaves, and the African servants, who are also called servants.
31:16They were treated in much the same way for many decades. They complained together. They ran away
31:22together. They rebelled together. George Washington himself had white slaves.
31:27At the beginning of your war of independence, the Revolutionary War, there were ads in the
31:32Virginia Gazette for runaways. And I think there were, that week, there were something like 11 for
31:38white runaways and three for black runaways. And two of the 11 white runaways were being advertised
31:45by George Washington.
31:46In early Virginia and Maryland, indentured servants, mostly English, Irish and Scottish,
31:51did the same jobs that enslaved Africans would do in the 19th century, mostly tobacco farming.
31:56Conditions were so bad that 40 to 50 percent died before completing their terms.
32:00A 1671 report from Virginia Governor William Berkeley noted that the number of white slaves arriving
32:07vastly outnumbered black, quote, We suppose there come in of servants about 1,500, of which most are
32:14English, few Scotch, fewer Irish, and not above two or three ships of Negroes in seven years.
32:20He then went on to note that in the early years of the colony, 80 percent of servants did not
32:25survive
32:25the first year. But it wasn't just the slaves that were multiracial. It was the slaveholders, too.
32:32At slavery's peak in 1860, thousands of slaves were owned by Choctaws, Cherokees, Creeks, and Chickasaw Indians.
32:40As Alan Taylor writes in the book American Colonies, the Iroquois were particularly brutal in this regard.
32:46In colonial America, the Iroquois would often subject captives, the ones they did not enslave,
32:51to ritualistic slaughter and cannibalism, in which captives would be tied to the stake,
32:56stabbed, then prodded with hot pokers. Quote,
32:59After the victim died, the women butchered his remains, cast them into cooking kettles,
33:04and served the stew to the entire village, so that all could be bound together in absorbing the
33:08captive's power. At the outbreak of the Civil War, one of South Carolina's wealthiest citizens was a
33:14planter and slaveholder named William Ellison. Census records show that at the outset of the Civil War,
33:19he owned 63 slaves, making him one of the biggest slave owners in the region.
33:24During the Civil War, he and his sons made substantial donations to the Confederate
33:28government, but what makes Ellison remarkable is that he was a black man. In fact, he was a freed
33:33slave whose former master had given him the business skills he needed to become a successful cotton
33:38gin manufacturer. He was such a prominent member of South Carolina society that the Charleston Mercury
33:43newspaper noted that he was a large slaveholder and is much respected throughout the district for his
33:48integrity and general good character. When the American journalist and social critic Frederick
33:53Law Olmsted visited Mississippi in the early 1860s, he described meeting a black man who told him
33:59there were, quote,
34:00many free Negroes all about this region. Some were very rich. He pointed out to me three plantations
34:05within 20 miles owned by colored men. They bought black folks, he said, and had servants of their own.
34:11They were very bad masters, very hard and cruel. If he had got to be sold, he would like best
34:16to have an
34:16American master by him. The French black Creole masters were very severe and they whipped their n-words
34:24most to death. They whipped the flesh off. In total, an estimated 3,000 blacks owned roughly 20,000 slaves
34:31in 1860. In some cases, black slaveholders purchase relatives and spouses philanthropically, rescuing
34:38them from other slaveholders. But according to the black historian Carter Godwin Woodson, they often
34:43simply bought and sold slaves like white traders. He even described one case in which, quote,
34:49a Negro shoemaker in Charleston, South Carolina, purchased his wife for $700, but on finding her hard
34:54to please, he sold her a few months thereafter for $750. The 1860 census offers some context that's
35:02left out of the history textbooks in this country. That year, there were 3,953,760 slaves and 487,970
35:12total free colored population in the slave states in 1860. The reality is that a very small percentage
35:19of freed blacks and American Indians owned slaves, but the same is true for white Americans. In the 1860
35:25census, at the very height of slavery, there were 393,975 slave owners in the U.S. out of a
35:32total
35:32population of over 31 million. That translates to about 1.2% of the population. The vast majority of American
35:40whites never owned any slaves. That's a critical point when in the context of modern calls for
35:47reparations. As a rule, black slaves in the American South had a life expectancy of 40 years and an
35:53annual mortality rate of 3 to 5%. Their odds of getting married, having children, obtaining freedom
36:00were dramatically higher than slaves in the Caribbean, Brazil, East Africa, or God forbid, Tahomey.
36:06Slaves in the Caribbean lived in barracks. In the South, they had cabins. There's no doubt that being
36:12a slave was a bad life, but if you were to be enslaved, it was better to be enslaved in
36:18the United States.
36:19The clearest metric on this is that the U.S. slaves' population kept growing after slave imports were
36:26banned in 1808. Unlike other parts of the Americas where deaths exceeded births, the U.S. ended up with nearly
36:334 million slaves in 1860 despite only 400,000 arrivals. Now, one reason for the better conditions could
36:40be incentives. With the import ban, slave owners' best source of slaves was high birth rates. Buying
36:46more was really expensive. The typical price for an able-bodied male field hand in New Orleans in 1860
36:51was about $2,000. And if you track inflation based on the price of gold, that'd be over $100,000
36:58today. For this
36:59reason, there are well-documented cases of slaveholders preferring to use less valuable
37:04lower-class whites for dangerous tasks. In 1800, there was not a single country on earth that had
37:11abolished slavery by law. Not one. By 1900, Britain, France, the United States, Denmark, the Netherlands,
37:18Spain, Portugal had all outlawed it. Every single abolition put place in societies under European control
37:25or heavy European pressure. In a perfect Orwellian twist of irony, it turns out white men are the
37:32heroes of the slavery story. It was the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron that freed hundreds of
37:37thousands of African slaves, all done at the expense of the British taxpayer. It was the nearly 400,000
37:43Union soldiers who died in the American Civil War, and the entirely white Congress and white
37:49legislatures that passed the 13th Amendment ending slavery. If the legacy of slavery is a permanent,
37:56unpayable debt that justifies racial redistribution in perpetuity, then literally every ethnic group on
38:02the planet owes every other one. The descendants of the Kingdom of Dahomey, which sold millions of their
38:10fellow Africans, would owe reparations to the descendants of their victims. The Arab world would
38:15owe West Africa and Europe, the Ottomans would owe the Balkans, the Irish would owe the English,
38:20and the English would owe the Irish. The list is endless because slavery is the norm, not America's
38:26unique shame. But only one civilization ever decided the guilt outweighed the profit and bled itself dry
38:33to end it. That's the real story they don't teach. Next month we'll be back with the real history of
38:42the American
38:43Indians. Subscribe so you don't miss me.
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