- 9 hours ago
Category
📺
TVTranscript
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
00:17the West, and to hate the figures, mostly white, mostly male, who built America. We're
00:23all familiar with their narrative. America is uniquely evil because of racism, slavery,
00:28colonialism, imperialism, and so on. They've waged intellectual warfare against our founding
00:34fathers and national heroes. They desecrated their reputations, tore down their statues.
00:39Their rewriting of history is such flagrant propaganda that it would make Pravda blush.
00:44That doesn't mean that it's not pervasive or successful. One professor from the University
00:49of Wisconsin spent 11 years administering historical literacy tests to his students. He discovered
00:54that they overwhelmingly believed that slavery began in the U.S. was almost exclusively an
00:59American phenomenon. A view shared, by the way, with at least one United States senator who
01:04attended Harvard Law. The 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 you get over it?
01:24How do you get over something that is as foundational to your society as anything can be foundational?
01:30We've been told that the history of slavery is straightforward and uncontroversial. We've been told
01:35that black slaves were mostly captured by whites, that white colonists in the Americas were
01:41routinely enslaved, free black men, and that more black people were enslaved than whites. And we've been
01:46told that we're not allowed to question any of that. Well, enough is enough. We're launching a monthly series,
01:52setting the record straight on various historical topics. We'll give you the facts that the propagandists
01:58and idiot school teachers have left out of the mainstream curriculum. And we'll start today by
02:03taking on one of the central claims of modern anti-American mythology. This is the real history of slavery.
02:16Historians and political pundits spend a lot of time talking about the transatlantic slave trade,
02:21the 350-year period in which an estimated 12.5 million slaves were brought to the Americas. But
02:28what we don't learn in school is where those slaves actually went. Just under half of them,
02:33an estimated 5.4 million, went only to Brazil, and many more went to the Caribbean. 1.2 million went
02:40to
02:40Jamaica, more than 900,000 to St. Dominique, and 889,000 to Cuba. The grand total of slaves brought
02:48to the future United States was about half the number brought only to Cuba. 472,372, or 3% of
02:58the total.
02:59The ones who came to the 13 colonies were the lucky ones. In the context of global slavery,
03:05getting put on a ship to New Orleans was really a best-case scenario. If you think American slavery
03:11was bad, wait until you see what happened to the ones who didn't make it here. And we'll show
03:16you that over the course of this video. But first we start with a West African country you've likely
03:21never heard of, the Kingdom of Dahomey. Now, Dahomey was not a peripheral player in the Atlantic slave
03:27trade. It was central to it. The Kingdom's wealth, its military power, and its cultural splendor were
03:33built entirely on the systematic capture, sale, and export of human beings. By the end of the Kingdom,
03:40an estimated 1.9 million slaves came from West African coastline controlled by the Dahomey. The
03:47Kingdom obtained its slaves by waging perpetual warfare upon its neighbors. In the 19th century,
03:52a Dahomeyan king named Gezzo described the slave trade as the ruling principle of my people. It is
03:58the source of their glory and health. Their songs celebrate their victories, and the mother lulls the
04:04child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery. Now, in many cases, the Kingdom
04:10of Dahomey obtained these slaves by deploying an all-female military unit called the Dahomey Amazons. They were
04:18the chief slave catchers of the empire. The Amazons would raid nearby towns and return with large
04:25contingents of slaves, along with the heads of anyone who resisted. One missionary who visited the
04:31country in 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 the 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 discovered
05:0518 depopulated towns over 60 miles near the territory of Dahomey. The death toll was massive. Gezzo,
05:13the king we mentioned earlier, built a palace called the Singbo-ji, which used human skulls for bricks,
05:21and human blood as mortar. His throne sat on the skulls of four enemy chiefs.
05:28Assuming you survived a Dahomey raid, which wasn't likely, and were taken captive,
05:33was 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 the
05:45Dahomeyans believed that they could communicate with the gods through human sacrifice. On average,
05:51they dispatched about 500 people a year. Roughly 10 percent were killed at the annual custom, a yearly mass
05:59slaughter. In 1893, the Sacramento Daily Union reported, quote,
06:03"...hundreds are annually put to death with the most savage tortures. They are dismembered limb by
06:08limb. They 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
06:54render the vicinity of the palace hideous." Such gruesome accounts were an ironic outcome
07:00of European powers ending the slave trade decades earlier. Unsellable slaves were only useful
07:06as human sacrifices. But the annual mass execution festivals weren't even the most brutal event in
07:12Dahomey. According to the Sacramento Daily Union, they were, quote, "...far surpassed by the scenes which
07:17take place when the new monarch is crowned. 500 to 1,000 men are put to death in order to
07:23provide the
07:23deceased king with a suitable retinue in the other world. Then blood flows in streams. On the accession
07:31of a present ruler, so great was the number of those wantonly slain that a large trench was made
07:36in the ground in which a canoe was placed. The blood of the murdered men was conducted by conduits
07:41into the trench until its quantity was sufficient to float the boat." This was the level of barbarism that
07:48defined the intra-African slave trade. The Dahomey literally sailed canoes in the blood of their
07:55slaves. They butchered thousands of slaves as an offering to their king. Slavery and barbarism were
08:01a fundamental part of their culture. Now it's worth noting here that although black Africans themselves
08:07did have slaves and routinely sold slaves, they weren't big players in the trans-oceanic transportation
08:13of slaves. They also didn't participate in the raids on the coast of Europe that we'll address
08:17later in this episode. That's because, quite frankly, they just didn't have the technology to do that.
08:22But that's never addressed by mainstream historians, nor are the details on the enslavers in Dahomey.
08:28Consider, for example, Ken Burns' recent PBS documentary on the American Revolution,
08:33where he uses passive voice to creatively skirt the question of who exactly did the enslaver.
08:39Tens 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.
08:54It would be inconvenient for propagandists like Burns to point out that the slaves were already
08:59enslaved by other Africans, mostly women by the way. That reality makes the white guilt narrative
09:05a little less straightforward. And if they did mention it, they'd also be obliged to point out
09:10another inconvenient fact, that the horrors of Dahomey ended in 1894 because French colonizers
09:16invaded the country and burned the royal palaces. The French, who freed their slaves in 1848,
09:23built hospitals, schools, instituted social services, mostly through Catholic missionaries.
09:28In other words, they brought civilization to some of the most savage people in human history.
09:40Slavery's roots go back at least ancient times in Babylonia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome,
09:46as well as the Ameri-Indian empires of Mexico and South America. One of the earliest references to
09:51slavery comes from this clay tablet from a Middle Eastern city called Uruk, dated back to around 3300
09:58BC, which gives us a look into Babylonian slavery, for example. On one surface of the tablet, there's
10:04a notation showing that at least 213 people were designated by the sign combination Sal Kerr, which
10:11means female and male slave, respectively. Young slaves, and specifically infants, were considered the
10:18most valuable. Poor parents often sold their own children into slavery. The historian Amanda Podany
10:24writes in her book, Weavers, Scribes, and Kings, quote, a woman named Kuei made what must have been
10:29a heartbreaking decision. She would sell her daughter. We've encountered this phenomenon before in the Orr 3
10:36period, when a family had to sell a child into slavery because that was the only way that the child
10:41would be able to be fed and to live, that the parents could survive. The price of the baby was
10:4730 shekels.
10:48Thousand years later, Ur-Nammu, the leader of the Sumerian dynasty of Ur in southern Mesopotamia,
10:54issued a legal code with different penalties depending on whether you were legally classified
11:00as free or a slave. A more famous ancient reference to slavery comes from the Code of Hammurabi,
11:06which established slaves as property, set rules for interactions between slaves and their owners,
11:11included penalties for harboring fugitive slaves, and had class-based punishments for crimes based on
11:17whether the perpetrator was free or slave. Slavery was so common in ancient Greece that most classical
11:23scholars agree that Plato simply assumed that there would be non-Greek slaves in the ideal city in the
11:29republic. In Aristotle's politics, he openly declared, quote, some men are by nature free and others
11:35slaves, and that for these latter, slavery is both expedient and right. Indeed, in ancient Athens,
11:42slaves comprised more than 35 percent of the population. Athenian slaves were private property
11:47and could be bought and sold. Slaves who worked domestic jobs or skilled crafts had a decent shot
11:54at acquiring freedom, but there were also slaves who were sent to the mines. They were leg ironed,
12:00routinely starved, savagely beaten, seldom saw daylight, and were worked to death with a typical
12:06life expectancy of about four years. Athens, by the way, was the best place to be a slave in the
12:12ancient
12:12world. In Sparta, slaves known as helots outnumbered citizens seven to one, and one thing that made them
12:18unusual 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
12:29power to 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,
12:46there were an estimated two to three million slaves, including roughly a third of the population of
12:52Rome. Roman slaves were chattel, the full property of their owners. Some worked in agricultural chain
12:58gangs. The punishment for runaways was often crucifixion. After a slave rebellion in 71 BC, the Roman
13:05general Marcus Licinius Crassus crucified 6,000 slaves on the road from Capua to Rome, a dead slave
13:13mounted to a cross every 100 feet or so. The word slavery itself provides some insight into just how
13:19ubiquitous slavery has been throughout history. Slave comes directly from the ethnic term Slav,
13:24because the people who lived in Central and Eastern Europe, Slavic peoples, were so frequently captured and
13:30sold into slavery from the 8th to 11th centuries. Slavery was widespread outside of Europe too,
13:35of course. According to the anthropologist Pierre van den Berg, war captives and slaves were
13:41systematically humiliated and often tortured to death in some North American Indian societies.
13:46Among some South American groups of the Amazon rainforest, slaves were well fed, but only in preparation
13:51for a cannibalistic feast preceded by a mock battle in which the slave would be clubbed to death.
13:57Often slavery was a simple function of power dynamics. As countries rose and fell, they'd shift from
14:03enslavers to the enslaved. Consider the case of the Irish in the early 5th century. As the power of Rome
14:09declined, Irish marauders frequently raided the British coast for loot and slaves. Thousands of men,
14:16women and children were taken. In one raid on the village of Bonneveme-Tibernier, near modern-day Wales,
14:21Irish raiders kidnapped a 16-year-old boy named Suckat. Suckat spent six years as a slave at a sheep
14:28farm in
14:29Northern Ireland. He later escaped, returned home, became a priest, and came back to the land of his
14:34captivity as a missionary. And we know him today as St. Patrick, patron saint, Vireland. By 795 AD,
14:41the tides had turned and now Vikings were enslaving the Irish. Along with many other Northern Europeans,
14:47Viking slaves were seen as cattle, or as advanced domestic animals, who typically lived in the
14:53darkest end of the longhouse with the other domestic animals. After Oliver Cromwell conquered
14:58Ireland in the mid-17th century, the situation reversed and the Irish were at the mercy of their
15:04former captives. The new English regime forced the relocation of roughly 80,000 Irish men, women and
15:09children to sugar colonies in the Caribbean, where they were held in bondage and forced to work in
15:14the fields. Not easy to do with an Irish complexion, by the way. It's a statistical reality that every
15:26living white person has ancestors who were enslaved. But a great deal of white slavery was not done by
15:34fellow Europeans. This is the town of Baltimore in County Cork, Ireland. The tranquility of its rocky
15:41shoreline was shattered on the night of June 20th, 1631. That evening, at precisely two o'clock in the
15:48morning, Islamic pirates, led by a commander named Morat the Younger, arrived banging war drums and
15:54screaming in Arabic. They arrived on two large raiding vessels flying crescent moon flags, one 300-ton
16:01flagship equipped with 200 men and 24 pieces of ordnance, including 12 cannons on each side and
16:07a smaller, more maneuverable 100-ton ship with six iron guns on each side. It came as a shock to
16:13the Irish villagers, who were mostly fishermen. According to a book called The Stolen Village,
16:18quote, none of these untraveled fisher folk would ever have seen anything like the Turkish warriors with
16:24their flashing scimitars, their swirling flowing robes with distinctive cowls, the torchlight glistening on
16:30the sweat of bare arms, which they contemptuously left unprotected by armor. Storm them, my brave
16:36ones, some of the Janissaries would have been yelling, while others responded with shouts of
16:40Allah, Allah. These pirates were Janissaries, and they were raised from a young age to become
16:45fearsome monk-like fighters for the Ottoman Empire. Their story offers a good look into the
16:50proliferation of slavery. The forced levy of Christians to become Janissaries is called the
16:55Devshir-Meh system, and it involved the kidnapping of hundreds of thousands of Christian boys
17:00over 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,
17:221,200 miles away, preparing silently for precisely this moment. And when that moment
17:28arrived, the Janissaries were prepared. The villagers were not. Outnumbered 10 to 1,
17:33the citizens of Baltimore never stood a chance. Neither did the British Navy,
17:37which was responsible for patrolling the coast and protecting villages like Baltimore from attack.
17:42The British knew through good intelligence gathering in Algiers that the Janissaries were planning an
17:47attack, but expected it to happen at a much larger and wealthier town called Kinsale, 50 miles away.
17:53Through a captured and likely tortured fisherman, the Janissaries learned that the British fleet had
17:59left Baltimore unguarded, and they planned to move into the interior of the country to collect more Irish
18:04slaves. But Irish ingenuity claimed the day. Resourceful villagers gathered nearby, collected firearms and
18:11rum and started making as much noise as possible. This convinced the pirates that an English army was
18:17marching on them, and they were treated from Baltimore, limiting themselves to around 100 slaves.
18:22The raid on Baltimore is unique because of where it happened, but such raids into Europe were fairly common.
18:28In 1627, for example, Corsairs took five ships in a raid on remote Heimei Island in Iceland.
18:34With total ferocity, they killed and maimed, they raped the women and girls, dismembered infants,
18:41desecrated churches, and slaughtered a priest at prayer. They burned and looted everything in
18:47sight and, quote, settled down to a long, unhurried orgy of rape, mutilation, and murder, which seems to
18:53have been motivated by nothing more than sadistic sport. One account tells of the Corsairs cutting
18:58people in half and callously snapping the necks of infants. Anyone unable to keep up with their pace
19:05was cut down, and in their madness for blood, these villains then chopped and hacked the bodies into
19:10small pieces with the greatest enjoyment and lust for blood, wrote one eyewitness. In that particular
19:15raid on Iceland, the Corsairs kidnapped half the island's population. They murdered one in 12 villagers,
19:21including several priests. All in all, they returned to Algiers with roughly 400 slaves taken from the
19:27coast of Iceland. And along the way, they would seize church bells and attach them to the mass of their
19:32ships as trophies. They destroyed crucifixes and mocked Christians by destroying the Eucharist at
19:37every opportunity. According to the book The Forgotten Slave Trade, historian Simon Webb described
19:42this shocking contemporaneous account, quote, they began to set fire to the houses. There was a woman there
19:47who could not walk whom they had captured easily. Her they threw on the fire along with her two-year
19:53-old baby.
19:54When she and the poor child screamed and called to God for help, the wicked Turks bellowed with
19:59laughter. They struck both child and mother with the sharp points of their spears, forcing them into
20:04the fire. They even stabbed fiercely at the poor burning bodies. In just seven days, the historian Des Ecken
20:10writes, the typical medium-sized Corsair ship usually seized five vessels, enslaved nearly 100 Englishmen,
20:17and stole roughly 60,000 pounds. Victims who weren't killed, in many cases, became galley slaves. Since the
20:25Roman era, galley slaves were considered the most effective way to keep the galleys moving since they
20:29required coordinated rowing. If anyone took a break, they'd make the ship much less efficient. Webb notes
20:35that after a naval battle in 1571 between the Ottoman Empire and the Holy League, which includes Spain and
20:41Venice, became evident just how many Christians had been forced to row boats for the Ottomans and what
20:47horrific conditions these galley slaves had to endure. Following the battle, the Holy League
20:52discovered that more than 12,000 European Christians have 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, a typical galley might
21:07have
21:0825 oars on each side and perhaps three to five rowers for each oar. The slaves were shackled in place
21:14and
21:15were therefore physically unable to move from their designated positions. It was said in the 16th century
21:20that a galley crewed by slaves can be smelled from as far away as a mile. This was unlikely to
21:26be an
21:26exaggeration. Imagine, if you will, hundreds of men confined in a narrow space and compelled by nature to open
21:31their bladders and bowels where they were seated, day in and day out, for years at a time. There was
21:37no provision for washing. The only prospect of escape for the Ottoman galley slaves was if ships
21:42of a Christian nation defeated the Ottomans. A more dreadful fate is difficult to imagine.
21:47But not all slaves were forced to row the galleys. After returning to Algiers, some slaves, men,
21:52women, and children were put up for the auction. Children as young as 12 years old were sold as concubines.
21:57In a normal auction, children younger than seven could sell for over 100 pounds, roughly double the
22:02asking price for an attractive woman. Between 1500 and 1800 AD, the Ottomans and their North African
22:09corsairs, also called Barbary pirates, likely enslaved roughly a million and a half people
22:14from Christian Europe. Unlike the transatlantic slave trade, which was driven by pure profit,
22:19the Barbary raids on Europe were motivated by bloodlust and hatred. One historian described it as
22:25revenge, almost a jihad, for the expulsion of Muslims from Spain in 1492, for the centuries
22:31of crusading violence that had preceded them, and for the ongoing religious struggle between
22:36Christians and Muslims. In the first half of the 17th century, Barbary's slavers were sailing
22:41through the English Channel and into the Thames estuary, plundering local shipping and coastal towns,
22:46such that, as the minutes of parliament put it, the fishermen are afraid to put to sea,
22:51and were forced to keep continual watch on all our coasts. By 1640, at least 3,000 British nationals
22:58were enslaved in Algiers alone. In just the seven-year stretch from 1609 to 1616, 466 English ships were,
23:07quote, boarded 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. In August 1625,
23:23a raiding party landed at Mounts Bay in Cornwall. The villagers saw the ships at anchor and fled for
23:28safety to a local church, but this was not enough to save them. The slavers dragged 60 people out of
23:33the church, loaded them onto their rowing boats, and took them on board the waiting ships. They all ended
23:39up in the slave markets of North Africa. On the 12th of that month, the mayor of Plymouth wrote to
23:44the
23:44Privy Council in London. He pleaded for assistance from the navy because in 10 days, 27 ships had been
23:50taken and all of the men on board, over 200 of them, had been made slaves. As bad as it
23:55was to be in
23:56British waters, it was worse in southern Europe. Muslim raids on the northern shore of the Mediterranean were
24:02almost annual events of terror and pillage. In 1544, in the Bay of Naples, Algerians took 6,000
24:09captives. 6,000 more Italians were taken during the sack of Vieste in Calabria. In 1566, they took
24:164,000 slaves in Granada, Spain, in a single raid. They described it as reigning Christians in Algiers.
24:23The list goes on. In 1617, 1,200 men in Madira. In 1636, another 700 in Calabria, Italy.
24:31Then 1,000 more in 1639, and 4,000 more in 1644. In 1683, the French military attempted to free
24:39some
24:39of the slaves being held in Algiers. The Algerians didn't take kindly to it. Quote, infuriated at their
24:45helplessness in the face of such an attack, the Algerians decided to vent their anger upon those
24:51Frenchmen who were at their mercy, including Jean Lavachet. Algiers had at the time the most powerful cannon in
24:57the whole of the Mediterranean. It weighed 12 tons. A 23-foot-long gun had a range of three miles.
25:03The unfortunate French consul was pushed partly into the barrel, the cannon then being discharged
25:09with a load of shrapnel, blowing him to pieces. The Algerians found 22 other Frenchmen and tied them
25:14to 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. It wasn't just castration
26:05leading to mass deaths. Conditions were so brutal that three out of four died before even getting
26:10to market. The East African slave trade included legendary traders like the black ivory merchant
26:16Hamed bin Mohammed Almerjbi, also known as Tipu Tip, who organized the removal of between 50,000 to
26:23100,000 slaves from the Congo to move ivory to markets on the coast. Almerjbi earned his nickname Tipu Tip
26:30from the sounds his men's guns made during their raiding parties into the Congo. When he finally
26:36brought his slaves to the African coast with their ivory, they were then auctioned off to the highest
26:41bidder. So many slaves moved through East Africa that Zanzibar became the biggest slave market in the
26:47world. By some estimates, as many as 17 million East Africans were sold into slavery over 1,300 years,
26:54dwarfing the transatlantic slave trade. Many of them worked spice fields and plantations in East Africa,
27:00and the practice wasn't abolished until 1909. Once again, because of colonizers, this time from
27:06Britain. The reality is that the East African slave trade, which exceeded the West African slave trade
27:11in 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
27:22against white Americans. White Americans, by the way, whose ancestors were enslaved as well.
27:32On the morning of June 14, 1786, Captain James Moore's family woke up on what seemed to be a normal
27:38day in southwest Virginia. But as they left the family's cabin to tend to their farm animals,
27:43the fearful war whoop was heard, and a raiding party of Ohio Valley Shawnee Indians rode down a ridge
27:49line and attacked them. Captain Moore was shot seven times before being tomahawked and scalped.
27:54The Indians then murdered three of his children, leaving only his family members who were locked
27:59inside the cabin. Much like the Barbary pirates, the Indians broke into the house, shot the dogs,
28:05plundered and burned the home, killed the livestock, and took Moore's wife and surviving children captive.
28:09The raiding party stole horses and embarked on a journey to Detroit, which was then an open-air market
28:15for humans captured by Indians. To give you a sense of the savagery of the Indians, when one of the
28:21surviving sons, John, fell behind on the journey, an Indian split his head open with a tomahawk and then
28:26told John's mother what happened with her son's bloody scalp hanging in his waistband. They reached Detroit in
28:33December, where in a drunken frolic, one of the surviving daughters, Mary Moore, was sold into
28:39slavery for a few gallons of rum to a man named Stogwell, who had been an active Tory during the
28:45war and had removed to Canada after it closed for fear of losing his life if he remained in the
28:50United
28:50States. Three 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, and often the stories
28:59became nationwide bestsellers. The vast majority of white slaves in the United States were owned by
29:04fellow whites. Somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of white immigrants to the American colonies
29:09arrived in bondage, often involuntarily. An estimated 350,000 arrived between 1620 and 1776,
29:18in numbers that likely far exceeded the number of black slaves who arrived in the 1600s. Mortality rates
29:24on the journey to the colonies often exceeded 20 percent. Many of them were legally classified as
29:29indentured servants under British law. Indentured servitude was, in theory, a contract entered
29:35between a poor person and a sponsor, in which the sponsor pays for the poor person's transit across the
29:41Atlantic in exchange for a set period of bondage. That, however, is the textbook definition. Reality was
29:48much harsher. In the early colonial period, there were not substantial differences between indentured
29:54servants and black slaves. Many were subjected to conditions of such brutality, duration, and
29:59heritability that historians increasingly regard slave as the more accurate term. There's no question
30:06that indentured servitude was slavery. Some indentured contracts literally used the term slave, and ads
30:13issued for runaway servants asked for them to be returned to their masters. Some of them were held in
30:19bondage for life. Many of them were sent here against their will. At the outbreak of the revolution in
30:231776, more than 50,000 convicts were sent to the colonies as slave laborers. There were all sorts of
30:30sources of white slavery. They were the convicts, the urban poor, political prisoners, thieves, prostitutes,
30:38vagrants, prisoners of war, anyone designated undesirable by the British government. In the winter of 1650,
30:45150 ragged Scottish prisoners of war arrived at Massachusetts Bay Colony, where they were sold
30:51as indentured laborers for 20 to 30 pounds each. In colonial America, white and black slaves often
30:58bonded, according to NPR, which admits America's first slaves were white. According to some African
31:05American historians, there was no sign or little sign of racial tension between the English servants,
31:12which we reckon were slaves. And the African servants, also called servants, they were treated
31:17in much the same way for many decades. They complained together, they ran away together,
31:23they rebelled together. George Washington himself had white slaves. At the beginning of your war of
31:29independence, the Revolutionary War, there were ads in the Virginia Gazette for runaways. And I think
31:35there were that week, there were something like 11 for white runaways and three for black runaways.
31:42And two of the 11 white runaways were being advertised by 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. A 1671 report from
32:02Virginia Governor William Berkeley noted that the number of white slaves arriving vastly outnumbered
32:08black, quote, we suppose there come in of servants about 1500 of which most are English, few Scotch,
32:15fewer Irish and not above two or three ships of Negroes in seven years. He then went on to note
32:21that
32:21in the early years of the colony, 80 percent of servants did not survive the first year. But it wasn't
32:28just the slaves that were multiracial. It was the slaveholders too. At slavery's peak in 1860,
32:34thousands of slaves were owned by Choctaws, Cherokees, Creeks and Chickasaw Indians. As Alan
32:41Taylor 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, after the victim died, the women butchered his
33:01remains, cast them into cooking kettles and serve the stew to the entire village so that all could
33:07be bound together in absorbing the captive's power. At the outbreak of the Civil War, one of South
33:12Carolina's wealthiest citizens was a planter and slaveholder named William Ellison. Census records show
33:18that at the outset of the Civil War, he owned 63 slaves, making him one of the biggest slave owners
33:23in
33:23the region. During 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 gin
33:38manufacturer. 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 Law
33:53Olmsted visited Mississippi in the early 1860s, he described meeting a black man who told him there
33:59were, quote, many free Negroes all about this region. Some were very rich. He pointed out to me three
34:04plantations within 20 miles owned by colored men. They bought black folks, he said, and had servants of their
34:11own. They were very bad masters, very hard and cruel. If he had got to be sold, he would like
34:16best to have an
34:16American master by him. The French black Creole masters were very severe and they whipped their
34:23n-words most to death. They whipped the flesh off. In total, an estimated 3,000 blacks owned roughly 20
34:31,000
34:31slaves in 1860. And in some cases, black slaveholders purchase relatives and spouses philanthropically,
34:37rescuing them from other slaveholders. But according to the black historian Carter Godwin Woodson,
34:43they often simply bought and sold slaves like white traders. He even described one case in which,
34:48quote, a Negro shoemaker in Charleston, South Carolina, purchased his wife for $700. But on finding
34:54her hard to please, he sold her a few months thereafter for $750. The 1860 census offers some context
35:02that's left out of the history textbooks in this country. That year, there were 3,953,760 slaves,
35:10and 487,970 total free colored population in the slave states in 1860. The reality is that a very
35:18small percentage of freed blacks and American Indians owned slaves, but the same is true for white
35:23Americans. In the 1860 census, at the very height of slavery, there were 393,975 slave owners in the
35:31U.S. out of a total population of over 31 million. That translates to about 1.2% of the
35:38population.
35:39The vast majority of American whites never owned any slaves. That's a critical point when in the
35:45context of modern calls for reparations. As a rule, black slaves in the American South had a life
35:51expectancy of 40 years and an annual mortality rate of three to five percent. The odds of getting married,
35:57having children, obtaining freedom were dramatically higher than slaves in the Caribbean, Brazil,
36:03East Africa, or God forbid, Dahomey. Slaves in the Caribbean lived in barracks. In the South,
36:09they had cabins. There's no doubt that being a slave was a bad life, but if you were to be
36:15enslaved,
36:16it was better to be enslaved in the United States. The clearest metric on this is that
36:21the U.S. slaves' population kept growing after slave imports were banned in 1808. Unlike other parts
36:29of the Americas where deaths exceeded births, the U.S. ended up with nearly 4 million slaves in 1860,
36:35despite only 400,000 arrivals. Now, one reason for the better conditions could be incentives. With the
36:41import ban, slave owners' best source of slaves was high birth rates. Buying more was really expensive.
36:47A typical price for an able-bodied male field hand in New Orleans in 1860 was about $2,000. And
36:53if you
36:53track inflation based on the price of gold, that'd be over $100,000 today. For this reason, there are
37:01well-documented cases of slaveholders preferring to use less valuable lower-class whites for dangerous
37:07tasks. In 1800, there was not a single country on earth that had abolished slavery by law. Not one.
37:14By 1900, Britain, France, the United States, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal had all outlawed it.
37:21Every single abolition took place in societies under European control or heavy European pressure.
37:28In a perfect Orwellian twist of irony, it turns out white men are the heroes of the slavery story. It
37:34was
37:34the Royal Navy's West Africa squadron that freed hundreds of thousands of African slaves, all done at the
37:40expense of the British taxpayer. It was the nearly 400,000 Union soldiers who died in the American
37:45Civil War, and the entirely white Congress and white legislatures that passed the 13th Amendment, ending
37:51slavery. If the legacy of slavery is a permanent, unpayable debt that justifies racial redistribution and
37:59perpetuity, then literally every ethnic group on the planet owes every other one. The descendants of the
38:07Kingdom of Dahomey, which sold millions of their fellow Africans, would owe reparations to the
38:12descendants of their victims. The Arab world would owe West Africa and Europe. The Ottomans would owe
38:18the Balkans, the Irish would owe the English, and the English would owe the Irish. The list is endless,
38:22because slavery is the norm, not America's unique shame. But only one civilization ever decided the guilt
38:30outweighed the profit and bled itself dry to end it. That's the real story. They don't teach.
38:39Next month, we'll be back with the real history of the American Indians. Subscribe so you don't miss it.
Comments