ROMNEY WORDSWORTH - You’ve heard it all before. America is a horrible place because it was built on slave labor, Indian genocide, racism. Christians defended the practice of slavery in America and America practiced slavery far longer than the rest of the world. Thankfully, the secular humanist Marxists came along to create peace, equality, and progress.
Except it didn’t really happen that way at all. Oh, there were sins committed by certain Americans, but not America as a whole, and not by American ideals. The real history of slavery in America is the history of the Democrat Party.
But first, a prefatory note: American Indians widely practiced slavery among themselves long before European settlers showed up. Some, like the Mayans and Incas, were truly blood thirsty lunatics that murdered millions of slaves in blood sacrifice rituals. Other tribes in North America regularly kidnapped members of other tribes to use as slaves, as well as defeated warriors taken as spoils of war.
Other states and cultures still practice chattel slavery to this day. States like Saudi Arabia and the Islamic State. In Islam, any infidels are considered fair game to be taken as slaves, sexual and otherwise, and it is officially sanctioned by the Koran. Not surprising, really, when you consider that Islam is modelled after the life of Mohammed, and Mohammed was a jumped up caravan bandit with delusions of Godhood.
Let’s also remember that slavery was a common practice everywhere in the Ancient World which persisted through the Middle Ages and up to The Enlightenment. There is not a single nation or ethnicity in Europe that was not enslaved by somebody else at some time or other.
Now that we’ve established the proper historical context, let’s take a look at the real history of black slavery in America.
Jamestown Colony was the first English colony in the New World, established by the Virginia Company of London. The first black indentured servants were sold (depending on who is telling the story) by either the Portuguese or the Dutch in 1619. Note that “indentured servants” are not the same thing as “chattel slavery”. Indentured servitude was entered into by many white Europeans to pay for their passage to the New World. It was servitude for a set number of years, after which the servant earned their freedom under contract. Chattel slavery, on the other hand, treated blacks as draft animals, and denied their humanity. It was for life and not a set period.
There’s a hot debate right now about who was the first chattel slave owner, but it really just comes down to semantics. In 1640, John Punch, a black indentured servant of Hugh Gwyn, a white wealthy landowner, ran off to Maryland with two other white indentured servants, breaking their indenture contracts. All three were captured and in a hearing before the Virginia Governor’s Council (Virginia Colony’s highest court) the two white servants were given a sentence of 4 extra years servitude, and a public whipping. John Punch, however, was sentenced to servitude for life and a public whipping.
Leftists like to point to the case of John Punch as being the first black chattel slave because it involved a white landowner and preceded another case in 1654. But the court in the Punch case never used the words “slave” or “chattel”. In the later case, a black landowner by the name of Anthony Johnson went to court in Virginia to have his black indentured servant, John Casor, declared a chattel slave for life. The court agreed, and this was the case in 1654 that established as LAW the practice of black chattel slavery. So the first black chattel slave owner, was himself BLACK.
Abolition of slavery did not happen all at once, in the same year, in Colonial America. Today, Marxists who hate America love to use the year 1833 as the “Gold Standard” of abolition, because that was the year that the British Crown abolished slavery in the British Empire. British warships shut down the slave trade in the Atlantic, ending it everywhere in the Western World except for the Evil United States. Or so we’ve been told. But this isn’t completely true either.
The state of Vermont was created in 1777, resolving the land dispute between New Hampshire and New York by not giving the land to either. Concomitant with its creation, the state of Vermont abolished slavery within its jurisdiction, making it the first legal jurisdiction in North America to abolish slavery, and beating the British by 56 years. But Vermont was not the only state in the colonies to beat the British to the punch when it came to abolishing slavery.
The State of Massachusetts passed total and instant abolition of slavery within its territory in 1783. This abolition movement was championed by Puritan Christian sects. Yes, THOSE Puritans that Hollywood loves to vilify today as a bunch of humorless prudes who hate dancing and singing. Well, they DID view dancing and singing as the Devil’s Workshop, but they also hated slavery even more!
Did you know that the colonies of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut all allowed freed black men to VOTE as early as 1776? It’s true.
Puritan and Quaker influence led the states of Connecticut (1784), Rhode Island (1784), Pennsylvania (1780), New York (1799), New Jersey (1785) and New Hampshire (1783) to pass “Gradual Abolition Acts”, which set dates after which any child born to a slave would be freed. Between 1810 and 1847 slavery was fully abolished in these states, which comprised all of New England and the Mid-Atlantic states except for Delaware and Maryland. In other words, black slavery was abolished in all of the States of the Union except those states controlled by the Democrat Party!
At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1860, every slave owner in the United States belonged to one political party—the Democrat Party. They comprised 2% of the entire population of the United States at the time. The same party that under Andrew Jackson carried out the genocide of the American Indians. So the sins normally ascribed to the United States as a whole are really the sins of one political party, which is why I usually type the name as the DemocRats.
Poll taxes and literacy tests to votes were also invented by the DemocRats to deprive blacks from voting and had to be outlawed under the 24th Amendment.
These facts need to be kept in mind and are a persuasive reason why Americans should reject any call by the United Nations for present day Americans to be forced to pay reparations for slavery. I know the banana republic dictators and sultans of the UN don’t understand Western Legal Tradition, but there is one tenet that has been around since the Magna Carta: We don’t punish the Son for the sins of the Father, and certainly not the Great, Great, Great, Great, Great Grandsons and daughters, 98% of whose ancestors are guilty of no sin at all!