For Congressional Representation, It Was Not Between Black and White

Since slaves had no voice whatever in the selection of Southern Congressman, counting the slave population at full strength would only have give white Southerners a stronger pro-slavery contingent in Congress. Scoring points today and being serious are two very different things. It should also be noted that the Constitution’s distinction in counting people for representation in Congress was between slave and free, not black and white. Free blacks were counted the same as whites—and free blacks existed before the Constitution existed.

Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals, pg.155

American Slavery Was African Slavery Purchased

Contrary to the “myths to live by” created by Alex Haley and others, Africans were by no means the innocents portrayed in Roots, baffled as to why white men were coming in and taking their people away in chains. On the contrary, the region of West Africa from which Kunte Kinte supposedly came was one of the great slave-trading regions of the continent—before, during, and after the white man arrived. It was the Africans who enslaved their fellow Africans, selling some of these slaves to Europeans or to Arabs and keeping others for themselves. Even at the peak of the Atlantic slave trade, Africans retained more slaves for themselves than they sent to the Western Hemisphere.

Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals, pg. 120

Are You A Slave?

Apologizing for Slavery?

Among the most absurd apologies have been apologies for slavery by politicians. For one thing, slavery is not something you can apologize for, any more than you can apologize for murder. …

Slavery is too serious for an apology and somebody else being a slaveowner is not something for you to apologize for. When somebody who has never owned a slave apologizes for slavery to somebody who has never been a slave, then what began as mushy thinking has degenerated into theatrical absurdity—or, worse yet, politics.

Slavery has existed all over the planet for thousands of years, with black, white, yellow and other races being both slaves and enslavers. Does that mean that everybody ought to apologize to everybody else for what their ancestors did? Or are the only people who are supposed to feel guilty the ones who have money that others want to talk them out of?

Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America, pg.238

What’s Wrong With Slavery?

We are, as a culture, opposed to slavery, but is slavery intrinsically wrong? If morals are simply pragmatic social constructs, without reference to an all-powerful God, on what basis can anyone today claim that the former enslavement of Africans, for example, was immoral?  Why all the judgmentalism? After all, the scientific consensus of evolutionists at the time of the Civil War was that blacks were lesser evolved beings. The people just “followed the science,” and science said the evolutionary gap between blacks and whites was far greater than the evolutionary gap between blacks and apes. Under that school of thought, owning a black person was not any different than owning a canary, cat, or cow. For that matter, evolution never did and still does not care whether we own a man or a canary as long as the conquering species improves its chances for survival.

Don and Joy Veinot, The Dilemma of Morals

Democrats Fought the Emancipation Proclamation

No one understood the political vulnerabilities of the [Emancipation] Proclamation better than Lincoln. Following his September announcement, the Democratic Party declared political war on emancipation and spoke of the Proclamation as the death knell of the Republican Party. On the other side, the radical Republicans were furious that Lincoln hadn’t made emancipation universal and immediate, and they threatened to cut off funding for the war.

Christopher Flannery, American Christmas, American New Year, Imprimis, 12/22

More Than One Kind of Slavery

Talk about slavery! It is not the peculiar institution of the South. It exists wherever men are bought and sold, wherever a man allows himself to be made a mere thing or a tool, and surrenders his inalienable rights of reason and conscience. Indeed, this slavery is more complete than that which enslaves the body alone.

Henry David Thoreau (American essayist, poet, and naturalist)

“Southern” America’s View of Slavery

Rather than viewing Africa as a source of unlimited labor, English colonists preferred European indentured servants well into the 1670s, even when they came from the ranks of criminals from English jails. But by the 1660s, the southern colonists had slowly altered their attitudes toward Africans. Increasingly, the southerners viewed them as permanent servants, and in 1664 some southern colonies declared slavery hereditary, as it had been in ancient Athens and still was throughout the Muslim world.

Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen, A Patriot’s History of the United States, pg. 21

American Slavery

What America did with the slave system it inherited from the British was end it. America’s abolition campaign began with its revolutionary proclamation that all men are created equal and have a God given right to liberty. America began implementing this right in 1787, the first year of its existence, with the enactment of the Northwest Ordinance, outlawing slavery in a territory the size of the original 13 colonies.  Within twenty years slavery was abolished in all the northern states. As for the “original sin” of enslaving the black Africans brought to this country, that properly is the achievement of the Africans themselves who then sold their brothers and sisters to Europeans at slave auctions in Ghana and Benin.

David Horowitz and John Perazzo, “Biden's Team of Racists and Anti-Semites: An Anti-American Coalition in the Heart of the White House”

Did the Founders Fail in Regards to Slavery?

The third charge [by the English] against the Founders was that they failed to abolish slavery. Our answer, to this point, has been: they limited and eventually outlawed the importation of slaves from abroad; they abolished slavery in a majority of the original states; they forbade the expansion of slavery into areas where it had not been previously permitted; they made laws regulating slavery more humane; individual owners in most states freed slaves in large numbers. In light of all this, it is a gross exaggeration to speak…of “the unfree origin of the United States.” Freedom was secured for the large majority of Americans, and important actions were undertaken in the service of the rest.

Thomas G. West, Vindicating the Founders: Race, Sex, Class, and Justice in the Origins of America, pg.14

About Slavery

The confining of discussions of slavery to that of blacks held in bondage by whites is just one of the many ways in which the agendas of the present distort our understanding of the past, forfeiting valuable lessons that an unfiltered knowledge of the past could teach. At a minimum, the worldwide history of slavery should be a grim warning for all people, and for all time, against giving any human beings unbridled power over other human beings, regardless of hows attractively that unbridled power might be packaged rhetorically.

Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities, Pg.221

White Slavery?

More whites were brought as slaves to North Africa than blacks brought as slaves to the United States or to the 13 colonies from which it was formed. White slaves were still being bought and sold in the Ottoman Empire, decades after blacks were freed in the United States.

Thomas Sowell

Are You A Slave?

The slave is the one who obeys a vicious master, which may all be the man’s own lusts.  The free man obeys God.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, pg.133

The New Plantation

Uncle Sam has developed a sophisticated poverty plantation, operated by a federal government, overseen by bureaucrats, protected by media elite, and financed by the taxpayers.  The only difference between this plantation and the slave plantations of the antebellum South is perception.

If anyone works their way off of the plantation and denounces it, they are called “uppity” or “sellout” or even “Uncle Tom.”  Instead of a physical beating, defectors are ostracized in the public forum.

Star Parker

Lincoln Did Not Enter the Civil War to Free Slaves

[During the presidential campaign], Lincoln firmly and even vehemently denied he had anything like racial equality or amalgamation in mind.  “I will say that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.”  Nor did he favor making blacks voters or jurors, or qualifying them to hold office.  “There is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social or political equality.”

Thomas Fleming, A Disease in the Public Mind, pg. 233

Be Harsh With Truth

I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice.  On this subject [slavery] I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation.  Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher…?  No! No!

William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879), cited in “Quotable,” The Berean Call, February 1996

The Facts About American Slavery

Politically correct media and school textbooks give the impression that slavery has primarily been a sin committed by white people who enslaved blacks.  The fact that only about 25 percent of the Americans in the South had slaves before the Civil War is commonly not mentioned, nor is the fact that (according to the United States census of 1830), for example, 407 black Americans in Charleston, South Carolina, alone owned black slaves.

Alvin J. Schmidt, Under the Influence: How Christianity Transformed Civilization, p. 273