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1. SLAVERY WAS AN ANCIENT AND UNIVERSAL
INSTITUTION, NOT A DISTINCTIVELY AMERICAN INNOVATION. At the
time of the founding of the Republic in 1776, slavery existed
literally everywhere on earth and had been an accepted aspect
of human history from the very beginning of organized
societies. Current thinking suggests that human beings took a
crucial leap toward civilization about 10,000 years ago with
the submission, training and domestication of important animal
species (cows, sheep, swine, goats, chickens, horses and so
forth) and, at the same time, began the “domestication,”
bestialization and ownership of fellow human beings captured
as prisoners in primitive wars. In ancient Greece, the great
philosopher Aristotle described the ox as “the poor man’s
slave” while Xenophon likened the teaching of slaves “to
the training of wild animals.” Aristotle further opined that
“it is clear that there are certain people who are free and
certain who are slaves by nature, and it is both to their
advantage, and just, for them to be slaves.” The Romans
seized so many captives from Eastern Europe that the terms
“Slav” and “slave” bore the same origins. All the
great cultures of the ancient world, from Egypt to Babylonia,
Athens to Rome, Persia to India to China, depended upon the
brutal enslavement of the masses – often representing heavy
majorities of the population. Contrary to the glamorization of
aboriginal New World cultures, the Mayas, Aztecs and Incas
counted among the most brutal slave-masters of them all ---
not only turning the members of other tribes into harshly
abused beasts of burden but also using these conquered enemies
to feed a limitless lust for human sacrifice. The Tupinamba, a
powerful tribe on the coast of Brazil south of the Amazon,
took huge numbers of captives, then humiliated them for months
or years, before engaging in mass slaughter of their victims
in ritualized cannibalistic feasts. In Africa, slavery also
represented a timeless norm long before any intrusion by
Europeans. Moreover, the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch or British
slave traders rarely penetrated far beyond the coasts: the
actual capture and kidnapping of the millions of victims
always occurred at the hands of neighboring tribes. As the
great African-American historian Nathan Huggins pointed out,
“virtually all of the enslavement of Africans was carried
out by other Africans” but the concept of an African
“race” was the invention of Western colonists, and most
African traders “saw themselves as selling people other than
their own.” In the final analysis, Yale historian David
Brion Davis in his definitive 2006 history “Inhuman Bondage:
The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World” notes that
“colonial North America…surprisingly received only 5 to 6
percent of the African slaves shipped across the Atlantic.”
Meanwhile, the Arab slave trade (primarily from East Africa)
lasted longer and enslaved more human beings than the European
slavers working the other side of the continent. According to
the best estimates, Islamic societies shipped between 12 and
17 million African slaves out of their homes in the course of
a thousand years; the best estimate for the number of Africans
enslaved by Europeans amounts to 11 million. In other words,
when taking the prodigious and unspeakably cruel Islamic
enslavements into the equation, at least 97% of all African
men, women and children who were kidnapped, sold, and taken
from their homes, were sent somewhere other than the British
colonies of North America. In this context there is no
historical basis to claim that the United States bears
primary, or even prominent guilt for the depredations of
centuries of African slavery.
2. SLAVERY EXISTED ONLY BRIEFLY, AND IN LIMITED LOCALES, IN
THE HISTORY OF THE REPUBLIC – INVOLVING ONLY A TINY
PERCENTAGE OF THE ANCESTORS OF TODAY’S AMERICANS. The
Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution put a formal end to
the institution of slavery 89 years after the birth of the
Republic; 142 years have passed since this welcome
emancipation. Moreover, the importation of slaves came to an
end in 1808 (as provided by the Constitution), a mere 32 years
after independence, and slavery had been outlawed in most
states decades before the Civil War. Even in the South, more
than 80% of the white population never owned slaves. Given the
fact that the majority of today’s non-black Americans
descend from immigrants who arrived in this country after the
War Between the States, only a tiny percentage of today’s
white citizens – perhaps as few as 5% -- bear any authentic
sort of generational guilt for the exploitation of slave
labor. Of course, a hundred years of Jim Crow laws, economic
oppression and indefensible discrimination followed the
theoretical emancipation of the slaves, but those harsh
realities raise different issues from those connected to the
long-ago history of bondage.
3. THOUGH BRUTAL, SLAVERY WASN’T GENOCIDAL: LIVE SLAVES
WERE VALUABLE BUT DEAD CAPTIVES BROUGHT NO PROFIT. Historians
agree that hundreds of thousands, and probably millions of
slaves perished over the course of 300 years during the rigors
of the “Middle Passage” across the Atlantic Ocean.
Estimates remain inevitably imprecise, but range as high as
one third of the slave “cargo” who perished from disease
or overcrowding during transport from Africa. Perhaps the most
horrifying aspect of these voyages involves the fact that no
slave traders wanted to see this level of deadly suffering:
they benefited only from delivering (and selling) live slaves,
not from tossing corpses into the ocean. By definition, the
crime of genocide requires the deliberate slaughter of a
specific group of people; slavers invariably preferred
oppressing and exploiting live Africans rather than murdering
them en masse. Here, the popular, facile comparisons between
slavery and the Holocaust quickly break down: the Nazis
occasionally benefited from the slave labor of their victims,
but the ultimate purpose of facilities like Auschwitz involved
mass death, not profit or productivity. For slave owners and
slave dealers in the New World, however, death of your human
property cost you money, just as the death of your domestic
animals would cause financial damage. And as with their horses
and cows, slave owners took pride and care in breeding as many
new slaves as possible. Rather than eliminating the slave
population, profit-oriented masters wanted to produce as many
new, young slaves as they could. This hardly represents a
compassionate or decent way to treat your fellow human beings,
but it does amount to the very opposite of genocide. As David
Brion Davis reports, slave holders in North America developed
formidable expertise in keeping their “bondsmen” alive and
healthy enough to produce abundant offspring. The British
colonists took pride in slaves who “developed an almost
unique and rapid rate of population growth, freeing the later
United States from a need for further African imports.”
4. IT’S NOT TRUE THAT THE U.S. BECAME A WEALTHY NATION
THROUGH THE ABUSE OF SLAVE LABOR: THE MOST PROSPEROUS STATES
IN THE COUNTRY WERE THOSE THAT FIRST FREED THEIR SLAVES.
Pennsylvania passed an emancipation law in 1780; Connecticut
and Rhode Island followed four years later (all before the
Constitution). New York approved emancipation in 1799. These
states (with dynamic banking centers in Philadelphia and
Manhattan) quickly emerged as robust centers of commerce and
manufacturing, greatly enriching themselves while the
slave-based economies in the South languished by comparison.
At the time of the Constitution, Virginia constituted the most
populous and wealthiest state in the Union, but by the time of
the War Between the States the Old Dominion had fallen far
behind a half-dozen northern states that had outlawed slavery
two generations earlier. All analyses of Northern victory in
the great sectional struggle highlights the vast advantages in
terms of wealth and productivity in New England, the
Mid-Atlantic States and the Midwest, compared to the
relatively backward and impoverished states of the
Confederacy. While a few elite families in the Old South
undoubtedly based their formidable fortunes on the labor of
slaves, the prevailing reality of the planter class involved
chronic indebtedness and shaky finances long before the
ultimate collapse of the evil system of bondage. The notion
that America based its wealth and development on slave labor
hardly comports with the obvious reality that for two hundred
years since the founding of the Republic, by far the poorest
and least developed section of the nation was precisely that
region where slavery once prevailed.
5. WHILE AMERICA DESERVES NO UNIQUE BLAME FOR THE EXISTENCE
OF SLAVERY, THE UNITED STATES MERITS SPECIAL CREDIT FOR ITS
RAPID ABOLITION. In the course of scarcely more than a century
following the emergence of the American Republic, men of
conscience, principle and unflagging energy succeeded in
abolishing slavery not just in the New World but in all
nations of the West. During three eventful generations, one of
the most ancient, ubiquitous and unquestioned of all human
institutions (considered utterly indispensable by the
“enlightened” philosophers of Greece and Rome) became
universally discredited and finally illegal – with Brazil at
last liberating all its slaves in 1888. This worldwide mass
movement (spear-headed in Britain and elsewhere by fervent
Evangelical Christians) brought about the most rapid and
fundamental transformation in all human history. While the
United States (and the British colonies that preceded our
independence) played no prominent role in creating the
institution of slavery, or even in establishing the
long-standing African slave trade pioneered by Arab,
Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and other merchants long before the
settlement of English North America, Americans did contribute
mightily to the spectacularly successful anti-slavery
agitation. As early as 1646, the Puritan founders of New
England expressed their revulsion at the enslavement of their
fellow children of God. When magistrates in Massachusetts
discovered that some of their citizens had raided an African
village and violently seized two natives to bring them across
the Atlantic for sale in the New World, the General Court
condemned “this haynos and crying sinn of man-stealing.”
The officials promptly ordered the two blacks returned to
their native land. Two years later, Rhode Island passed
legislation denouncing the practice of enslaving Africans for
life and ordered that any slaves “brought within the
liberties of this Collonie” be set free after ten years
“as the manner is with the English servants.” A hundred
and thirty years later John Adams and Benjamin Franklin both
spent most of their lives as committed activists in the
abolitionist cause, and Thomas Jefferson included a bitter
condemnation of slavery in his original draft of the
Declaration of Independence. This remarkable passage saw
African bondage as “cruel war against human nature itself,
violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty” and
described “a market where MEN should be bought and sold”
as constituting “piratical warfare” and “execrable
commerce.” Unfortunately, the Continental Congress removed
this prescient, powerful denunciation in order to win approval
from Jefferson’s fellow slave-owners, but the impact of the
Declaration and the American Revolution remained a powerful
factor in energizing and inspiring the international
anti-slavery cause. Nowhere did idealists pay a higher price
for liberation than they did in the United States of America.
Confederate forces (very few of whom ever owned slaves) may
not have fought consciously to defend the Peculiar
Institution, but Union soldiers and sailors (particularly at
the end of the war) proudly risked their lives for the
emancipation cause. Julia Ward Howe’s powerful and popular
“Battle Hymn of the Republic” called on Federal troops to
follow Christ’s example: “as he died to make men holy/let
us die to make men free.” And many of them did die, some
364,000 in four years of combat—or the stunning equivalent
of five million deaths as a percentage of today’s United
States population. Moreover, the economic cost of liberation
remained almost unimaginable. In nearly all other nations, the
government paid some form of compensation to slave-owners at
the time of emancipation, but Southern slave-owners received
no reimbursement of any kind when they lost an estimated $3.5
billion in 1860 dollars (about $70 billion in today’s
dollars) of what Davis describes as a “hitherto legally
accepted form of property.” The most notable aspect of
America’s history with slavery doesn’t involve its
tortured and bloody existence, but the unprecedented speed and
determination with which abolitionists roused the national
conscience and put this age-old evil to an end.
6. THERE IS NO REASON TO BELIEVE THAT TODAY’S
AFRICAN-AMERICANS WOULD BE BETTER OFF IF THEIR ANCESTORS HAD
REMAINED BEHIND IN AFRICA. The idea of reparations rests on
the notion of making up to the descendants of slaves for the
incalculable damage done to their family status and welfare by
the enslavement of generations of their ancestors. In theory,
reparationists want society to repair the wrongs of the past
by putting today’s African-Americans into the sort of
situation they would have enjoyed if their forebears hadn’t
been kidnapped, sold and transported across the ocean.
Unfortunately, to bring American blacks in line with their
cousins who the slave-traders left behind in Africa would
require a drastic reduction in their wealth, living standards,
and economic and political opportunities. No honest observer
can deny or dismiss this nation’s long record of racism and
injustice, but it’s also obvious that Americans of African
descent enjoy vastly greater wealth and human rights of every
variety than the citizens of any nation of the Mother
Continent. If we sought to erase the impact of slavery on
specific black families, we would need to obliterate the
spectacular economic progress made by those families (and by
US citizens in general) over the last 100 years. In view of
the last century of history in Nigeria or Ivory Coast or
Sierra Leone or Zimbabwe, could any African American say with
confidence that he or she would have fared better had some
distant ancestor not been enslaved? Of course, those who seek
reparations would also cite the devastating impact of Western
colonialism in stunting African progress, but the United
States played virtually no role in the colonization of the
continent. The British, French, Italians, Portuguese, Germans
and others all established brutal colonial rule in Africa;
tiny Belgium became a particularly oppressive and bloodthirsty
colonial power in the Congo. The United States, on the other
hand, sponsored only one long-term venture on the African
continent: the colony of Liberia, an independent nation set up
as a haven for liberated American slaves who wanted to go
“home.” The fact that so few availed themselves of the
opportunity, or heeded the back-to-African exhortations of
turn- of-the-century Black Nationalist Marcus Garvey, reflects
the reality that descendants of slaves understood they were
better off remaining in the United States, for all its faults.
In short, politically correct assumptions about America’s
entanglement with slavery lack any sense of depth, perspective
or context. As with so many other persistent lies about this
fortunate land, the unthinking indictment of the United States
as uniquely blameworthy for an evil institution ignores the
fact that the record of previous generations provides some
basis for pride as well as guilt.
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