The first official slave owner in colonial America was a black man, not white; the Arab Slave trade in Negroes was far greater and much longer lasting than the transatlantic slave trade; the founder of the southern state of Georgia banned both slavery and Africans from the state; large numbers of “free blacks” owned black slaves; and less than 5 percent of pre-Civil War American families actually had slaves.
These are some of the facts about slavery in America which are deliberately hidden from establishment histories of slavery in America, which are all designed to blame white Americans for “racism” and “slavery” and induce a completely false sense of guilt among whites.
Fact 1: The first official slave owner in America was an Angolan who adopted the European name of Anthony Johnson. He was sold to slave traders in 1621 by an enemy tribe in his native Africa, and was registered as “Antonio, a Negro” in the official records of the Colony of Virginia. He went to work for a white farmer as an indentured servant.
Prior to 1654, all Africans in the thirteen colonies were held in indentured servitude and were released after a contracted period with many of the indentured receiving land and equipment after their contracts for work expired. Johnson would later take ownership of a large plot of farmland after the expiration of his contract and, using the skills he had learned during his indentured labor service, Johnson became moderately successful.
By July 1651 Johnson had five indentured servants of his own. In 1684, he brought a case before Virginia courts in which he contested a suit launched by one of his indentured servants, a Negro who adopted the name of John Casor. Johnson won the suit and retained Casor as his servant for life, who thus became the first official and true slave in America.
Thus the accusation that whites “started slavery” in America is utterly untrue: blacks in Africa sold each other as slaves, and the first true lifelong slave in America was owned by a black man, not a white.
Fact 2: The transatlantic slave trade was dwarfed by the Arab or Muslim slave trade, which lasted from 650 AD to 1900 AD. It is estimated that a minimum of 18 million Africans were enslaved by Arab slave traders, and that over one million Europeans were enslaved by the Muslim world during the same period.
The Muslim slave trade saw Africans exported to regions throughout the Middle East and even to India, while the Europeans were captured in raids in Spain, Italy, France, Britain, and Ireland. These raids were launched from North Africa, and during the Islamic occupation of Iberia and southern Italy, from the latter regions as well.
The invasion of southeastern Europe by the Ottoman Turks saw even more Europeans enslaved into the Muslim world—but their numbers are unknown.
The Muslim trade in slaves, both black and white, was therefore longer lasting and far more extensive than the transatlantic slave trade—but there are today no cries of “Arab guilt” or demands for reparations against Muslim nations.
Fact 3: James Oglethorpe (1696–1785) was a British general who founded the colony of Georgia in 1732. From the very beginning, Oglethorpe ensured that slavery was banned in the colony, and that Africans were barred from entering the territory. The colony’s founding charter also forbid Roman Catholicism from being established in the region.
It was only in 1750, after Oglethorpe had left the colony, that the ban on slavery was lifted.
Fact 4: Many free Negroes owned black slaves; in fact, in numbers disproportionate to their representation in society at large.
In 1830, a fourth of the free Negro slave masters in South Carolina owned 10 or more slaves; eight owning 30 or more.
According to federal census reports, on June 1, 1860 there were nearly 4.5 million Negroes in the United States, with fewer than four million of them living in the southern slaveholding states.
Of the blacks residing in the South, 261,988 were not slaves. Of this number, 10,689 lived in New Orleans. Black Duke University professor John Hope Franklin recorded that in New Orleans over 3,000 free Negroes owned slaves, or 28 percent of the free Negroes in that city.
In 1860 there were at least six Negroes in Louisiana who owned 65 or more slaves. The largest number, 152 slaves, were owned by the widow C. Richards and her son P.C. Richards, who owned a large sugar cane plantation.
Another Negro slave magnate in Louisiana, with over 100 slaves, was Antoine Dubuclet, a sugar planter whose estate was valued at (in 1860 dollars) $264,000.
In Charleston, South Carolina in 1860, 125 free Negroes owned slaves; six of them owning 10 or more. Of the $1.5 million in taxable property owned by free Negroes in Charleston, more than $300,000 represented slave holdings. In North Carolina 69 free Negroes were slave owners.
(Source: Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South, Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roak New York: Norton, 1984.)
Fact 5: In 1860 only a small minority of whites owned slaves. According to the US census report for that last year before the Civil War, there were nearly 27 million whites in the country. Some eight million of them lived in the slaveholding states.
The census also determined that there were fewer than 385,000 individuals who owned slaves. Even if all slaveholders had been white, that would amount to only 1.4 percent of whites in the country (or 4.8 percent of southern whites owning one or more slaves).
The figures show conclusively that, when free, blacks disproportionately became slave masters in pre-Civil War America. The statistics outlined above show that about 28 percent of free blacks owned slaves—as opposed to less than 4.8 percent of southern whites, and dramatically more than the 1.4 percent of all white Americans who owned slaves.
Steve
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The interesting thing to know is when did these facts become hidden?
My instinct is that at the time it probably wasn’t secret but as time has passed, certain things are “remembered” & others are “forgotten” by those who write the history books & do the “educating” AKA brainwashing to serve a particular agenda.
BritishActivism
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A very usable (and re-usable) article.
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Are all the facts in the article sourced from “”Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South” or just part of it?
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(No doubt in a public or online debate with opposition elements (or the unsure) there will be calls for the sources to some of the claimed contents otherwise).
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I am positive that this article will prove most useful to all of us who attempt to argue our case – and attempt to expose the sheer weight of the psychological and manipulative machinery that opposes our endeavors.
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Thanks!
frederickdixon
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Right up until American independence significant numbers of whites from the British Isles, both men and women, sold themselves into indentured servitude as the only way the impoverished could get to America. Others were transported there as convicts but were then treated as indentured servants .
Like their black equivalents it was usual for them to receive a plot of land on the completion of their term of years. I suppose it’s not unlikely that the indentures of some of them were purchased by black masters, which might account for the otherwise slightly surprising fact that black Americans derive 2% of their mitochondrial female line DNA from European women.
Anglo-Australian Alliance
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The Black Nationalist Marcus Garvey (pre-Martin Luther King/Malcolm X) is said to have opined of slavery that it “…was ‘a mere interruption’, and now it was time for black people to organise like other ethnic groups and build a strong power base.”[1]
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Yet in light of Sewell’s laughingly contradictory and hilariously hypocritical and effete coverage of a strong Nationalist leader, Marcus Garvey attacks Haile Selassie for “… [holding] their brothers in slavery in another country whilst they [diaspora Blacks] are enjoying the benefits of freedom elsewhere. The Africans who are free can also appreciate the position of slaves in Abyssinia.”[2]
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Indeed, Garvey continues, “What right has the Emperor [Selassie] to keep slaves when all the democratic sections of the world were free, when men had the right to live, to develop, to expand, to enjoy all the benefits of human liberty[?]”[3]
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And so we see that Marcus Garvey criticises also his own people for holding his racial kindred as slaves while the West (primarily Britain –she who was the first Western Nation to abolish slavery and fight for the emancipation of Blacks) was making inroads into ending it.
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This is a pivotal point in relation to Haile Selassie who to this day enjoys god-like status from the Rastafari movement[4] originating from the Caribbean –the main external and internal source of criticism for what America was subjugating their people to.
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The point of this short is post is that Blacks were still holding their people in slavery even after nations of the West had abolished it; indeed, it is well documented that Black African’s were trading their own people and were thus the primary cause of slavery.[4]
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[1] https://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/14/blackhistorymonth-race
[2] https://libcom.org/history/articles/1892-1975-haile-selassie
[3] op cit.
[4] https://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/rastafari/beliefs/haileselassie.shtml
[5] https://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/27567319?uid=3738032&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21102416890367
Anglo-Australian Alliance
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As I delve further into the Nationalist Marcus Garvey I uncover this quote in relation to Marcus Garvey’s dialogue with the Ku Klux Klan to facilitate Nationalist empathy:
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“I regard the Klan, the Anglo-Saxon clubs and White American societies, as far as the Negro is concerned, as better friends of the race than all other groups of hypocritical whites put together. I like honesty and fair play. You may call me a Klansman if you will, but, potentially, every white man is a Klansman, as far as the Negro in competition with whites socially, economically and politically is concerned, and there is no use lying.
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– Marcus Garvey
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Garvey#Criticism
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(vVs-a-vis- Louis Farrakhan regarding the Jews)
ConnalOakesHolt
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Yes , those white children who worked down the pits in Britain throughout the eighteenth century were also slaves.
There were also thousands of Chinese slaves taken to America by their fellow Chinesemen, these people are curiously edited from the history of slavery in America. I suppose they were not an emotive force through which to manipulate ML King when “those who like to tell lies” were busy getting up to their old tricks .
I found this which may be of interest.
https://www.revisionisthistory.org/forgottenslaves.html
Steve
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Yes my ancestors had it pretty hard too, so I feel no guilt over black slavery & I’m not playing the victim card either the way they do.
Steve
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Yes it’s a good point, someone said with our dependence on oil it was the equivalent of 10 slaves or some such thing.
Once that goes modern life would become very difficult to maintain.
Steve
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Yes some people concentrate on one sort & overlook others.
There have been several modern cases of slavery here & they have often involved either travellers misusing homeless alcoholics or immigrants abusing their own kind.
jackdaw
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The life-span of a black slave in the southern states of America was longer than that of an endentured white worker in the north of England at the same time. That should be enough to tell us who had the better quality of life.
The Dragon
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A form of slavery was implemented in the UK, not only in England, well into the 20th Century and well into the industrial age. At a time when the population of the British Isles was almost totally white, young women and children worked alongside men in atrocious conditions in cotton mills,iron works, coal mines and other labour intensive industries. The owners paid them just enough money to cover their rent and buy food so that they had the strength to return to work the following day to continue their miserable existence. The homes they lived in were often owned by their employers, the shops they bought food in and the pubs that some of them drank in ( those who could afford to ) were also owned by their employers. They had no disposable income. Was that slavery, or was that slavery? We should know those poor people, they were our ancestors and we should never forget that. We have nothing to be ashamed of and nothing to apologise for.