The White Man Didn’t Enslave the Black Man, He Emancipated Him! Some Basic Facts about Slavery in the Colonies and Antebellum America

By Nicholas Stix

In a previous item, I mentioned two black racists who had attacked white novelist James Howard Kunstler, condemning him for supposed racism.

In lieu of any argument, the racist black “Renaissance man” (so-named by the liberal host, “KMO”) attacking Kunstler had pointed and spluttered about “300 years of slavery.”

I suppose it could have been worse. Usually, they point and splutter about “400” or even “500 years of slavery”!

Yes, “they.”

Rather than blacks being enslaved by whites for 400 or 500 years, blacks were not enslaved by whites, but whites emancipated the slaves.

Let me pick that topic up where I left off.

The first slaves in the colonies were whites, who were officially “indentured servants.” Most were worked to death by their white masters, before they could earn their freedom. (See also here.)

The blacks who were later bought by white slave traders to be resold in the colonies, America, after it gained independence, and the Spanish, British, Portuguese and French holdings in Mexico, the Caribbean, and South America, had been enslaved by black Africans and Arab Moslems. Arab Moslems also kidnapped over one million white Europeans into slavery.

The institution of chattel slavery in the colonies was founded in the colonies by a black man, Anthony Johnson. Johnson had come over to Jamestown as an indentured servant in 1619, and when he fulfilled his contract, became a farmer and contracted with Africans who initially worked for him as indentured servants. However, that wasn’t enough for Johnson, and so he decided he wanted to own his black workers for life as slaves.

Johnson had brought over another black man, John Casor, as a slave, in 1651. However, Casor did not wish to be slave, and escaped. A white neighbor, Robert Parker, offered Casor sanctuary, and Johnson took the matter to a British colonial court, which ruled in his favor in 1654.

Thus, chattel slavery was founded both in Africa and the American colonies by black men. It was ended in America in 1862 by a white man named Abraham Lincoln. Thus, slavery lasted officially not for 400 or 500 years here, but for only 208—as opposed to probably hundreds of thousands of years in the motherland, where it still exists—and for only the first 86 years of the United States of America.

Only a tiny percentage of free southern whites owned slaves (perhaps five percent), and a much lower percentage of free whites in the North did, while probably the majority—thousands—of free Southern blacks owned black slaves in the run-up to the Civil War. And most of those black slaveowners owned them for the same reason that whites did, but treated their slaves worse than white slavers did.

Note too that far from viciously breaking up slave families, white slaveowners did everything possible to keep those families together. Racist blacks who repeat this myth often idealize the Moslem world, an idealization which is diametrically opposed to the truth. Unlike paternalistic white planters in the colonies and the early Republic, Mohammedan slave owners did not permit black male slaves to have any families, and mercilessly worked them to death.

The notion that blacks only bought slaves in order to free them was a bald-faced lie invented by “scholar” Carter G. Woodson, a black nationalist propagandist who variously ascribed all black failings to white influences (all of which he depicted as evil), or made up racial fairy tales, to turn black perfidy (e.g., owning slaves) into a virtue. This hoax has been repeatedly debunked, most powerfully by Larry Koger in Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790-1860.

Woodson, by the way, was the founder of The Journal of Negro History, since renamed The Journal of African American History, and Negro History Week, which eventually became Black History Month. His spirit of chicanery and fraud still hovers over Black History Month and black studies.

Whether the journal Woodson founded has transcended its mean beginnings, I cannot say.