Human Events Daily with Jack Posobiec - February 20, 2023


EPISODE 399： WAS AMERICA FOUNDED ON SLAVERY？


Episode Stats

Length

24 minutes

Words per Minute

182.45251

Word Count

4,541

Sentence Count

279

Misogynist Sentences

1

Hate Speech Sentences

8


Summary

In honor of President's Day, we re asking a simple question: Was the founding of the United States done in order to perpetuate the institution of slavery in the 13 colonies? And if so, who were the original 13 colonies really part of the original thirteen colonies?


Transcript

00:00:00.760 Happy President's Day, everyone. Welcome to the Human Events Daily President's Day special.
00:00:05.640 We're going to be asking a simple question. Was America founded on slavery? Was the 1619
00:00:11.540 Project correct in that? I don't think they were. But we're going to have a discussion
00:00:15.860 all about it. First, I want to remind you to sign up for the Poso Daily Brief. The Poso
00:00:19.820 Daily Brief at humanevents.com slash Poso. That's humanevents.com slash Poso. Read what
00:00:24.520 I read. It is completely free. It will be delivered to you every single day. Save you
00:00:28.640 from endless scrolling online. The Poso Daily Brief, humanevents.com slash Poso. Let's get
00:00:33.060 into it.
00:00:44.200 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard to today's edition of Human Events Daily. Today is our
00:00:48.480 President's Day special. And I decided to take aim at the 1619 Project today and to really
00:00:57.860 focus on this indelible question that they posed for us. Was America founded on slavery? Was the
00:01:05.820 founding of America done in order to perpetuate the institution of slavery to protect and potentially
00:01:13.300 expand slavery in the 13 colonies? And that is why America, of course, as we know, the early
00:01:20.360 presidents led this revolution against the British Empire, pulled the United States, pulled the 13
00:01:26.440 colonies out of the British Empire, which was sort of the global international trade system at the
00:01:32.440 time, set themselves up as their own shop, created their own country, their own declaration,
00:01:37.740 constitution. Was all of this done, all of the stories that we've been told for generations in
00:01:43.580 this country, was all of it done in furtherance of slavery? Well, to help me on this, bringing back
00:01:50.180 to the show, editor in chief of the Post Millennial, Miss Libby Evans. Libby, thank you so much for joining
00:01:54.520 us today. Sure thing, Jack. Thanks. So Libby, I mean, I've actually did a little research. I know, crazy,
00:02:01.640 right? But it turns out that Poso has the receipts as usual. British imports from the colonies, 1768 to 1772.
00:02:10.180 Turns out that from New England, hardly any. From the middle colonies, hardly any. From the Chesapeake,
00:02:19.480 maybe if I were being generous, I'd say 8%, but it looks like about 10. From the Carolinas, maybe 5%.
00:02:26.760 Yet the West Indies, it turns out, the British imports, over 30% came from the West Indies.
00:02:37.740 Now, Libby, correct me if I'm wrong, were the West Indies part of the original 13 colonies?
00:02:44.440 They were not part of the original 13 colonies.
00:02:47.160 Oh, they were not. They were not. So the Caribbean was not part of the revolution, at least in terms of the
00:02:52.440 areas that rebelled. They had revolutions and rebellions later on that were not connected.
00:02:58.700 Many of them were, by the way, slave-driven. Obviously, Haiti is, of course, a great example of this,
00:03:03.420 even though it was French, not British. But when you look at this, and in fact, we're all taught
00:03:08.960 in school about the triangle trade, the triangle trade. British goods and then raw materials from
00:03:14.900 America become British goods. British goods are then sold for slaves in Africa. Those slaves are
00:03:19.580 then brought to the United States. That's the triangle trade. But it turns out that the majority
00:03:22.920 of those slaves were actually going, again, to the Caribbean. They were not going to what later
00:03:27.940 became the 13 colonies in North America. And I think a lot of people miss this, that the British
00:03:33.480 empire at the time, right, for sugar, for rum, et cetera, that the British empire wasn't just the
00:03:39.380 13 colonies. And so we have this kind of warped view of what colonial America was like, because
00:03:46.220 obviously there were even Canadian colonies that ended up becoming the Tories that were royalists that
00:03:50.840 didn't rebel. And so you saw, by the way, a lot of royalists move up there. This was the only time,
00:03:55.720 of course, that liberals actually left the country and fled to Canada, even though they always claim
00:04:00.020 they're going to an election doesn't go their way. But this idea that, you know, I'm not going to sit
00:04:06.640 here and say that slavery didn't exist. Of course it existed. We knew it existed. It existed everywhere
00:04:10.260 in the world prior to the events of the Christianization of Western civilization, the Western
00:04:16.940 world, et cetera, that these are the areas where slavery was done away with. There still is slavery in
00:04:22.400 parts of the world today. There's the fact if, depending on how you, how you judge it, how you
00:04:28.480 measure it, there is potentially even more slavery in the world today than there has ever been
00:04:33.180 in the past. And so if you're, if you're looking at it in terms of human trafficking, which is
00:04:37.780 arguably the same thing, we're talking about human trafficking of the 1700s versus human trafficking
00:04:42.800 today, it essentially becomes the same deal. But this idea that, okay, the Southern colonies had
00:04:49.460 slaves, but Libby, did the, were the Northern colonies reliant on slavery as well? Is this true?
00:04:56.880 No, their economy was not reliant on slavery. You do have New Jersey, which was an agricultural
00:05:03.040 colony. And so they outlawed slavery in that colony in 1804. The rest of the Northern colonies had
00:05:11.120 outlawed slavery for the most part shortly after the declaration of independence, which actually opened
00:05:17.160 many Americans' eyes to the horror of slavery because the language in that document is unequivocal.
00:05:24.160 I would say as regards to slavery globally now, I think one of the reasons that American slavery comes
00:05:31.860 under such a microscope is because it was the last government sanctioned slavery that we, that we
00:05:40.080 really see. So now a lot of that is it's black market slavery and things like this. I mean, unless you
00:05:45.600 want to talk about Dubai and the, the, um, the men there who are building Dubai and their passports
00:05:51.920 are confiscated, that's a thing for sure. I mean, human trafficking is so people should understand
00:05:58.800 that, that when we're talking about trafficking, we talk about it in terms of, uh, labor trafficking
00:06:03.840 and sex trafficking. So you see this currently in the United States, there's labor trafficking.
00:06:08.560 Of course there's sex trafficking. It's rampant in the Middle East. It's rampant in Asia, particularly
00:06:13.460 Southeast Asia. And yet we're supposed to act and, and as we're supposed to pretend like none of this
00:06:19.000 is going on and the United States is the only country that's ever done anything like this.
00:06:23.340 Yeah, certainly the United States is not the only country that ever had sanctioned slavery,
00:06:27.620 but it is, I believe thoroughly to our credit that we eradicated that practice and that we even went
00:06:34.560 as far, you know, in eradicating that practice. We fought a war over it. It's interesting too. We're
00:06:40.340 constantly taught as children, um, you know, we're taught that the civil war was about slavery and then
00:06:46.220 we're taught that the civil war wasn't about slavery. And then it turns out that in fact, the civil war was
00:06:51.080 about slavery and it was about eradicating that practice and our founding fathers, um, John Adams,
00:06:57.780 who is absolutely one of my, maybe my favorite of the founding fathers, um, you know, was entirely
00:07:04.220 opposed to slavery as was his wife and they fought against it really hard. So did Ben Franklin. I mean,
00:07:10.840 you know, the founding fathers, all of them, they're, you know, Washington, Jefferson, Madison,
00:07:15.940 Hamilton, Adams, Franklin, they all knew that slavery was a scourge and was not
00:07:21.000 in keeping with human dignity. And to be sure there, there are, by the way, if you talk to
00:07:25.960 someone from the South, and I know we have a lot of, a lot of viewers down there that I'm sure
00:07:29.460 someone will say, well, it was, it was also about States rights. We didn't want it imposed on us from
00:07:33.660 the federal government. We were working this out internally, this institution, putting all that
00:07:39.380 aside. I'm putting all that aside right now because we are talking specifically here today about
00:07:43.960 the founding of the United States itself. We're going to get into that after the break, but I wanted to
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00:08:38.580 And we're back with Libby Edmund. So Libby, when we left before, you were telling us how
00:08:44.860 racist the country has always been from the start, how much you hate the Declaration,
00:08:49.120 the Constitution, or founding documents, and that when the next time that we take our kids down to
00:08:54.400 the National Mall, you're just going to be pointing out how the Washington Monument,
00:08:58.360 while that's nothing more than a phallic symbol, that the Freemasons have been in charge from the
00:09:02.640 very start, and how really this entire country was founded on nothing other than the suppression
00:09:09.680 and oppression of colored people. Is that right? That doesn't sound like me. I think you got me
00:09:15.060 confused with Nicole Hannah-Jones. Oh, I must have been listening to another podcast in my ear.
00:09:21.100 And Producer Angelo, you're fired again. That must be it. That must be the thing. Yeah. You know,
00:09:27.240 I think that obvious, I think it's so clear when you look at the 1619 Project, and when you listen
00:09:32.980 also to the historians that came out after that work of journalistic madness was released in the New
00:09:41.960 York Times, complete with educational manuals so that it could be shipped off to all of the schools
00:09:47.360 across the country, colleges, high schools, you know, it came with a whole manual of how to teach the
00:09:52.720 1619 Project. And if you actually read the essays, some of them are interesting personal accounts.
00:09:59.940 The writing is not necessarily bad, but the facts are tortured into the submission of this ideology
00:10:06.760 of the founding of our country that actually just does not hold up to scrutiny.
00:10:10.380 I got to say this one. So as I was doing some research for this, I said, look, we've only got
00:10:15.460 so much time on the show today. We can't bring up everything because I really want to talk about this,
00:10:19.880 that the colony of British North America, the economy, was not reliant as a whole on slavery.
00:10:28.200 It just wasn't. Certain regions, sure, but those weren't the only regions that rebelled. There were
00:10:33.080 other regions that had economies like the North, which was primarily industrial, that were not reliant
00:10:38.680 on slavery that also rebelled. So just right there, just based on that, then they had widely,
00:10:44.600 as to your point, widely divergent views on the institution of slavery,
00:10:48.660 extremely divergent views. I mean, as a son of the Philadelphia area, very familiar with Benjamin
00:10:56.620 Franklin and his outspoken opposition to the institution of slavery from the very start.
00:11:02.520 But what gets me is actually, there's a line in the 1619 Project, one of the essays, I forget exactly
00:11:10.100 which one of the writers it is. We can look it up later. He says that the system of accounting
00:11:15.780 accounting that we have today, Microsoft Excel, and even the spreadsheet itself is based on slave
00:11:24.260 ledgers, that the entire practice of accounting... No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Double entry bookkeeping
00:11:29.040 was not invented in America. It was invented far before that. No, no, no, no, no, no.
00:11:36.220 Double entry bookkeeping was invented in Byzantium. I'm pretty sure double entry bookkeeping. Yeah,
00:11:42.680 I mean, the double entry where you have the credit and the debit, you know, and you can actually see
00:11:46.200 things. And then it really came to the fore in Venice with their whole shipbuilding thing. And
00:11:51.400 that's how Venice got rich. Venice got rich because they figured out how to properly account for things.
00:11:57.340 I'm pretty sure that's right. For a while, I was really obsessed with accounting. I thought it was
00:12:00.560 really fascinating. I know that's really dorky, but it's so interesting, double entry bookkeeping.
00:12:05.680 We found Libby's trigger on this one. So double entry bookkeeping, it's all based on slavery, right?
00:12:12.920 No one had ever done this before. The Medici's were doing, the Medici bank was doing this in the 14th
00:12:18.520 century, literally. Yeah, that's because it was invented in Europe, double entry bookkeeping.
00:12:24.300 I think Florence, the Medici's, I mean, of course, of course, it was the Italians, right?
00:12:30.560 Um, and it was actually invented in Byzantium. Yeah. But right. It actually is saying, I'm just
00:12:37.640 looking at something now. It's saying that there, it was pulled from, it was brought there,
00:12:40.900 um, by, by merchants. And, you know, I'm sure if I can. And then Venice got rich because they were
00:12:47.560 able to not only track what they spent, but what they earned and they were able to track inventory.
00:12:54.200 Why would they do that? Why would they, why would they lie to us about technological developments
00:12:58.640 of the middle ages? What? Why would they lie to us about something so obviously wrong,
00:13:04.580 just so obviously false? Well, you can, there's a couple of different ways you could look at it,
00:13:08.340 right? I mean, for example, they could be lying, um, in order to prop up a perspective that doesn't
00:13:15.240 actually hold up to scrutiny. Maybe they actually believe it. I mean, the, you know, the best liars are
00:13:20.380 the ones who actually believe what they're saying. Um, but there is this penchant for revisionist
00:13:25.780 history in the United States right now. And we see it all over the place. We see it also on Disney
00:13:31.500 plus, which some of, um, some of the viewers may have seen the reboot of the proud family on Disney
00:13:37.920 plus. There were some clips circulating of some teen, um, some teenagers on a high school stage.
00:13:45.180 It was a cartoon and they were doing basically like a spoken word thing about how the country
00:13:49.880 was built on slavery. Uh, and this was the, this was the entire purpose of the little song and
00:13:56.080 dance. And by the way, I'm going to point this out that I saw conservatives defending that I saw
00:14:01.340 particularly defensible. Um, I saw conservatives saying, well, you're just, uh, your white fragility
00:14:10.980 is showing because you are threatened by the, the true history that's being portrayed here by Disney.
00:14:17.340 And I said, no, I'm pointing out that it's wrong. Number one, it's vertical revisionism saying things
00:14:23.220 like Lincoln didn't free the slaves. I mean, you can not only freed the slaves with the emancipation
00:14:28.840 proclamation, which he could have titled it anything. He could have titled it something very simple
00:14:33.980 about the law or what have you, but he chose to title it the emancipation proclamation so that anyone
00:14:39.640 upon hearing the title of this speech would know what it was about and know what it was intended
00:14:44.800 to do. So if you're an enslaved person and you hear that there was an emancipation proclamation
00:14:50.100 given by the president, you know, right away what that's about. You don't even have to read the whole
00:14:54.380 thing, which probably, you know, you can't read anyway, but you can understand those words for sure.
00:15:00.800 Keep in mind, as we talk about the civil war, we're still a hundred years after the founding of
00:15:07.080 America. We're talking about things that occurred a hundred years after the founding. So this is what
00:15:12.240 the 1619 project does again and again, is that they constantly jump between the found, the, the
00:15:18.700 singular founding project and the founding generation of America. And then they'll jump forward to things
00:15:24.680 like the, the, the emancipation proclamation, which of course, uh, affected the Confederate States
00:15:30.800 that were, uh, that had been occupied by union troops first, later on the amendments to the
00:15:37.480 constitution, 15th amendment came in and freed the, the rest of the slaves in the union States.
00:15:42.180 Again, we're not going into all of the nuance here, but we're pointing out as you were teaching
00:15:46.700 children, number one lies about the United States, you're teaching them to hate their country and you
00:15:51.860 are teaching them that there is something wrong with them because of the color of their skin
00:15:56.260 inherently. And that is insane. There's also something very important, which is the history
00:16:02.520 of slavery in the United States. It's not a straight line at all. There was an awful lot of
00:16:06.980 nuance. Um, and in preparation for talking to you, we are coming up on a break here, but I want to get
00:16:14.500 into that research. We're going to use that folks as our, as our teaser for when we come back after the
00:16:19.960 break, Libby is going to explain to us the true history of slavery in the United States. And
00:16:25.980 it's certainly not what Disney plus. So Libya, I gave everyone a huge teaser and you were about
00:16:35.040 to tell us how slavery was not a straight line in us history. Libby, are you telling us that
00:16:40.300 the history of slavery wasn't all black and white? Oh my goodness. Yeah. I'm telling you that
00:16:47.660 I'm a dad. You're allowed to make these kinds of jokes. Um, yeah, there were black men, African men
00:16:54.980 in the South, uh, prior to the cotton mill and all of that who owned land and who owned slaves and who
00:17:02.600 also contracted indentured servants from Europe. So, and these, these men had good standing in the
00:17:08.300 community. Um, and this was true for a long time that, that this was acceptable, that this was all
00:17:13.980 right. Uh, yes, there was probably bias and that started to rear its ugly head. And some of these men
00:17:20.740 were later disenfranchised of their property, but it does stand that they were engaged in these same
00:17:27.040 practices as the white landowners that were their neighbors. And they were all on equal footing with
00:17:33.040 that. And I learned that information in a podcast from slate in 2015, that was reported by Jamel Bowie. So
00:17:41.440 I'm even getting this from the progress. Right. So there, there actually was this period where in, in the
00:17:47.540 second Obama administration and, um, you know, a lot of wokeness came about in Obama's second term
00:17:54.180 because, um, you know, I think he harbored a lot of these sentiments, um, probably cause he got too many
00:18:00.000 driving tickets, too many speeding tickets going between Chicago and Springfield. Um, that he actually
00:18:04.660 talks about this. He's actually mentioned this before that he believes he was pulled over so much
00:18:08.560 because it was because you were speeding. It wasn't the color of your skin. It was because you're
00:18:11.180 speeding. Senator, you know, that's it. That's all it was. And, and, and, and yet somehow this
00:18:19.240 all, you know, I really think that all of wokeness goes back to Barack Obama's speeding tickets.
00:18:24.520 And that's a really funny theory. You have this period where there were people in academia that were
00:18:33.460 completely opposed to wokeness and would just talk about history the way that it were, or I should say
00:18:38.540 not opposed to it, but you know, it hadn't quite hit yet. It wasn't, it wasn't quite all the way
00:18:42.140 there. Right. And, you know, I, it was interesting listening to this podcast about the history of
00:18:47.580 American slavery because so much of it was just straightforward and honest and nuanced and
00:18:53.540 really fascinating to hear the way that things changed, like the change, um, in America to change
00:19:00.780 so that the status of a child was not the father's status, but was the mother's status instead.
00:19:06.540 And that was an adjustment from British common law at the time, um, or to hear also about,
00:19:13.200 and this is something I've read and I know that you've read to hear about the founding fathers,
00:19:17.340 even those who owned, uh, slaves and who were engaged in that economy knew that it was not an
00:19:25.140 appropriate way to treat their fellow men. They wrote about it. They spoke about it. Jefferson was
00:19:31.560 sort of amazing on this and he was very troubled and so was Washington. They were both very troubled by
00:19:37.420 the institution of slavery. They were concerned about the future and how harshly they would be
00:19:44.940 judged and how the nation would be judged. And they, they talked directly about this.
00:19:50.000 I was, as, as we're, as we're in our last couple of minutes here.
00:19:53.980 And I highly encourage everyone to listen to it.
00:19:56.280 They did. No, I believe they did. And, and I would highly encourage everyone to listen to those,
00:19:59.900 those podcasts that you can find them, but also encourage, you can find it on YouTube.
00:20:03.800 You can actually find recordings of former slaves. Um, some that were made later on in their years.
00:20:09.860 Uh, the left never, ever plays those recordings, but I just, I find that stuff to be absolutely
00:20:15.040 fascinating when you can hear people describe what the, I did. I remember that. Um, I don't even
00:20:21.500 think I posted it. I think it's just fascinating for us to be able to hear the living history.
00:20:25.260 Uh, and the fact that with the internet, we have the ability to find this stuff now and share it.
00:20:28.720 That's why they always trying to shut us down. But this, this historical revisionism that we're,
00:20:34.080 we're engaged in, in this country, this idea that we should go throughout all of the past and judge it
00:20:39.780 with the social mores and the moral scruples of today. Uh, this is a huge problem. And I think
00:20:47.980 that for a lot of the time that we, um, we judge people not based on the world they were born into.
00:20:57.240 And that's what the founding fathers were, uh, came about. I mean, to take someone out of their
00:21:03.040 time, to take someone out of, I mean, keep in mind, they were using bloodletting and leeches and
00:21:07.560 all these, we don't judge them for that. We just know that that's the point that they were at at
00:21:11.940 that time. And I think there's going to be things that we're judged for today. I think, uh, abortion
00:21:16.900 is something that will certainly be judged for as a country. I think that's also, you know, certain
00:21:21.520 things that we'll take as precepts, uh, just from a medical perspective, right? Take the moral element
00:21:26.840 out of it. The idea that we, we fatten ourselves with seed oils and synthetics and this, this plant
00:21:33.100 based crap that is actually chemical based crap, uh, and tell ourselves that it's health
00:21:38.280 food. It's something that will obviously be judged on in the future. And so I don't think
00:21:43.140 that we should necessarily judge them in, in a vacuum, I guess is all I'm trying to say.
00:21:47.840 And how dangerous is it if you teach that's important. Yeah, I think that's really important.
00:21:52.740 And I also think that there's something else that we can consider when we do seek to judge
00:21:57.640 these men who, you know, it's so amazing that they all found each other at the exact same place
00:22:03.140 and were able to found this glorious country. But when we look back and we think about John Adams
00:22:08.560 and we think about Jefferson, uh, Washington, Madison, John J. Hamilton, in a lot of cases,
00:22:14.160 when they did have the power, they were not necessarily able to just go out there and abolish
00:22:21.560 slavery outright in large part because of the political climate at the time. And we think
00:22:28.960 about, yeah. And if we think about that from our current perspective, how many situations and things
00:22:35.440 are there today where we would really like to just have there be a decisive, um, you know, decision
00:22:42.020 made to abolish something or to uphold something. And people are not able to do it. Politicians,
00:22:49.200 our elected leaders are not able to do it because for me, it's cargo, expediency.
00:22:52.980 For me, it's just straight up cargo shorts. Abolish, criminalize federal law. Absolutely. Lock
00:22:58.360 everybody up. Sure. But you know what I'm saying? Public executions. You know, I'm just saying,
00:23:03.000 you know, why are they not? But maybe just maybe the manufacturers, the makers, the importers.
00:23:08.980 But Congress is not going to go forward with a full abortion ban because it's not politically
00:23:13.180 expedient and they can't get it through right now. So when we look at that. Yeah. And
00:23:19.080 so the country wasn't ready for the abolishment of slavery, um, prior to the time when it was
00:23:25.040 abolished either. And even then it was very difficult. Um, but I think that we need to
00:23:29.700 consider that when we judge, when we judge our founding fathers. Yeah. With this, we actually
00:23:35.580 should be looking at ourselves with these concerns as well. Couldn't, couldn't agree more. And I think
00:23:40.900 that we also run the problem of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, that the declaration of the
00:23:46.420 United States, the constitution, the founding of this country as a nation state, which was meant
00:23:51.000 to be separate from the global system at the time that we discussed with Norbin Laden, the British
00:23:56.440 empire was the, was globalization, right? We had globalization before it was called the British
00:24:02.260 empire. They were the, the world government. They weren't just the government of, of one.
00:24:07.200 And I never said, right. And so the idea that the United States would be founded as a country
00:24:13.300 that was completely separate to that, it didn't mean that the country was perfect. Okay. It didn't
00:24:19.180 mean the country, it was, Hey, we're, you know, we're buying this thing warts and all, but at the
00:24:22.640 same time, it also set forward a plan for a new nation that would be separate. They weren't, they
00:24:29.040 weren't going to join the Spanish empire. They weren't going to join the French empire. They weren't
00:24:32.620 going to do any of these other things. They were going to form a nation state Libby Emmons. Where
00:24:37.540 can people follow you? You can find me at Libby Emmons on Twitter, and you can check out what we're
00:24:43.320 doing at the postmillennial.com every day. Hey Libby, happy presidency. You too. Ladies and
00:24:51.360 gentlemen, as always, you have my permission to lay ashore.