The Matt Walsh Show - The Real History of Slavery

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00:00:30.000 For more than half a century,

00:00:33.000 anti-American propagandists have waged a demoralization campaign against us.

00:00:38.000 Generations of Americans have been force-fed lies

00:00:41.000 designed to beat us into a state of submission and self-loathing.

00:00:45.000 We've been taught to hate ourselves,

00:00:47.000 to hate the West, 0.93

00:00:48.000 and to hate the figures, mostly white, mostly male, 0.78

00:00:51.000 who built America.

00:00:53.000 We're all familiar with their narrative.

00:00:55.000 America is uniquely evil because of racism,

00:00:58.000 slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and so on.

00:01:01.000 They've waged intellectual warfare against our founding fathers and national heroes.

00:01:06.000 They desecrated their reputations, tore down their statues.

00:01:09.000 Their rewriting of history is such flagrant propaganda that it would make Pravda blush.

00:01:14.000 That doesn't mean that it's not pervasive or successful.

00:01:17.000 One professor from the University of Wisconsin spent 11 years administering historical literacy tests to his students.

00:01:23.000 He discovered that they overwhelmingly believed that slavery began in the U.S.

00:01:28.000 was almost exclusively an American phenomenon.

00:01:31.000 A view shared, by the way, with at least one United States Senator who attended Harvard Law.

00:01:36.000 The United States didn't inherit slavery from anybody. We created it.

00:01:40.000 Despite almost total ignorance on the topic, one Washington Post poll found that

00:01:44.000 a 67 percent majority of the public says the legacy of slavery affects American society today.

00:01:49.000 That question every black person gets, which is slavery was a long time ago.

00:01:53.000 Why don't you get over it?

00:01:54.000 How do you get over something that is as foundational to your society as anything can be foundational?

00:02:00.000 We've been told that the history of slavery is straightforward and uncontroversial.

00:02:05.000 We've been told that black slaves were mostly captured by whites.

00:02:09.000 That white colonists in the Americas routinely enslaved free black men.

00:02:13.000 And that more black people were enslaved than whites.

00:02:16.000 And we've been told that we're not allowed to question any of that.

00:02:20.000 Well, enough is enough.

00:02:21.000 We're launching a monthly series setting the record straight on various historical topics. 0.98

00:02:26.000 We'll give you the facts that the propagandists and idiot school teachers have left out of the mainstream curriculum. 0.92

00:02:32.000 And we'll start today by taking on one of the central claims of modern anti-American mythology. 0.99

00:02:38.000 This is the real history of slavery.

00:02:47.000 Historians and political pundits spend a lot of time talking about the transatlantic slave trade,

00:02:52.000 the 350 year period in which an estimated 12.5 million slaves were brought to the Americas.

00:02:58.000 But what we don't learn in school is where those slaves actually went.

00:03:02.000 Just under half of them, an estimated 5.4 million, went only to Brazil.

00:03:07.000 And many more went to the Caribbean.

00:03:09.000 1.2 million went to Jamaica, more than 900,000 to Saint Dominique, and 889,000 to Cuba.

00:03:16.000 The grand total of slaves brought to the future United States was about half the number brought only to Cuba.

00:03:23.000 472,372, or 3% of the total.

00:03:29.000 The ones who came to the 13 colonies were the lucky ones. 1.00

00:03:33.000 In the context of global slavery, getting put on a ship to New Orleans was really a best case scenario. 0.62

00:03:39.000 If you think American slavery was bad, wait until you see what happened to the ones who didn't make it here. 0.99

00:03:45.000 And we'll show you that over the course of this video.

00:03:48.000 But first we start with a West African country you've likely never heard of.

00:03:52.000 The Kingdom of Dahomey.

00:03:54.000 Now Dahomey was not a peripheral player in the Atlantic slave trade.

00:03:57.000 It was central to it.

00:03:59.000 The kingdom's wealth, its military power, and its cultural splendor were built entirely

00:04:04.000 on the systematic capture, sale, and export of human beings.

00:04:08.000 By the end of the kingdom, an estimated 1.9 million slaves came from West African coastline controlled by the Dahomey.

00:04:16.000 The kingdom obtained its slaves by waging perpetual warfare upon its neighbors.

00:04:21.000 In the 19th century, a Dahomeyan king named Gezzo described the slave trade as the ruling principle of my people.

00:04:28.000 It is the source of their glory and health.

00:04:31.000 Their songs celebrate their victories, and the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery.

00:04:39.000 Now in many cases, the Kingdom of Dahomey obtained these slaves by deploying an all-female military unit called the Dahomey Amazons. 1.00

00:04:47.000 They were the chief slave catchers of the empire. 0.99

00:04:51.000 The Amazons would raid nearby towns and return with large contingents of slaves, along with the heads of anyone who resisted. 1.00

00:04:59.000 One missionary who visited the country in 1861 described some of Dahomey's soldiers as equipped with three-foot-long straight razors,

00:05:07.000 which they held two-handed, and which were supposedly capable of splitting a man into two halves.

00:05:12.000 According to one historian, quote,

00:05:14.000 When Amazons walked out of the palace, they were preceded by a slave girl carrying a bell. 1.00

00:05:19.000 Sound told every male to get out of their path, retire a certain distance, and look the other way.

00:05:24.000 If the men didn't get out of the way, they stood a very good chance of being split in half.

00:05:29.000 The Dahomey Amazons ran roughshod over the region. 1.00

00:05:33.000 An American missionary named Jacob Bauer discovered 18 depopulated towns over 60 miles near the territory of Dahomey.

00:05:41.000 The death toll was massive.

00:05:43.000 Gezo, the king we mentioned earlier, built a palace called the Singbo-ji, which used human skulls for bricks and human blood as mortar. 0.51

00:05:53.000 His throne sat on the skulls of four enemy chiefs.

00:05:58.000 Assuming you survived the Dahomey raid, which wasn't likely, and were taken captive,

00:06:03.000 it was far preferable to be sold to Europeans than to remain in Dahomey. 0.82

00:06:08.000 Slaves they couldn't sell or that they didn't want anymore were subjected to torture and public executions.

00:06:14.000 That's because the Dahomeyans believed that they could communicate with the gods through human sacrifice. 1.00

00:06:20.000 On average, they dispatched about 500 people a year.

00:06:24.000 Roughly 10% were killed at the annual custom, a yearly mass slaughter.

00:06:29.000 In 1893, the Sacramento Daily Union reported, quote,

00:06:33.000 Hundreds are annually put to death with the most savage tortures.

00:06:37.000 They are dismembered limb by limb.

00:06:39.000 They are tied to posts and hounds are set to worry them to death.

00:06:43.000 They are securely fastened to the ground near the nests of the ferocious ants of the country that attack them and tear their flesh bit by bit away.

00:06:51.000 The spectacle of a still living man with his body half eaten by the ants being not infrequently seen.

00:06:57.000 Near the royal palace, there are long avenues, and when the king desires to receive an embassy with unusual pomp, gibbets are erected,

00:07:05.000 and on these are hung head downward dozens of hapless slaves there to remain, guarded by the king's soldiers,

00:07:12.000 until death puts an end to their sufferings.

00:07:14.000 Even before the breath has left the body, however, the vulture in Dahomey's sacred bird begins his work,

00:07:20.000 and the screams of the sufferers torn to pieces by the greedy birds render the vicinity of the palace hideous.

00:07:26.000 Such gruesome accounts were an ironic outcome of European powers ending the slave trade decades earlier.

00:07:33.000 Unsellable slaves were only useful as human sacrifices.

00:07:37.000 But the annual mass execution festivals weren't even the most brutal event in Dahomey.

00:07:42.000 According to the Sacramento Daily Union, they were, quote,

00:07:45.000 far surpassed by the scenes which take place when the new monarch is crowned.

00:07:50.000 Five hundred to a thousand men are put to death in order to provide the deceased king with a suitable retinue in the other world.

00:07:57.000 Then blood flows in streams.

00:08:00.000 On the accession of a present ruler, so great was the number of those wantonly slain that a large trench was made in the ground in which a canoe was placed.

00:08:08.000 The blood of the murdered men was conducted by conduits into the trench until its quantity was sufficient to float the boat.

00:08:16.000 This was the level of barbarism that defined the intra-African slave trade.

00:08:21.000 The Dahomey literally sailed canoes in the blood of their slaves. 1.00

00:08:26.000 They butchered thousands of slaves as an offering to their king.

00:08:29.000 Slavery and barbarism were a fundamental part of their culture.

00:08:33.000 Now, it's worth noting here that although black Africans themselves did have slaves and routinely sold slaves,

00:08:40.000 they weren't big players in the trans-oceanic transportation of slaves.

00:08:44.000 They also didn't participate in the raids on the coast of Europe that we'll address later in this episode.

00:08:48.000 That's because, quite frankly, they just didn't have the technology to do that.

00:08:52.000 But that's never addressed by mainstream historians, nor are the details on the enslavers in Dahomey.

00:08:58.000 Consider, for example, Ken Burns' recent PBS documentary on the American Revolution,

00:09:03.000 where he uses passive voice to creatively skirt the question of who exactly did the enslaving.

00:09:10.000 Tens of thousands were from West Africa, captured from what is now Senegal, Gambia, and Gabon,

00:09:18.000 Angola, Congo, and the Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Ghana.

00:09:24.000 It would be inconvenient for propagandists like Burns to point out that the slaves were already enslaved by other Africans,

00:09:31.000 mostly women, by the way. 1.00

00:09:33.000 That reality makes the white guilt narrative a little less straightforward.

00:09:37.000 And if they did mention it, they'd also be obliged to point out another inconvenient fact,

00:09:42.000 that the horrors of Dahomey ended in 1894 because French colonizers invaded the country and burned the royal palaces.

00:09:50.000 The French, who freed their slaves in 1848, built hospitals, schools, instituted social services,

00:09:57.000 mostly through Catholic missionaries.

00:09:59.000 In other words, they brought civilization to some of the most savage people in human history.

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00:10:53.000 What do Snow White, Cinderella, and smallpox blankets have in common?

00:10:58.000 They're all fairy tales.

00:11:00.000 For decades, you've been told that you live on stolen land.

00:11:03.000 We are right now on stolen land.

00:11:05.000 That the Indians were peaceful.

00:11:06.000 Native Americans. 0.99

00:11:07.000 We massacred them. 1.00

00:11:08.000 Your ancestors committed genocide. 0.99

00:11:10.000 And guess what?

00:11:12.000 None of it is true.

00:11:15.000 The Native Americans were some of the most savage fighters ever known to man. 1.00

00:11:19.000 Raiding, scalping, torturing, even eating enemies.

00:11:22.000 It was better to lose a battle to the U.S. Army than to get wiped out by a rival tribe. 0.96

00:11:27.000 And why did the story completely change in the 1960s?

00:11:30.000 It turns out there's a lot more to the American Indians than Hollywood directors and schoolteachers want you to know.

00:11:35.000 This month we blow up the biggest myths about the American Indians and reclaim the real history that was stolen from us.

00:11:42.000 This is the real history of the American Indian.

00:11:46.000 Slavery's roots go back at least ancient times in Babylonia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome, as well as the Amerindian empires of Mexico and South America.

00:12:07.000 One of the earliest references to slavery comes from this clay tablet from a Middle Eastern city called Uruk, dated back to around 3300 B.C., which gives us a look into Babylonian slavery, for example.

00:12:20.000 On one surface of the tablet, there's a notation showing that at least 213 people were designated by the sign combination Sal Kerr, which means female and male slave respectively.

00:12:32.000 Young slaves, and specifically infants, were considered the most valuable.

00:12:37.000 Poor parents often sold their own children into slavery.

00:12:40.000 The historian Amanda Potany writes in her book Weavers, Scribes, and Kings, quote,

00:12:45.000 A woman named Kuei made what must have been a heartbreaking decision. She would sell her daughter. 0.65

00:12:51.000 We've encountered this phenomenon before in the Ur III period when a family had to sell a child into slavery because that was the only way that the child would be able to be fed and to live, that the parents could survive.

00:13:03.000 The price of the baby was 30 shekels.

00:13:06.000 A thousand years later, Ur-Nammu, the leader of the Sumerian dynasty of Ur in southern Mesopotamia, issued a legal code with different penalties depending on whether you were legally classified as free or a slave.

00:13:20.000 A more famous ancient reference to slavery comes from the Code of Hammurabi, which established slaves as property, set rules for interactions between slaves and their owners,

00:13:29.000 included penalties for harboring fugitive slaves, and had class-based punishments for crimes based on whether the perpetrator was free or slave.

00:13:38.000 Slavery was so common in ancient Greece that most classical scholars agree that Plato simply assumed that there would be non-Greek slaves in the ideal city in the Republic.

00:13:48.000 In Aristotle's politics, he openly declared, quote,

00:13:51.000 quote,

00:13:59.000 Indeed, in ancient Athens, slaves comprised more than 35% of the population.

00:14:04.000 Athenian slaves were private property and could be bought and sold.

00:14:08.000 Slaves who worked domestic jobs or skilled crafts had a decent shot at acquiring freedom, but there were also slaves who were sent to the mines.

00:14:17.000 They were leg ironed, routinely starved, savagely beaten, seldom saw daylight, and were worked to death with a typical life expectancy of about four years.

00:14:27.000 Athens, by the way, was the best place to be a slave in the ancient world. 0.99

00:14:31.000 In Sparta, slaves known as helots outnumbered citizens seven to one.

00:14:36.000 And one thing that made them unusual is that they were public, not private property.

00:14:40.000 But because they vastly outnumbered citizens, Sparta used brutal secret police to intimidate the slaves and gave the secret police power to execute slaves who seemed strong or rebellious.

00:14:51.000 Sparta was a total apartheid state and banned helots from using the same roads as Spartan citizens.

00:14:57.000 Every year, Sparta's leaders would declare war on the slaves. Killing them was not considered homicide.

00:15:03.000 In the late stages of the Roman Republic, there were an estimated two to three million slaves, including roughly a third of the population of Rome.

00:15:11.000 Roman slaves were chattel, the full property of their owners. Some worked in agricultural chain gangs. 0.70

00:15:18.000 The punishment for runaways was often crucifixion.

00:15:21.000 After a slave rebellion in 71 BC, the Roman general Marcus Licinius Crassus crucified 6,000 slaves on the road from Capua to Rome, a dead slave mounted to a cross every 100 feet or so.

00:15:34.000 The word slavery itself provides some insight into just how ubiquitous slavery has been throughout history.

00:15:40.000 Slave comes directly from the ethnic term Slav, because the people who lived in Central and Eastern Europe, Slavic peoples, were so frequently captured and sold into slavery from the 8th to 11th centuries.

00:15:51.000 Slavery was widespread outside of Europe, too, of course. According to the anthropologist Pierre van den Berg, war captives and slaves were systematically humiliated and often tortured to death in some North American Indian societies.

00:16:04.000 Among some South American groups of the Amazon rainforest, slaves were well fed, but only in preparation for a cannibalistic feast preceded by a mock battle in which the slave would be clubbed to death.

00:16:15.000 Often slavery was a simple function of power dynamics. As countries rose and fell, they'd shift from enslavers to the enslaved.

00:16:23.000 Consider the case of the Irish in the early 5th century, as the power of Rome declined. Irish marauders frequently raided the British coast for loot and slaves. Thousands of men, women and children were taken.

00:16:35.000 In one raid on the village of Bonneveme to Bernier, near modern-day Wales, Irish raiders kidnapped a 16-year-old boy named Suckat.

00:16:43.000 Suckat spent six years as a slave at a sheep farm in Northern Ireland. He later escaped, returned home, became a priest, and came back to the land of his captivity as a missionary.

00:16:53.000 And we know him today as St. Patrick, patron saint of Ireland. By 795 AD, the tides had turned and now Vikings were enslaving the Irish.

00:17:03.000 Along with many other Northern Europeans, Viking slaves were seen as cattle, or as advanced domestic animals, who typically lived in the darkest end of the longhouse with the other domestic animals.

00:17:15.000 After Oliver Cromwell conquered Ireland in the mid-17th century, the situation reversed and the Irish were at the mercy of their former captives.

00:17:23.000 The new English regime forced the relocation of roughly 80,000 Irish men, women and children to sugar colonies in the Caribbean, where they were held in bondage and forced to work in the fields.

00:17:34.000 Not easy to do with an Irish complexion, by the way. 1.00

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00:18:45.000 It's a statistical reality that every living white person has ancestors who were enslaved.

00:18:51.000 But a great deal of white slavery was not done by fellow Europeans.

00:18:56.000 This is the town of Baltimore in County Cork, Ireland.

00:19:00.000 The tranquility of its rocky shoreline was shattered on the night of June 20th, 1631.

00:19:06.000 That evening at precisely two o'clock in the morning,

00:19:09.000 Islamic pirates led by a commander named Morat the Younger arrived banging war drums and screaming in Arabic.

00:19:16.000 They arrived on two large raiding vessels flying crescent moon flags, one 300 ton flagship equipped with 200 men and 24 pieces of ordnance,

00:19:26.000 including 12 cannons on each side and a smaller, more maneuverable 100 ton ship with six iron guns on each side.

00:19:33.000 It came as a shock to the Irish villagers who were mostly fishermen.

00:19:36.000 According to a book called The Stolen Village, quote,

00:19:39.000 None of these untraveled fisher folk would ever have seen anything like the Turkish warriors with their flashing scimitars, 1.00

00:19:46.000 their swirling, flowing robes with distinctive cowls,

00:19:49.000 the torchlight glistening on the sweat of bare arms which they contemptuously left unprotected by armor.

00:19:55.000 Storm them, my brave ones, some of the Janissaries would have been yelling while others responded with shouts of Allah, Allah. 0.70

00:20:02.000 These pirates were Janissaries and they were raised from a young age to become fearsome monk-like fighters for the Ottoman Empire. 0.60

00:20:09.000 Their story offers a good look into the proliferation of slavery.

00:20:12.000 The forced levy of Christians to become Janissaries is called the Devshir-Meh system, 0.99

00:20:17.000 and it involved the kidnapping of hundreds of thousands of Christian boys over the 300 years that it was in place.

00:20:24.000 After they were kidnapped, they were forcibly converted to Islam.

00:20:28.000 They were extraordinarily disciplined and well-equipped.

00:20:30.000 They carried muskets and pistols, carried in a red scarf tied around their waist,

00:20:35.000 as well as their signature double-curved blades.

00:20:39.000 The Janissaries had spent weeks sailing to Baltimore from Algiers, 1,200 miles away,

00:20:44.000 preparing silently for precisely this moment.

00:20:47.000 And when that moment arrived, the Janissaries were prepared.

00:20:50.000 The villagers were not.

00:20:52.000 Outnumbered 10 to 1, the citizens of Baltimore never stood a chance.

00:20:56.000 Neither did the British Navy, which was responsible for patrolling the coast and protecting villages like Baltimore from attack.

00:21:02.000 The British knew through good intelligence gathering in Algiers that the Janissaries were planning an attack, 0.99

00:21:08.000 but expected it to happen at a much larger and wealthier town called Kinsale, 50 miles away.

00:21:13.000 Through a captured and likely tortured fisherman, the Janissaries learned that the British fleet had left Baltimore unguarded,

00:21:20.000 and they planned to move into the interior of the country to collect more Irish slaves.

00:21:25.000 But Irish ingenuity claimed the day.

00:21:28.000 Resourceful villagers gathered nearby, collected firearms and rum,

00:21:32.000 and started making as much noise as possible.

00:21:35.000 This convinced the pirates that an English army was marching on them,

00:21:38.000 and they were treated from Baltimore, limiting themselves to around 100 slaves.

00:21:43.000 The raid on Baltimore is unique because of where it happened, but such raids into Europe were fairly common.

00:21:49.000 In 1627, for example, Corsairs took five ships in a raid on remote Heimei Island in Iceland.

00:21:55.000 With total ferocity, they killed and maimed, they raped the women and girls, 0.96

00:22:00.000 dismembered infants, desecrated churches, and slaughtered a priest at prayer. 0.98

00:22:05.000 They burned and looted everything in sight and, quote, settled down to a long, unhurried orgy of rape, mutilation, and murder, 0.56

00:22:13.000 which seems to have been motivated by nothing more than sadistic sport.

00:22:16.000 One account tells of the Corsairs cutting people in half and callously snapping the necks of infants.

00:22:22.000 Anyone unable to keep up with their pace was cut down.

00:22:26.000 In their madness for blood, these villains then chopped and hacked the bodies into small pieces

00:22:31.000 with the greatest enjoyment and lust for blood, wrote one eyewitness.

00:22:35.000 In that particular raid on Iceland, the Corsairs kidnapped half the island's population.

00:22:40.000 They murdered one in 12 villagers, including several priests.

00:22:43.000 All in all, they returned to Algiers with roughly 400 slaves taken from the coast of Iceland.

00:22:48.000 And along the way, they would seize church bells and attach them to the mass of their ships as trophies.

00:22:54.000 They destroyed crucifixes and mocked Christians by destroying the Eucharist at every opportunity. 0.83

00:22:59.000 According to the book The Forgotten Slave Trade, historian Simon Webb described this shocking contemporaneous account, quote,

00:23:05.000 They began to set fire to the houses.

00:23:07.000 There was a woman there who could not walk whom they had captured easily.

00:23:11.000 Her they threw on the fire along with her two-year-old baby.

00:23:15.000 When she and the poor child screamed and called to God for help, the wicked Turks bellowed with laughter. 1.00

00:23:20.000 They struck both child and mother with the sharp points of their spears, forcing them into the fire.

00:23:25.000 They even stabbed fiercely at the poor burning bodies.

00:23:29.000 In just seven days, the historian Des Ecken writes,

00:23:31.000 The typical medium-sized Corsair ship usually seized five vessels, enslaved nearly 100 Englishmen, and stole roughly 60,000 pounds.

00:23:41.000 Victims who weren't killed, in many cases, became galley slaves.

00:23:45.000 Since the Roman era, galley slaves were considered the most effective way to keep the galleys moving, since they required coordinated rowing.

00:23:51.000 If anyone took a break, they'd make the ship much less efficient.

00:23:55.000 Webb notes that after a naval battle in 1571 between the Ottoman Empire and the Holy League, which includes Spain and Venice,

00:24:02.000 it became evident just how many Christians had been forced to row boats for the Ottomans and what horrific conditions these galley slaves had to endure.

00:24:10.000 Following the battle, the Holy League discovered that more than 12,000 European Christians had been forced to row the galleys for the Ottomans.

00:24:17.000 They were shackled 24 hours a day. They were not afforded the opportunity to lie down to sleep, not that there was any room to do so in any event.

00:24:25.000 Webb writes that, quote,

00:24:26.000 Webb writes that, quote,

00:24:27.000 A typical galley might have 25 oars on each side and perhaps three to five rowers for each oar.

00:24:33.000 The slaves were shackled in place and were therefore physically unable to move from their designated positions.

00:24:39.000 It was said in the 16th century that a galley crewed by slaves can be smelled from as far away as a mile.

00:24:45.000 This was unlikely to be an exaggeration.

00:24:47.000 Imagine, if you will, hundreds of men confined in a narrow space and compelled by nature to open their bladders and bowels where they were seated day in and day out for years at a time.

00:24:57.000 There was no provision for washing. The only prospect of escape for the Ottoman galley slaves was if ships of a Christian nation defeated the Ottomans. 0.82

00:25:05.000 A more dreadful fate is difficult to imagine.

00:25:08.000 But not all slaves were forced to row the galleys.

00:25:10.000 After returning to Algiers, some slaves, men, women and children, were put up for the auction.

00:25:15.000 Children as young as 12 years old were sold as concubines.

00:25:18.000 In a normal auction, children younger than seven could sell for over £100, roughly double the asking price for an attractive woman. 0.97

00:25:25.000 Between 1500 and 1800 AD, the Ottomans and their North African corsairs, also called Barbary pirates, likely enslaved roughly a million and a half people from Christian Europe.

00:25:36.000 Unlike the transatlantic slave trade, which was driven by pure profit, the Barbary raids on Europe were motivated by bloodlust and hatred.

00:25:44.000 One historian described it as revenge, almost a jihad, for the expulsion of Muslims from Spain in 1492, for the centuries of crusading violence that had preceded them, and for the ongoing religious struggle between Christians and Muslims.

00:25:57.000 In the first half of the 17th century, Barbary slavers were sailing through the English Channel and into the Thames estuary, plundering local shipping and coastal towns such that, as the minutes of Parliament put it, the fishermen are afraid to put to sea, and were forced to keep continual watch on all our coasts.

00:26:15.000 By 1640, at least 3,000 British nationals were enslaved in Algiers alone.

00:26:21.000 In just the seven year stretch from 1609 to 1616, 466 English ships were, quote, boarded and the crews taken to North Africa as slaves.

00:26:31.000 In April 1625, three ships from Cornwall and one sailing from Dartmouth in Devon were captured by corsairs and the crews taken.

00:26:41.000 In August 1625, a raiding party landed at Mounts Bay in Cornwall.

00:26:45.000 The villagers saw the ships at anchor and fled for safety to a local church, but this was not enough to save them.

00:26:51.000 The slavers dragged 60 people out of the church, loaded them onto their rowing boats, and took them on board the waiting ships.

00:26:58.000 They all ended up in the slave markets of North Africa.

00:27:01.000 On the 12th of that month, the mayor of Plymouth wrote to the Privy Council in London.

00:27:06.000 He pleaded for assistance from the Navy because in 10 days, 27 ships had been taken, and all of the men on board, over 200 of them, had been made slaves.

00:27:14.000 As bad as it was to be in British waters, it was worse in southern Europe.

00:27:19.000 Muslim raids on the northern shore of the Mediterranean were almost annual events of terror and pillage.

00:27:26.000 In 1544, in the Bay of Naples, Algerians took 6,000 captives.

00:27:30.000 6,000 more Italians were taken during the sack of Vieste in Calabria.

00:27:35.000 In 1566, they took 4,000 slaves in Granada, Spain, in a single raid.

00:27:40.000 They described it as reigning Christians in Algiers.

00:27:43.000 The list goes on.

00:27:45.000 In 1617, 1,200 men in Madira.

00:27:48.000 In 1636, another 700 in Calabria, Italy.

00:27:52.000 Then 1,000 more in 1639.

00:27:54.000 And 4,000 more in 1644.

00:27:57.000 In 1683, the French military attempted to free some of the slaves being held in Algiers.

00:28:02.000 The Algerians didn't take kindly to it.

00:28:04.000 Quote,

00:28:05.000 Infuriated at their helplessness in the face of such an attack, the Algerians decided to vent their anger upon those Frenchmen who were at their mercy, including Jean Lavachet.

00:28:14.000 Algiers had, at the time, the most powerful cannon in the whole of the Mediterranean.

00:28:19.000 It weighed 12 tons.

00:28:20.000 A 23-foot-long gun had a range of three miles.

00:28:23.000 The unfortunate French consul was pushed partly into the barrel, the cannon then being discharged with a load of shrapnel, blowing him to pieces.

00:28:32.000 The Algerians found 22 other Frenchmen and tied them to the muzzles of other guns and killed them the same way. 0.87

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00:29:20.000 Now, for the most part, these slaves, unless they were ransomed or executed inside a cannon,

00:29:25.000 spent the rest of their lives in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire,

00:29:28.000 which incidentally is one of those colonial empires that no one on the left seems to mind,

00:29:33.000 assuming they're even aware of it.

00:29:36.000 One of the most shocking slave trades did not involve Europeans at all.

00:29:39.000 It involved an Arab-run slave trade operation in East Africa,

00:29:43.000 roughly around the same time as the Middle Passage was bringing slaves from places like Dahomey to Brazil.

00:29:49.000 But unlike slaves arriving in the New World, Arabs frequently castrated male slaves to prevent them from breeding. 0.52

00:29:54.000 The castration process was, in some cases, so brutal that 80 to 90 percent died during the operation.

00:30:01.000 It wasn't just castration leading to mass deaths. Conditions were so brutal that three out of four died before even getting to market.

00:30:09.000 The East African slave trade included legendary traders like the black ivory merchant Hamed bin Mohammed Al-Murjbi,

00:30:16.000 also known as Tipu Tip, who organized the removal of between 50,000 to 100,000 slaves from the Congo to move ivory to markets on the coast.

00:30:26.000 Al-Murjbi earned his nickname Tipu Tip from the sounds his men's guns made during their raiding parties into the Congo.

00:30:33.000 When he finally brought his slaves to the African coast with their ivory, they were then auctioned off to the highest bidder.

00:30:39.000 So many slaves moved through East Africa that Zanzibar became the biggest slave market in the world.

00:30:45.000 By some estimates, as many as 17 million East Africans were sold into slavery over 1,300 years, dwarfing the transatlantic slave trade.

00:30:54.000 Many of them worked spice fields and plantations in East Africa, and the practice wasn't abolished until 1909.

00:31:00.000 Once again, because of colonizers, this time from Britain.

00:31:05.000 The reality is that the East African slave trade, which exceeded the West African slave trade in its duration, barbarity, and quantity of slaves,

00:31:13.000 has received relatively little attention from academics and journalists.

00:31:16.000 That's because it's not a useful tool for a demoralization campaign against white Americans.

00:31:21.000 White Americans, by the way, whose ancestors were enslaved as well.

00:31:25.000 On the morning of June 14th, 1786, Captain James Moore's family woke up on what seemed to be a normal day in southwest Virginia.

00:31:37.000 But as they left the family's cabin to tend to their farm animals, the fearful war whoop was heard.

00:31:43.000 And a raiding party of Ohio Valley Shawnee Indians rode down a ridgeline and attacked them.

00:31:48.000 Captain Moore was shot seven times before being tomahawked and scalped.

00:31:52.000 The Indians then murdered three of his children, leaving only his family members who were locked inside the cabin.

00:31:58.000 Much like the Barbary pirates, the Indians broke into the house, shot the dogs, plundered and burned the home, 1.00

00:32:04.000 killed the livestock, and took Moore's wife and surviving children captive.

00:32:08.000 The raiding party stole horses and embarked on a journey to Detroit, which was then an open-air market for humans captured by Indians.

00:32:15.000 To give you a sense of the savagery of the Indians, when one of the surviving sons, John, fell behind on the journey,

00:32:21.000 the Indians split his head open with a tomahawk and then told John's mother what happened with her son's bloody scalp hanging in his waistband. 0.65

00:32:29.000 They reached Detroit in December, where, in a drunken frolic, one of the surviving daughters, Mary Moore, was sold into slavery for a few gallons of rum to a man named Stogwell, 0.97

00:32:41.000 who had been an active Tory during the war and had removed to Canada after it closed for fear of losing his life if he remained in the United States.

00:32:48.000 Three years later, she was rescued by her brother and returned to the United States. Stories like Mary Moore's were common in the early frontier period in America,

00:32:56.000 and often the stories became nationwide bestsellers. The vast majority of white slaves in the United States were owned by fellow whites.

00:33:03.000 Somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of white immigrants to the American colonies arrived in bondage, often involuntarily.

00:33:10.000 An estimated 350,000 arrived between 1620 and 1776, in numbers that likely far exceeded the number of black slaves who arrived in the 1600s.

00:33:20.000 Mortality rates on the journey to the colonies often exceeded 20 percent. Many of them were legally classified as indentured servants under British law.

00:33:29.000 Indentured servitude was, in theory, a contract entered between a poor person and a sponsor,

00:33:35.000 in which the sponsor pays for the poor person's transit across the Atlantic in exchange for a set period of bondage.

00:33:42.000 That, however, is the textbook definition. Reality was much harsher.

00:33:48.000 In the early colonial period, there were not substantial differences between indentured servants and black slaves.

00:33:54.000 Many were subjected to conditions of such brutality, duration, and heritability that historians increasingly regard slave as the more accurate term.

00:34:03.000 There's no question that indentured servitude was slavery.

00:34:07.000 Some indentured contracts literally used the term slave and ads issued for runaway servants asked for them to be returned to their masters.

00:34:15.000 Some of them were held in bondage for life. Many of them were sent here against their will.

00:34:20.000 At the outbreak of the revolution in 1776, more than 50,000 convicts were sent to the colonies as slave laborers.

00:34:27.000 There were all sorts of sources of white slavery. They were the convicts, the urban poor, political prisoners, thieves, prostitutes, vagrants, prisoners of war, anyone designated undesirable by the British government.

00:34:41.000 In the winter of 1650, 150 ragged Scottish prisoners of war arrived at Massachusetts Bay Colony, where they were sold as indentured laborers for 20 to 30 pounds each.

00:34:53.000 In colonial America, white and black slaves often bonded, according to NPR, which admits America's first slaves were white.

00:35:01.000 According to some African American historians, there was no sign or little sign of racial tension between the English servants, which we reckon were slaves, and the African servants, also called servants.

00:35:14.000 They were treated in much the same way for many decades. They complained together. They ran away together. They rebelled together.

00:35:22.000 George Washington himself had white slaves.

00:35:25.000 At the beginning of your War of Independence, the Revolutionary War, there were ads in the Virginia Gazette for runaways.

00:35:32.000 And I think there were that week there were something like 11 for white runaways and three for black runaways. And two of the 11 white runaways were being advertised by George Washington.

00:35:44.000 In early Virginia and Maryland, indentured servants, mostly English, Irish and Scottish, did the same jobs that enslaved Africans would do in the 19th century, mostly tobacco farming.

00:35:54.000 Conditions were so bad that 40 to 50 percent died before completing their terms.

00:35:59.000 A 1671 report from Virginia Governor William Berkeley noted that the number of white slaves arriving vastly outnumbered black, quote,

00:36:07.000 We suppose there come in of servants about 1,500, of which most are English, few Scotch, fewer Irish, and not above two or three ships of Negroes in seven years.

00:36:18.000 He then went on to note that in the early years of the colony, 80 percent of servants did not survive the first year.

00:36:25.000 But it wasn't just the slaves that were multiracial. It was the slaveholders, too.

00:36:30.000 At slavery's peak in 1860, thousands of slaves were owned by Choctaws, Cherokees, Creeks, and Chickasaw Indians.

00:36:38.000 As Alan Taylor writes in the book American Colonies, the Iroquois were particularly brutal in this regard.

00:36:44.000 In colonial America, the Iroquois would often subject captives, the ones they did not enslave, 0.81

00:36:49.000 to ritualistic slaughter and cannibalism in which captives would be tied to the stake, stabbed, then prodded with hot pokers.

00:36:56.000 Quote,

00:36:57.000 After the victim died, the women butchered his remains, cast them into cooking kettles, 1.00

00:37:02.000 and served the stew to the entire village so that all could be bound together in absorbing the captives' power.

00:37:08.000 At the outbreak of the Civil War, one of South Carolina's wealthiest citizens was a planter and slaveholder named William Ellison.

00:37:15.000 Census records show that at the outset of the Civil War, he owned 63 slaves, making him one of the biggest slave owners in the region.

00:37:22.000 During the Civil War, he and his sons made substantial donations to the Confederate government.

00:37:27.000 What makes Ellison remarkable is that he was a black man.

00:37:30.000 In fact, he was a freed slave whose former master had given him the business skills he needed to become a successful cotton gin manufacturer.

00:37:37.000 He was such a prominent member of South Carolina society that the Charleston Mercury newspaper noted that he was a

00:37:43.000 large slaveholder and is much respected throughout the district for his integrity and general good character.

00:37:49.000 When the American journalist and social critic Frederick Law Olmsted visited Mississippi in the early 1860s,

00:37:55.000 he described meeting a black man who told him there were, quote,

00:37:58.000 Many free Negroes all about this region. Some were very rich. 0.97

00:38:01.000 He pointed out to me three plantations within 20 miles owned by colored men.

00:38:05.000 They bought black folks, he said, and had servants of their own. 0.97

00:38:09.000 They were very bad masters, very hard and cruel. 0.95

00:38:11.000 If he had got to be sold, he would like best to have an American master by him. 0.97

00:38:16.000 The French black Creole masters were very severe and they whipped their N-words most to death. 1.00

00:38:23.000 They whipped the flesh off. 0.78

00:38:25.000 In total, an estimated 3,000 blacks owned roughly 20,000 slaves in 1860.

00:38:30.000 And in some cases, black slaveholders purchase relatives and spouses philanthropically, rescuing them from other slaveholders. 0.79

00:38:38.000 But according to the black historian Carter Godwin Woodson, they often simply bought and sold slaves like white traders.

00:38:44.000 He even described one case in which, quote,

00:38:47.000 A Negro shoemaker in Charleston, South Carolina purchased his wife for $700. 0.98

00:38:51.000 But on finding her hard to please, he sold her a few months thereafter for $750.

00:38:57.000 The 1860 census offers some context that's left out of the history textbooks in this country.

00:39:03.000 That year there were 3,953,760 slaves and 487,970 total free colored population in the slave states in 1860. 0.78

00:39:14.000 The reality is that a very small percentage of freed blacks and American Indians owned slaves.

00:39:19.000 But the same is true for white Americans. 0.64

00:39:21.000 In the 1860 census, at the very height of slavery, there were 393,975 slave owners in the U.S.

00:39:29.000 out of a total population of over 31 million.

00:39:32.000 That translates to about 1.2% of the population.

00:39:36.000 The vast majority of American whites never owned any slaves.

00:39:40.000 That's a critical point when in the context of modern calls for reparations.

00:39:45.000 As a rule, black slaves in the American South had a life expectancy of 40 years and an annual mortality rate of 3 to 5%.

00:39:53.000 The odds of getting married, having children, obtaining freedom were dramatically higher than slaves in the Caribbean, Brazil, East Africa or, God forbid, Dahomey.

00:40:03.000 Slaves in the Caribbean lived in barracks.

00:40:06.000 In the South, they had cabins.

00:40:08.000 There's no doubt that being a slave was a bad life.

00:40:11.000 But if you were to be enslaved, it was better to be enslaved in the United States. 0.89

00:40:16.000 The clearest metric on this is that the U.S. slaves population kept growing after slave imports were banned in 1808.

00:40:25.000 Unlike other parts of the Americas where deaths exceeded births, the U.S. ended up with nearly 4 million slaves in 1860 despite only 400,000 arrivals.

00:40:35.000 Now, one reason for the better conditions could be incentives.

00:40:38.000 With the import ban, slave owners' best source of slaves was high birth rates.

00:40:43.000 Buying more was really expensive.

00:40:45.000 The typical price for an able-bodied male field hand in New Orleans in 1860 was about $2,000.

00:40:50.000 And if you track inflation based on the price of gold, that'd be over $100,000 today.

00:40:57.000 For this reason, there are well-documented cases of slaveholders preferring to use less valuable lower-class whites for dangerous tasks.

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00:41:58.000 In 1800, there was not a single country on Earth that had abolished slavery by law. Not one.

00:42:04.000 By 1900, Britain, France, the United States, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, had all outlawed it.

00:42:11.000 Every single abolition took place in societies under European control or heavy European pressure.

00:42:17.000 In a perfect Orwellian twist of irony, it turns out white men are the heroes of the slavery story. 0.90

00:42:24.000 It was the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron that freed hundreds of thousands of African slaves, all done at the expense of the British taxpayer.

00:42:31.000 It was the nearly 400,000 Union soldiers who died in the American Civil War,

00:42:36.000 and the entirely white Congress and white legislatures that passed the 13th Amendment, ending slavery.

00:42:42.000 If the legacy of slavery is a permanent, unpayable debt that justifies racial redistribution in perpetuity,

00:42:50.000 then literally every ethnic group on the planet owes every other one.

00:42:56.000 The descendants of the Kingdom of Dahomey, which sold millions of their fellow Africans, would owe reparations to the descendants of their victims. 0.99

00:43:03.000 The Arab world would owe West Africa and Europe. 1.00

00:43:06.000 The Ottomans would owe the Balkans. 0.97

00:43:08.000 The Irish would owe the English, and the English would owe the Irish. 0.98

00:43:11.000 The list is endless because slavery is the norm, not America's unique shame.

00:43:17.000 But only one civilization ever decided the guilt outweighed the profit and bled itself dry to end it.

00:43:24.000 That's the real story they don't teach.

00:43:27.000 What do Snow White, Cinderella, and Smallpox blankets have in common?

00:43:32.000 They're all fairy tales.

00:43:34.000 For decades, you've been told that you live on stolen land.

00:43:37.000 That we are right now on stolen land.

00:43:39.000 That the Indians were peaceful. 0.97

00:43:41.000 Native Americans, we massacred them. 1.00

00:43:43.000 Your ancestors committed genocide. 0.99

00:43:45.000 And guess what?

00:43:47.000 None of it is true.

00:43:49.000 The Native Americans were some of the most savage fighters ever known to man. 1.00

00:43:53.000 Raiding, scalping, torturing, even eating enemies.

00:43:57.000 It was better to lose a battle to the U.S. Army than to get wiped out by a rival tribe. 0.96

00:44:01.000 And why did the story completely change in the 1960s?

00:44:04.000 It turns out there's a lot more to the American Indians than Hollywood directors and school teachers want you to know.

00:44:09.000 This month, we blow up the biggest myths about the American Indians and reclaim the real history that was stolen from us.

00:44:17.000 This is the real history of the American Indian.

00:44:31.000 And заключ투 my education mission is to味en away from the United States and why you select massively markets and actual librarians.

00:44:37.000 For the first slide, we have to prevent BLU from being in Uni.

00:44:39.000 It has given the world from being inison in Mississippi.

00:44:40.000 This is the real history of the American Indians.

00:44:41.000 This is what we call isolation is COLLE and core within the Yakima and an Eagle process.

00:44:43.000 Many physicians are still

The Matt Walsh Show - February 18, 2026

The Real History of Slavery

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