For more than half a century, anti-American propagandists have waged a campaign against us. Generations of Americans have been forcefed lies designed to beat us into a state of submission and self-loathing. We ve been taught to hate ourselves, to hate the West, and to hate the figures, mostly white, mostly male, who built America. We re all familiar with their narrative: America is uniquely evil because of racism, slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. They ve waged intellectual warfare against our founding fathers and national heroes. Their rewriting of history is such flagrant propaganda that it would make Pravda blush. But that doesn t mean it s not pervasive or successful.
00:06:39.000They are tied to posts and hounds are set to worry them to death.
00:06:43.000They 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.
00:06:51.000The spectacle of a still living man with his body half eaten by the ants being not infrequently seen.
00:06:57.000Near the royal palace, there are long avenues, and when the king desires to receive an embassy with unusual pomp, gibbets are erected,
00:07:05.000and on these are hung head downward dozens of hapless slaves there to remain, guarded by the king's soldiers,
00:07:12.000until death puts an end to their sufferings.
00:07:14.000Even before the breath has left the body, however, the vulture in Dahomey's sacred bird begins his work,
00:07:20.000and the screams of the sufferers torn to pieces by the greedy birds render the vicinity of the palace hideous.
00:07:26.000Such gruesome accounts were an ironic outcome of European powers ending the slave trade decades earlier.
00:07:33.000Unsellable slaves were only useful as human sacrifices.
00:07:37.000But the annual mass execution festivals weren't even the most brutal event in Dahomey.
00:07:42.000According to the Sacramento Daily Union, they were, quote,
00:07:45.000far surpassed by the scenes which take place when the new monarch is crowned.
00:07:50.000Five hundred to a thousand men are put to death in order to provide the deceased king with a suitable retinue in the other world.
00:08:00.000On 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.
00:08:08.000The blood of the murdered men was conducted by conduits into the trench until its quantity was sufficient to float the boat.
00:08:16.000This was the level of barbarism that defined the intra-African slave trade.
00:08:21.000The Dahomey literally sailed canoes in the blood of their slaves.
00:08:26.000They butchered thousands of slaves as an offering to their king.
00:08:29.000Slavery and barbarism were a fundamental part of their culture.
00:08:33.000Now, it's worth noting here that although black Africans themselves did have slaves and routinely sold slaves,
00:08:40.000they weren't big players in the trans-oceanic transportation of slaves.
00:08:44.000They also didn't participate in the raids on the coast of Europe that we'll address later in this episode.
00:08:48.000That's because, quite frankly, they just didn't have the technology to do that.
00:08:52.000But that's never addressed by mainstream historians, nor are the details on the enslavers in Dahomey.
00:08:58.000Consider, for example, Ken Burns' recent PBS documentary on the American Revolution,
00:09:03.000where he uses passive voice to creatively skirt the question of who exactly did the enslaving.
00:09:10.000Tens of thousands were from West Africa, captured from what is now Senegal, Gambia, and Gabon,
00:09:18.000Angola, Congo, and the Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Ghana.
00:09:24.000It would be inconvenient for propagandists like Burns to point out that the slaves were already enslaved by other Africans,
00:11:15.000The Native Americans were some of the most savage fighters ever known to man.
00:11:19.000Raiding, scalping, torturing, even eating enemies.
00:11:22.000It was better to lose a battle to the U.S. Army than to get wiped out by a rival tribe.
00:11:27.000And why did the story completely change in the 1960s?
00:11:30.000It turns out there's a lot more to the American Indians than Hollywood directors and schoolteachers want you to know.
00:11:35.000This month we blow up the biggest myths about the American Indians and reclaim the real history that was stolen from us.
00:11:42.000This is the real history of the American Indian.
00:11:46.000Slavery'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.
00:12:07.000One 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.
00:12:20.000On 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.
00:12:32.000Young slaves, and specifically infants, were considered the most valuable.
00:12:37.000Poor parents often sold their own children into slavery.
00:12:40.000The historian Amanda Potany writes in her book Weavers, Scribes, and Kings, quote,
00:12:45.000A woman named Kuei made what must have been a heartbreaking decision. She would sell her daughter.
00:12:51.000We'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.
00:13:06.000A 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.
00:13:20.000A 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,
00:13:29.000included penalties for harboring fugitive slaves, and had class-based punishments for crimes based on whether the perpetrator was free or slave.
00:13:38.000Slavery 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.
00:13:48.000In Aristotle's politics, he openly declared, quote,
00:13:59.000Indeed, in ancient Athens, slaves comprised more than 35% of the population.
00:14:04.000Athenian slaves were private property and could be bought and sold.
00:14:08.000Slaves 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.
00:14:17.000They were leg ironed, routinely starved, savagely beaten, seldom saw daylight, and were worked to death with a typical life expectancy of about four years.
00:14:27.000Athens, by the way, was the best place to be a slave in the ancient world.
00:14:31.000In Sparta, slaves known as helots outnumbered citizens seven to one.
00:14:36.000And one thing that made them unusual is that they were public, not private property.
00:14:40.000But 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.
00:14:51.000Sparta was a total apartheid state and banned helots from using the same roads as Spartan citizens.
00:14:57.000Every year, Sparta's leaders would declare war on the slaves. Killing them was not considered homicide.
00:15:03.000In 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.
00:15:11.000Roman slaves were chattel, the full property of their owners. Some worked in agricultural chain gangs.
00:15:18.000The punishment for runaways was often crucifixion.
00:15:21.000After 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.
00:15:34.000The word slavery itself provides some insight into just how ubiquitous slavery has been throughout history.
00:15:40.000Slave 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.
00:15:51.000Slavery 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.
00:16:04.000Among 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.
00:16:15.000Often slavery was a simple function of power dynamics. As countries rose and fell, they'd shift from enslavers to the enslaved.
00:16:23.000Consider 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.
00:16:35.000In one raid on the village of Bonneveme to Bernier, near modern-day Wales, Irish raiders kidnapped a 16-year-old boy named Suckat.
00:16:43.000Suckat 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.
00:16:53.000And 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.
00:17:03.000Along 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.
00:17:15.000After Oliver Cromwell conquered Ireland in the mid-17th century, the situation reversed and the Irish were at the mercy of their former captives.
00:17:23.000The 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.
00:17:34.000Not easy to do with an Irish complexion, by the way.
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00:18:45.000It's a statistical reality that every living white person has ancestors who were enslaved.
00:18:51.000But a great deal of white slavery was not done by fellow Europeans.
00:18:56.000This is the town of Baltimore in County Cork, Ireland.
00:19:00.000The tranquility of its rocky shoreline was shattered on the night of June 20th, 1631.
00:19:06.000That evening at precisely two o'clock in the morning,
00:19:09.000Islamic pirates led by a commander named Morat the Younger arrived banging war drums and screaming in Arabic.
00:19:16.000They arrived on two large raiding vessels flying crescent moon flags, one 300 ton flagship equipped with 200 men and 24 pieces of ordnance,
00:19:26.000including 12 cannons on each side and a smaller, more maneuverable 100 ton ship with six iron guns on each side.
00:19:33.000It came as a shock to the Irish villagers who were mostly fishermen.
00:19:36.000According to a book called The Stolen Village, quote,
00:19:39.000None of these untraveled fisher folk would ever have seen anything like the Turkish warriors with their flashing scimitars,
00:19:46.000their swirling, flowing robes with distinctive cowls,
00:19:49.000the torchlight glistening on the sweat of bare arms which they contemptuously left unprotected by armor.
00:19:55.000Storm them, my brave ones, some of the Janissaries would have been yelling while others responded with shouts of Allah, Allah.
00:20:02.000These pirates were Janissaries and they were raised from a young age to become fearsome monk-like fighters for the Ottoman Empire.
00:20:09.000Their story offers a good look into the proliferation of slavery.
00:20:12.000The forced levy of Christians to become Janissaries is called the Devshir-Meh system,
00:20:17.000and it involved the kidnapping of hundreds of thousands of Christian boys over the 300 years that it was in place.
00:20:24.000After they were kidnapped, they were forcibly converted to Islam.
00:20:28.000They were extraordinarily disciplined and well-equipped.
00:20:30.000They carried muskets and pistols, carried in a red scarf tied around their waist,
00:20:35.000as well as their signature double-curved blades.
00:20:39.000The Janissaries had spent weeks sailing to Baltimore from Algiers, 1,200 miles away,
00:20:44.000preparing silently for precisely this moment.
00:20:47.000And when that moment arrived, the Janissaries were prepared.
00:23:07.000There was a woman there who could not walk whom they had captured easily.
00:23:11.000Her they threw on the fire along with her two-year-old baby.
00:23:15.000When she and the poor child screamed and called to God for help, the wicked Turks bellowed with laughter.
00:23:20.000They struck both child and mother with the sharp points of their spears, forcing them into the fire.
00:23:25.000They even stabbed fiercely at the poor burning bodies.
00:23:29.000In just seven days, the historian Des Ecken writes,
00:23:31.000The typical medium-sized Corsair ship usually seized five vessels, enslaved nearly 100 Englishmen, and stole roughly 60,000 pounds.
00:23:41.000Victims who weren't killed, in many cases, became galley slaves.
00:23:45.000Since the Roman era, galley slaves were considered the most effective way to keep the galleys moving, since they required coordinated rowing.
00:23:51.000If anyone took a break, they'd make the ship much less efficient.
00:23:55.000Webb notes that after a naval battle in 1571 between the Ottoman Empire and the Holy League, which includes Spain and Venice,
00:24:02.000it 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.
00:24:10.000Following the battle, the Holy League discovered that more than 12,000 European Christians had been forced to row the galleys for the Ottomans.
00:24:17.000They 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.
00:24:27.000A typical galley might have 25 oars on each side and perhaps three to five rowers for each oar.
00:24:33.000The slaves were shackled in place and were therefore physically unable to move from their designated positions.
00:24:39.000It was said in the 16th century that a galley crewed by slaves can be smelled from as far away as a mile.
00:24:45.000This was unlikely to be an exaggeration.
00:24:47.000Imagine, 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.
00:24:57.000There 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.
00:25:05.000A more dreadful fate is difficult to imagine.
00:25:08.000But not all slaves were forced to row the galleys.
00:25:10.000After returning to Algiers, some slaves, men, women and children, were put up for the auction.
00:25:15.000Children as young as 12 years old were sold as concubines.
00:25:18.000In a normal auction, children younger than seven could sell for over £100, roughly double the asking price for an attractive woman.
00:25:25.000Between 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.
00:25:36.000Unlike the transatlantic slave trade, which was driven by pure profit, the Barbary raids on Europe were motivated by bloodlust and hatred.
00:25:44.000One 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.
00:25:57.000In 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.
00:26:15.000By 1640, at least 3,000 British nationals were enslaved in Algiers alone.
00:26:21.000In just the seven year stretch from 1609 to 1616, 466 English ships were, quote, boarded and the crews taken to North Africa as slaves.
00:26:31.000In April 1625, three ships from Cornwall and one sailing from Dartmouth in Devon were captured by corsairs and the crews taken.
00:26:41.000In August 1625, a raiding party landed at Mounts Bay in Cornwall.
00:26:45.000The villagers saw the ships at anchor and fled for safety to a local church, but this was not enough to save them.
00:26:51.000The slavers dragged 60 people out of the church, loaded them onto their rowing boats, and took them on board the waiting ships.
00:26:58.000They all ended up in the slave markets of North Africa.
00:27:01.000On the 12th of that month, the mayor of Plymouth wrote to the Privy Council in London.
00:27:06.000He 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.
00:27:14.000As bad as it was to be in British waters, it was worse in southern Europe.
00:27:19.000Muslim raids on the northern shore of the Mediterranean were almost annual events of terror and pillage.
00:27:26.000In 1544, in the Bay of Naples, Algerians took 6,000 captives.
00:27:30.0006,000 more Italians were taken during the sack of Vieste in Calabria.
00:27:35.000In 1566, they took 4,000 slaves in Granada, Spain, in a single raid.
00:27:40.000They described it as reigning Christians in Algiers.
00:28:05.000Infuriated 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.
00:28:14.000Algiers had, at the time, the most powerful cannon in the whole of the Mediterranean.
00:28:20.000A 23-foot-long gun had a range of three miles.
00:28:23.000The unfortunate French consul was pushed partly into the barrel, the cannon then being discharged with a load of shrapnel, blowing him to pieces.
00:28:32.000The Algerians found 22 other Frenchmen and tied them to the muzzles of other guns and killed them the same way.
00:28:38.000When it comes to protecting yourself and your family, it's better to be prepared.
00:28:42.000That's why I'm a member of Ammo Squared.
00:28:44.000Ammo Squared lets you build an ammo reserve of your calibers steadily, month by month, without drama or excuses.
00:29:36.000One of the most shocking slave trades did not involve Europeans at all.
00:29:39.000It involved an Arab-run slave trade operation in East Africa,
00:29:43.000roughly around the same time as the Middle Passage was bringing slaves from places like Dahomey to Brazil.
00:29:49.000But unlike slaves arriving in the New World, Arabs frequently castrated male slaves to prevent them from breeding.
00:29:54.000The castration process was, in some cases, so brutal that 80 to 90 percent died during the operation.
00:30:01.000It wasn't just castration leading to mass deaths. Conditions were so brutal that three out of four died before even getting to market.
00:30:09.000The East African slave trade included legendary traders like the black ivory merchant Hamed bin Mohammed Al-Murjbi,
00:30:16.000also 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.
00:30:26.000Al-Murjbi earned his nickname Tipu Tip from the sounds his men's guns made during their raiding parties into the Congo.
00:30:33.000When he finally brought his slaves to the African coast with their ivory, they were then auctioned off to the highest bidder.
00:30:39.000So many slaves moved through East Africa that Zanzibar became the biggest slave market in the world.
00:30:45.000By some estimates, as many as 17 million East Africans were sold into slavery over 1,300 years, dwarfing the transatlantic slave trade.
00:30:54.000Many of them worked spice fields and plantations in East Africa, and the practice wasn't abolished until 1909.
00:31:00.000Once again, because of colonizers, this time from Britain.
00:31:05.000The reality is that the East African slave trade, which exceeded the West African slave trade in its duration, barbarity, and quantity of slaves,
00:31:13.000has received relatively little attention from academics and journalists.
00:31:16.000That's because it's not a useful tool for a demoralization campaign against white Americans.
00:31:21.000White Americans, by the way, whose ancestors were enslaved as well.
00:31:25.000On the morning of June 14th, 1786, Captain James Moore's family woke up on what seemed to be a normal day in southwest Virginia.
00:31:37.000But as they left the family's cabin to tend to their farm animals, the fearful war whoop was heard.
00:31:43.000And a raiding party of Ohio Valley Shawnee Indians rode down a ridgeline and attacked them.
00:31:48.000Captain Moore was shot seven times before being tomahawked and scalped.
00:31:52.000The Indians then murdered three of his children, leaving only his family members who were locked inside the cabin.
00:31:58.000Much like the Barbary pirates, the Indians broke into the house, shot the dogs, plundered and burned the home,
00:32:04.000killed the livestock, and took Moore's wife and surviving children captive.
00:32:08.000The raiding party stole horses and embarked on a journey to Detroit, which was then an open-air market for humans captured by Indians.
00:32:15.000To give you a sense of the savagery of the Indians, when one of the surviving sons, John, fell behind on the journey,
00:32:21.000the 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.
00:32:29.000They 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,
00:32:41.000who 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.
00:32:48.000Three 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,
00:32:56.000and often the stories became nationwide bestsellers. The vast majority of white slaves in the United States were owned by fellow whites.
00:33:03.000Somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of white immigrants to the American colonies arrived in bondage, often involuntarily.
00:33:10.000An estimated 350,000 arrived between 1620 and 1776, in numbers that likely far exceeded the number of black slaves who arrived in the 1600s.
00:33:20.000Mortality rates on the journey to the colonies often exceeded 20 percent. Many of them were legally classified as indentured servants under British law.
00:33:29.000Indentured servitude was, in theory, a contract entered between a poor person and a sponsor,
00:33:35.000in which the sponsor pays for the poor person's transit across the Atlantic in exchange for a set period of bondage.
00:33:42.000That, however, is the textbook definition. Reality was much harsher.
00:33:48.000In the early colonial period, there were not substantial differences between indentured servants and black slaves.
00:33:54.000Many were subjected to conditions of such brutality, duration, and heritability that historians increasingly regard slave as the more accurate term.
00:34:03.000There's no question that indentured servitude was slavery.
00:34:07.000Some indentured contracts literally used the term slave and ads issued for runaway servants asked for them to be returned to their masters.
00:34:15.000Some of them were held in bondage for life. Many of them were sent here against their will.
00:34:20.000At the outbreak of the revolution in 1776, more than 50,000 convicts were sent to the colonies as slave laborers.
00:34:27.000There 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.
00:34:41.000In 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.
00:34:53.000In colonial America, white and black slaves often bonded, according to NPR, which admits America's first slaves were white.
00:35:01.000According 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.
00:35:14.000They were treated in much the same way for many decades. They complained together. They ran away together. They rebelled together.
00:35:22.000George Washington himself had white slaves.
00:35:25.000At the beginning of your War of Independence, the Revolutionary War, there were ads in the Virginia Gazette for runaways.
00:35:32.000And 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.
00:35:44.000In 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.
00:35:54.000Conditions were so bad that 40 to 50 percent died before completing their terms.
00:35:59.000A 1671 report from Virginia Governor William Berkeley noted that the number of white slaves arriving vastly outnumbered black, quote,
00:36:07.000We 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.
00:36:18.000He then went on to note that in the early years of the colony, 80 percent of servants did not survive the first year.
00:36:25.000But it wasn't just the slaves that were multiracial. It was the slaveholders, too.
00:36:30.000At slavery's peak in 1860, thousands of slaves were owned by Choctaws, Cherokees, Creeks, and Chickasaw Indians.
00:36:38.000As Alan Taylor writes in the book American Colonies, the Iroquois were particularly brutal in this regard.
00:36:44.000In colonial America, the Iroquois would often subject captives, the ones they did not enslave,
00:36:49.000to ritualistic slaughter and cannibalism in which captives would be tied to the stake, stabbed, then prodded with hot pokers.
00:36:57.000After the victim died, the women butchered his remains, cast them into cooking kettles,
00:37:02.000and served the stew to the entire village so that all could be bound together in absorbing the captives' power.
00:37:08.000At the outbreak of the Civil War, one of South Carolina's wealthiest citizens was a planter and slaveholder named William Ellison.
00:37:15.000Census 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.
00:37:22.000During the Civil War, he and his sons made substantial donations to the Confederate government.
00:37:27.000What makes Ellison remarkable is that he was a black man.
00:37:30.000In fact, he was a freed slave whose former master had given him the business skills he needed to become a successful cotton gin manufacturer.
00:37:37.000He was such a prominent member of South Carolina society that the Charleston Mercury newspaper noted that he was a
00:37:43.000large slaveholder and is much respected throughout the district for his integrity and general good character.
00:37:49.000When the American journalist and social critic Frederick Law Olmsted visited Mississippi in the early 1860s,
00:37:55.000he described meeting a black man who told him there were, quote,
00:37:58.000Many free Negroes all about this region. Some were very rich.
00:38:01.000He pointed out to me three plantations within 20 miles owned by colored men.
00:38:05.000They bought black folks, he said, and had servants of their own.
00:38:09.000They were very bad masters, very hard and cruel.
00:38:11.000If he had got to be sold, he would like best to have an American master by him.
00:38:16.000The French black Creole masters were very severe and they whipped their N-words most to death.
00:38:25.000In total, an estimated 3,000 blacks owned roughly 20,000 slaves in 1860.
00:38:30.000And in some cases, black slaveholders purchase relatives and spouses philanthropically, rescuing them from other slaveholders.
00:38:38.000But according to the black historian Carter Godwin Woodson, they often simply bought and sold slaves like white traders.
00:38:44.000He even described one case in which, quote,
00:38:47.000A Negro shoemaker in Charleston, South Carolina purchased his wife for $700.
00:38:51.000But on finding her hard to please, he sold her a few months thereafter for $750.
00:38:57.000The 1860 census offers some context that's left out of the history textbooks in this country.
00:39:03.000That year there were 3,953,760 slaves and 487,970 total free colored population in the slave states in 1860.
00:39:14.000The reality is that a very small percentage of freed blacks and American Indians owned slaves.
00:39:19.000But the same is true for white Americans.
00:39:21.000In the 1860 census, at the very height of slavery, there were 393,975 slave owners in the U.S.
00:39:29.000out of a total population of over 31 million.
00:39:32.000That translates to about 1.2% of the population.
00:39:36.000The vast majority of American whites never owned any slaves.
00:39:40.000That's a critical point when in the context of modern calls for reparations.
00:39:45.000As a rule, black slaves in the American South had a life expectancy of 40 years and an annual mortality rate of 3 to 5%.
00:39:53.000The odds of getting married, having children, obtaining freedom were dramatically higher than slaves in the Caribbean, Brazil, East Africa or, God forbid, Dahomey.
00:40:03.000Slaves in the Caribbean lived in barracks.
00:40:08.000There's no doubt that being a slave was a bad life.
00:40:11.000But if you were to be enslaved, it was better to be enslaved in the United States.
00:40:16.000The clearest metric on this is that the U.S. slaves population kept growing after slave imports were banned in 1808.
00:40:25.000Unlike 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.
00:40:35.000Now, one reason for the better conditions could be incentives.
00:40:38.000With the import ban, slave owners' best source of slaves was high birth rates.
00:40:45.000The typical price for an able-bodied male field hand in New Orleans in 1860 was about $2,000.
00:40:50.000And if you track inflation based on the price of gold, that'd be over $100,000 today.
00:40:57.000For this reason, there are well-documented cases of slaveholders preferring to use less valuable lower-class whites for dangerous tasks.
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00:41:58.000In 1800, there was not a single country on Earth that had abolished slavery by law. Not one.
00:42:04.000By 1900, Britain, France, the United States, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, had all outlawed it.
00:42:11.000Every single abolition took place in societies under European control or heavy European pressure.
00:42:17.000In a perfect Orwellian twist of irony, it turns out white men are the heroes of the slavery story.
00:42:24.000It 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.
00:42:31.000It was the nearly 400,000 Union soldiers who died in the American Civil War,
00:42:36.000and the entirely white Congress and white legislatures that passed the 13th Amendment, ending slavery.
00:42:42.000If the legacy of slavery is a permanent, unpayable debt that justifies racial redistribution in perpetuity,
00:42:50.000then literally every ethnic group on the planet owes every other one.
00:42:56.000The descendants of the Kingdom of Dahomey, which sold millions of their fellow Africans, would owe reparations to the descendants of their victims.
00:43:03.000The Arab world would owe West Africa and Europe.
00:43:49.000The Native Americans were some of the most savage fighters ever known to man.
00:43:53.000Raiding, scalping, torturing, even eating enemies.
00:43:57.000It was better to lose a battle to the U.S. Army than to get wiped out by a rival tribe.
00:44:01.000And why did the story completely change in the 1960s?
00:44:04.000It turns out there's a lot more to the American Indians than Hollywood directors and school teachers want you to know.
00:44:09.000This month, we blow up the biggest myths about the American Indians and reclaim the real history that was stolen from us.
00:44:17.000This is the real history of the American Indian.
00:44:31.000And заключ투 my education mission is to味en away from the United States and why you select massively markets and actual librarians.
00:44:37.000For the first slide, we have to prevent BLU from being in Uni.
00:44:39.000It has given the world from being inison in Mississippi.
00:44:40.000This is the real history of the American Indians.
00:44:41.000This is what we call isolation is COLLE and core within the Yakima and an Eagle process.