The Real History of Slavery dismantles the "white guilt" narrative by exposing Dahomey’s 1.9M enslaved Africans, Arab-run Zanzibar’s 17M captives, and Ottoman galley slavery—all underreported to avoid complicating U.S. blame. It highlights Shawnee raids in 1786, white indentured servitude (60–70% of colonial immigrants), and Native American tribes’ brutal enslavement practices, including cannibalism. The episode argues that European abolition efforts, like the Royal Navy’s suppression of the transatlantic trade or the 13th Amendment, ended slavery globally, not U.S. actions alone, while questioning reparations by framing slavery as a universal historical crime. [Automatically generated summary]
For more than half a century, anti-American propagandists have waged a demoralization campaign against us.
Generations of Americans have been force-fed 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, imperialism, and so on.
They've waged intellectual warfare against our founding fathers and national heroes.
They desecrated their reputations, tore down their statues.
Their rewriting of history is such flagrant propaganda that it would make Pravda blush.
That doesn't mean that it's not pervasive or successful.
One professor from the University of Wisconsin spent 11 years administering historical literacy tests to his students.
He discovered that they overwhelmingly believed that slavery began in the U.S., was almost exclusively an American phenomenon.
A view shared, by the way, with at least one United States senator who attended Harvard Law.
The United States didn't inherit slavery from anybody.
We created it.
Despite almost total ignorance on the topic, one Washington Post poll found that a 67% majority of the public says the legacy of slavery affects American society today.
That question every black person gets, which is, slavery was a long time ago.
Why don't you get over it?
How do you get over something that is as foundational to your society as anything can be foundational?
We've been told that the history of slavery is straightforward and uncontroversial.
We've been told that black slaves were mostly captured by whites, that white colonists in the Americas routinely enslaved free black men, and that more black people were enslaved than whites.
And we've been told that we're not allowed to question any of that.
Well, enough is enough.
We're launching a monthly series setting the record straight on various historical topics.
We'll give you the facts that the propagandists and idiot school teachers have left out of the mainstream curriculum.
And we'll start today by taking on one of the central claims of modern anti-American mythology.
This is The Real History of Slavery.
Historians and political pundits spend a lot of time talking about the transatlantic slave trade, the 350 year period in which an estimated 12.5 million slaves were brought to the Americas.
But what we don't learn in school is where those slaves actually went.
Just under half of them, an estimated 5.4 million, went only to Brazil, and many more went to the Caribbean.
1.2 million went to Jamaica, more than 900,000 to St. Dominique, and 889,000 to Cuba.
The grand total of slaves brought to the future United States was about half the number brought only to Cuba.
472,372, or 3% of the total.
The ones who came to the 13 colonies were the lucky ones.
In the context of global slavery, getting put on a ship to New Orleans was really a best case scenario.
If you think American slavery was bad, wait until you see what happened to the ones who didn't make it here.
And we'll show you that over the course of this video.
But first, we start with a West African country you've likely never heard of, the Kingdom of Dahomey.
Dahomey was not a peripheral player in the Atlantic slave trade.
It was central to it.
The kingdom's wealth, its military power, and its cultural splendor were built entirely on the systematic capture, sale, and export of human beings.
By the end of the kingdom, an estimated 1.9 million slaves came from West African coastline controlled by the Dahomey.
The kingdom obtained its slaves by waging perpetual warfare upon its neighbors.
In the 19th century, a Dahomeian king named Gezzo described the slave trade as the ruling principle of my people.
It is the source of their glory and health.
Their songs celebrate their victories, and the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery.
Now, in many cases, the Kingdom of Dahomey obtained these slaves by deploying an all-female military unit called the Dahomey Amazons.
They were the chief slave catchers of the empire.
The Amazons would raid nearby towns and return with large contingents of slaves along with the heads of anyone who resisted.
One missionary who visited the country in 1861 described some of Dahomey's soldiers as equipped with three-foot-long straight razors, which they held two-handed, and which were supposedly capable of splitting a man into two halves.
According to one historian, quote, when Amazons walked out of the palace, they were preceded by a slave girl carrying a bell.
Sound told every male to get out of their path, retire a certain distance, and look the other way.
If the men didn't get out of the way, they stood a very good chance of being split in half.
The Dahomey Amazons ran roughshod over the region.
An American missionary named Jacob Bauer discovered 18 depopulated towns over 60 miles near the territory of Dahomey.
The death toll was massive.
Gezzo, the king we mentioned earlier, built a palace called the Singbo-ji, which used human skulls for bricks and human blood as mortar.
His throne sat on the skulls of four enemy chiefs.
Assuming you survived a Dahomey raid, which wasn't likely, and were taken captive, it was far preferable to be sold to Europeans than to remain in Dahomey.
Slaves they couldn't sell or that they didn't want anymore were subjected to torture and public executions.
That's because the Dahomeyans believed that they could communicate with the gods through human sacrifice.
On average, they dispatched about 500 people a year.
Roughly 10% were killed at the annual custom, a yearly mass slaughter.
In 1893, the Sacramento Daily Union reported, quote, hundreds are annually put to death with the most savage tortures.
They are dismembered limb by limb.
They're tied to posts and hounds are set to worry them to death.
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.
The spectacle of a still living man with his body half eaten by the ants being not infrequently seen.
Near the royal palace, there are long avenues, and when the king desires to receive an embassy with unusual pomp, gibbets are erected, and on these are hung head downward dozens of hapless slaves, there to remain, guarded by the king's soldiers, until death puts an end to their sufferings.
Even before the breath has left the body, however, the vulture, in Dahomey, a sacred bird, begins his work, and the screams of the sufferers torn to pieces by the greedy birds render the vicinity of the palace hideous.
Such gruesome accounts were an ironic outcome of European powers ending the slave trade decades earlier.
Unsellable slaves were only useful as human sacrifices.
But the annual mass execution festivals weren't even the most brutal event in Dahomey.
According to the Sacramento Daily Union, they were, quote, far surpassed by the scenes which take place when the new monarch is crowned.
500 to 1,000 men are put to death in order to provide the deceased king with a suitable retinue in the other world.
Then, blood flows in streams.
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.
The blood of the murdered men was conducted by conduits into the trench until its quantity was sufficient to float the boat.
This was the level of barbarism that defined the intra-African slave trade.
The Dahomey literally sailed canoes in the blood of their slaves.
They butchered thousands of slaves as an offering to their king.
Slavery and barbarism were a fundamental part of their culture.
Now, it's worth noting here that although black Africans themselves did have slaves and routinely sold slaves, they weren't big players in the trans-oceanic transportation of slaves.
They also didn't participate in the raids on the coast of Europe that we'll address later in this episode.
That's because, quite frankly, they just didn't have the technology to do that.
But that's never addressed by mainstream historians, nor are the details on the enslavers in Tahomei.
Consider, for example, Ken Burns' recent PBS documentary on the American Revolution, where he uses passive voice to creatively skirt the question of who exactly did the enslaving.
Tens of thousands were from West Africa, captured from what is now Senegal, Gambia, and Gabon, Angola, Congo, and the Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Ghana.
It would be inconvenient for propagandists like Burns to point out that the slaves were already enslaved by other Africans, mostly women, by the way.
That reality makes the white guilt narrative a little less straightforward.
And if they did mention it, they'd also be obliged to point out another inconvenient fact, that the horrors of Tahomey ended in 1894 because French colonizers invaded the country and burned the royal palaces.
The French, who freed their slaves in 1848, built hospitals, schools, instituted social services, mostly through Catholic missionaries.
In other words, they brought civilization to some of the most savage people in human history.
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What do Snow White, Cinderella, and smallpox blankets have in common?
They're all fairy tales.
For decades, you've been told that you live on stolen land.
We are right now on stolen land.
That the Indians were peaceful.
Ancient Slavery Practices00:05:16
Native Americans, we massacred them.
Your ancestors committed genocide.
And guess what?
None of it is true.
The Native Americans were some of the most savage fighters ever known to man, raiding, scalping, torturing, even eating enemies.
It was better to lose a battle to the U.S. Army than to get wiped out by a rival tribe.
And why did the story completely change in the 1960s?
It turns out there's a lot more to the American Indians than Hollywood directors and school teachers want you to know.
This month, we blow up the biggest myths about the American Indians and reclaim the real history that was stolen from us.
This is the real history of the American Indian.
Slavery's roots go back at least ancient times in Babylonia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome, as well as the Amerindian empires in Mexico and South America.
One of the earliest references to slavery comes from this clay tablet from a Middle Eastern city called Uruk, dated back to around 3300 BC, which gives us a look into Babylonian slavery, for example.
On one surface of the tablet, there's a notation showing that at least 213 people were designated by the sign combination sal ker, which means female and male slave respectively.
Young slaves and specifically infants were considered the most valuable.
Poor parents often sold their own children into slavery.
The historian Amanda Podany writes in her book Weavers, Scribes, and Kings, quote, a woman named Kue made what must have been a heartbreaking decision.
She would sell her daughter.
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.
The price of the baby was 30 shekels.
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.
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, included penalties for harboring fugitive slaves, and had class-based punishments for crimes based on whether the perpetrator was free or slave.
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.
In Aristotle's Politics, he openly declared, quote, some men are by nature free and others slaves, and that for these latter, slavery is both expedient and right.
Indeed, in ancient Athens, slaves comprised more than 35% of the population.
Athenian slaves were private property and could be bought and sold.
Slaves who worked domestic jobs or skilled crafts had a decent shot at acquiring freedom, but they were also slaves who were sent to the mines.
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.
Athens, by the way, was the best place to be a slave in the ancient world.
In Sparta, slaves known as helots outnumbered citizens seven to one.
And one thing that made them unusual is that they were public, not private property.
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.
Sparta was a total apartheid state and banned helots from using the same roads as Spartan citizens.
Every year, Sparta's leaders would declare war on the slaves.
Killing them was not considered homicide.
In the late stages of the Roman Republic, there were an estimated 2 to 3 million slaves, including roughly a third of the population of Rome.
Roman slaves were chattel, the full property of their owners.
Some worked in agricultural chain gangs.
The punishment for runaways was often crucifixion.
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.
The word slavery itself provides some insight into just how ubiquitous slavery has been throughout history.
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.
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.
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.
Often slavery was a simple function of power dynamics.
As countries rose and fell, they'd shift from enslavers to the enslaved.
Viking Slaves and Domestic Animals00:02:21
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.
In one raid on the village of Bonnevam Tibernier near modern-day Wales, Irish raiders kidnapped a 16-year-old boy named Succat.
Sucked 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.
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, 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.
After Oliver Cromwell conquered Ireland in the mid-17th century, the situation reversed and the Irish were at the mercy of their former captives.
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.
Not easy to do with an Irish complexion, by the way.
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White Slavery in Algiers00:15:42
It's a statistical reality that every living white person has ancestors who were enslaved.
But a great deal of white slavery was not done by fellow Europeans.
This is the town of Baltimore in County Cork, Ireland.
The tranquility of its rocky shoreline was shattered on the night of June 20th, 1631.
That evening at precisely 2 o'clock in the morning, Islamic pirates led by a commander named Morat the Younger arrived banging war drums and screaming in Arabic.
They arrived on two large raiding vessels flying crescent moon flags, one 300-ton flagship equipped with 200 men and 24 pieces of ordnance, including 12 cannons on each side and a smaller, more maneuverable 100-ton ship with six iron guns on each side.
It came as a shock to the Irish villagers, who were mostly fishermen.
According to a book called The Stolen Village, quote, none of these untraveled fisher folk would ever have seen anything like the Turkish warriors with their flashing scimitars, their swirling flowing robes with distinctive cowls, the torchlight glistening on the sweat of bare arms, which they contemptuously left unprotected by armor.
Storm them, my brave ones.
Some of the Janissaries would have been yelling while others responded with shouts of Allah, Allah.
These pirates were Janissaries, and they were raised from a young age to become fearsome monk-like fighters for the Ottoman Empire.
Their story offers a good look into the proliferation of slavery.
The forced levy of Christians to become Janissaries is called the Devscher Mei system, and it involved the kidnapping of hundreds of thousands of Christian boys over the 300 years that it was in place.
After they were kidnapped, they were forcibly converted to Islam.
They were extraordinarily disciplined and well-equipped.
They carried muskets and pistols, carried in a red scarf tied around their waist, as well as their signature double-curved blades.
The Janissaries had spent weeks sailing to Baltimore from Algiers, 1,200 miles away, preparing silently for precisely this moment.
And when that moment arrived, the Janissaries were prepared.
The villagers were not.
Outnumbered 10 to 1, the citizens of Baltimore never stood a chance.
Neither did the British Navy, which was responsible for patrolling the coast and protecting villages like Baltimore from attack.
The British knew through good intelligence gathering in Algiers that the Janissaries were planning an attack, but expected it to happen at a much larger and wealthier town called Kinsale, 50 miles away.
Through a captured and likely tortured fisherman, the Janissaries learned that the British fleet had left Baltimore unguarded, and they planned to move into the interior of the country to collect more Irish slaves.
But Irish ingenuity claimed the day.
Resourceful villagers gathered nearby, collected firearms and rum, and started making as much noise as possible.
This convinced the pirates that an English army was marching on them, and they retreated from Baltimore, limiting themselves to around 100 slaves.
The raid on Baltimore is unique because of where it happened, but such raids into Europe were fairly common.
In 1627, for example, corsairs took five ships in a raid on remote Haimei Island in Iceland.
With total ferocity, they killed and maimed, they raped the women and girls, dismembered infants, desecrated churches, and slaughtered a priest at prayer.
They burned and looted everything in sight and, quote, settled down to a long, unhurried orgy of rape, mutilation, and murder, which seems to have been motivated by nothing more than sadistic sport.
One account tells of the corsairs cutting people in half and callously snapping the necks of infants.
Anyone unable to keep up with their pace was cut down, and in their madness for blood, these villains then chopped and hacked the bodies into small pieces with the greatest enjoyment and lust for blood, wrote one eyewitness.
In that particular raid on Iceland, the corsairs kidnapped half the island's population.
They murdered one in 12 villagers, including several priests.
All in all, they returned to Algiers with roughly 400 slaves taken from the coast of Iceland.
And along the way, they would seize church bells and attach them to the masts of their ships as trophies.
They destroyed crucifixes and mocked Christians by destroying the Eucharist at every opportunity.
According to the book, The Forgotten Slave Trade, historian Simon Webb described this shocking contemporaneous account.
Quote, They began to set fire to the houses.
There was a woman there who could not walk, whom they had captured easily.
Her, they threw on the fire along with her two-year-old baby.
When she and the poor child screamed and called to God for help, the wicked Turks bellowed with laughter.
They struck both child and mother with the sharp points of their spears, forcing them into the fire.
They even stabbed fiercely at the poor burning bodies.
In just seven days, the historian Des Ekin writes, the typical medium-sized corsair ship usually seized five vessels, enslaved nearly 100 Englishmen, and stole roughly 60,000 pounds.
Victims who weren't killed, in many cases, became galley slaves.
Since the Roman era, galley slaves were considered the most effective way to keep the galleys moving since they required coordinated rowing.
If anyone took a break, they'd make the ship much less efficient.
Webb notes that after a naval battle in 1571 between the Ottoman Empire and the Holy League, which included Spain and Venice, 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.
Following the battle, the Holy League discovered that more than 12,000 European Christians had been forced to row the galleys for the Ottomans.
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.
Webb writes that, quote, a typical galley might have 25 oars on each side and perhaps three to five rowers for each oar.
The slaves were shackled in place and were therefore physically unable to move from their designated positions.
It was said in the 16th century that a galley crewed by slaves could be smelled from as far away as a mile.
This was unlikely to be an exaggeration.
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.
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.
A more dreadful fate is difficult to imagine.
But not all slaves were forced to row the galleys.
After returning to Algiers, some slaves, men, women, and children, were put up for the auction.
Children as young as 12 years old were sold as concubines.
In a normal auction, children younger than seven could sell for over 100 pounds, roughly double the asking price for an attractive woman.
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.
Unlike the transatlantic slave trade, which was driven by pure profit, the Barbary raids on Europe were motivated by bloodlust and hatred.
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.
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.
By 1640, at least 3,000 British nationals were enslaved in Algiers alone.
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.
In April 1625, three ships from Cornwall and one sailing from Dartmouth in Devon were captured by corsairs and the crews taken.
In August 1625, a raiding party landed at Mounts Bay in Cornwall.
The villagers saw the ships at anchor and fled for safety to a local church, but this was not enough to save them.
The slavers dragged 60 people out of the church, loaded them onto their rowing boats, and took them on board the waiting ships.
They all ended up in the slave markets of North Africa.
On the 12th of that month, the mayor of Plymouth wrote to the Privy Council in London, 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.
Now, as bad as it was to be in British waters, it was worse in southern Europe.
Muslim raids on the northern shore of the Mediterranean were almost annual events of terror and pillage.
In 1544 in the Bay of Naples, Algerians took 6,000 captives.
6,000 more Italians were taken during the sack of Vieste in Calabria.
In 1566, they took 4,000 slaves in Granada, Spain, in a single raid.
They described it as reigning Christians in Algiers.
The list goes on.
In 1617, 1,200 men in Madira.
In 1636, another 700 in Calabria, Italy.
Then 1,000 more in 1639, and 4,000 more in 1644.
In 1683, the French military attempted to free some of the slaves being held in Algiers.
The Algerians didn't take kindly to it.
Quote, 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 Lavacher.
Algiers had at the time the most powerful cannon in the whole of the Mediterranean.
It weighed 12 tons.
A 23-foot-long gun had a range of three miles.
The unfortunate French consul was pushed partly into the barrel, the cannon then being discharged with a load of shrapnel, blowing him to pieces.
The Algerians found 22 other Frenchmen and tied them to the muzzles of other guns and killed them the same way.
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Now, for the most part, these slaves, unless they were ransomed or executed inside a cannon, spent the rest of their lives in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire, which incidentally is one of those colonial empires that no one on the left seems to mind, assuming they're even aware of it.
One of the most shocking slave trades did not involve Europeans at all.
It involved an Arab-run slave trade operation in East Africa, roughly around the same time as the Middle Passage was bringing slaves from places like Tahomei to Brazil.
But unlike slaves arriving in the New World, Arabs frequently castrated male slaves to prevent them from breeding.
The castration process was in some cases so brutal that 80 to 90 percent died during the operation.
It wasn't just castration leading to mass deaths.
Conditions were so brutal that three out of four died before even getting to market.
The East African slave trade included legendary traders like the black ivory merchant Hamed bin Muhammad Almurjby, 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.
Al-Murgby earned his nickname Tipu Tip from the sounds his men's guns made during their raiding parties into the Congo.
When he finally brought his slaves to the African coast with their ivory, they were then auctioned off to the highest bidder.
So many slaves moved through East Africa that Zanzibar became the biggest slave market in the world.
By some estimates, as many as 17 million East Africans were sold into slavery over 1,300 years, dwarfing the transatlantic slave trade.
Many of them worked spice fields and plantations in East Africa, and the practice wasn't abolished until 1909.
Once again, because of colonizers, this time from Britain.
But the reality is that the East African slave trade, which exceeded the West African slave trade in its duration, barbarity, and quantity of slaves, has received relatively little attention from academics and journalists.
That's because it's not a useful tool for a demoralization campaign against white Americans.
White Americans, by the way, whose ancestors were enslaved as well.
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.
But as they left the family's cabin to tend to their farm animals, the fearful war whoop was heard, and a raiding party of Ohio Valley Shawnee Indians rode down a ridgeline and attacked them.
Captain Moore was shot seven times before being tomahawked and scalped.
The Indians then murdered three of his children, leaving only his family members who were locked inside the cabin.
Much like the Barbary pirates, the Indians broke into the house, shot the dogs, plundered and burned the home, killed the livestock, and took Moore's wife and surviving children captive.
The raiding party stole horses and embarked on a journey to Detroit, which was then an open-air market for humans captured by Indians.
To give you a sense of the savagery of the Indians, when one of the surviving sons, John, fell behind on the journey, an Indian 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.
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, 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.
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, and often the stories became nationwide bestsellers.
The vast majority of white slaves in the United States were owned by fellow whites.
Somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of white immigrants to the American colonies arrived in bondage, often involuntarily.
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.
Mortality rates on the journey to the colonies often exceeded 20%.
Many of them were legally classified as indentured servants under British law.
Indentured servitude was, in theory, a contract entered between a poor person and a sponsor in which the sponsor pays for the poor person's transit across the Atlantic in exchange for a set period of bondage.
That, however, is the textbook definition.
Reality was much harsher.
In the early colonial period, there were not substantial differences between indentured servants and black slaves.
Many were subjected to conditions of such brutality, duration, and heritability that historians increasingly regard slave as the more accurate term.
There's no question that indentured servitude was slavery.
Some indenture contracts literally use the term slave, and ads issued for runaway servants asked for them to be returned to their masters.
Some of them were held in bondage for life.
Many of them were sent here against their will.
At the outbreak of the Revolution in 1776, more than 50,000 convicts were sent to the colonies as slave laborers.
Slavery's Complexities00:08:56
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.
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.
In colonial America, white and black slaves often bonded, according to NPR, which admits America's first slaves were white.
According to some African-American historians, they call them, 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.
They were treated in much the same way for many decades.
They complained together, they ran away together, they rebelled together.
George Washington himself had white slaves.
The beginning of your War of Independence, the Revolutionary War, there were ads in the Virginia Gazette for runaways, 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.
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.
Conditions were so bad that 40 to 50 percent died before completing their terms.
A 1671 report from Virginia Governor William Berkeley noted that the number of white slaves arriving vastly outnumbered black, quote, We suppose there come in of servants about 1,500, of which most are English, a few Scotch, a few are Irish, and not above two or three ships of Negroes in seven years.
He then went on to note that in the early years of the colony, 80% of servants did not survive the first year.
But it wasn't just the slaves that were multiracial.
It was the slaveholders too.
At slavery's peak in 1860, thousands of slaves were owned by Choctas, Cherokees, Creeks, and Chickasaw Indians.
As Alan Taylor writes in the book American Colonies, the Iroquois were particularly brutal in this regard.
In colonial America, the Iroquois would often subject captives, the ones they did not enslave, to ritualistic slaughter and cannibalism in which captives would be tied to the stake, stabbed, then prodded with hot pokers.
Quote, after the victim died, the women butchered his remains, cast them into cooking kettles, and served the stew to the entire village so that all could be bound together in absorbing the captive's power.
At the outbreak of the Civil War, one of South Carolina's wealthiest citizens was a planter and slaveholder named William Ellison.
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.
During the Civil War, he and his sons made substantial donations to the Confederate government, but what makes Allison remarkable is that he was a black man.
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.
He was such a prominent member of South Carolina society that the Charleston Mercury newspaper noted that he was a large slaveholder and is much respected throughout the district for his integrity and general good character.
When the American journalist and social critic Frederick Law Olmsted visited Mississippi in the early 1860s, he described meeting a black man who told him there were, quote, many free Negroes all about this region.
Some were very rich.
He pointed out to me three plantations within 20 miles owned by colored men.
They bought black folks, he said, and had servants of their own.
They were very bad masters, very hard and cruel.
If he had got to be sold, he would like best to have an American master buy him.
The French, black Creole masters, were very severe, and they whipped their N-words most to death.
They whipped the flesh off them.
In total, an estimated 3,000 blacks owned roughly 20,000 slaves in 1860.
And in some cases, black slaveholders purchased relatives and spouses philanthropically, rescuing them from other slaveholders.
But according to the black historian Carter Godwin Woodson, they often simply bought and sold slaves like white traders.
He even described one case in which, quote, a Negro shoemaker in Charleston, South Carolina purchased his wife for $700, but on finding her hard to please, he sold her a few months thereafter for $750.
The 1860 census offers some context that's left out of the history textbooks in this country.
That year, there were 3,953,760 slaves and 487,970 total free colored population in the slave states in 1860.
The reality is that a very small percentage of freed blacks and American Indians owned slaves, but the same is true for white Americans.
In the 1860 census, at the very height of slavery, there were 393,975 slave owners in the U.S. out of a total population of over 31 million.
That translates to about 1.2% of the population.
The vast majority of American whites never owned any slaves.
That's a critical point when in the context of modern calls for reparations.
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 percent.
Their odds of getting married, having children, attaining freedom were dramatically higher than slaves in the Caribbean, Brazil, East Africa, or, God forbid, Dahomey.
Slaves in the Caribbean lived in barracks.
In the South, they had cabins.
There's no doubt that being a slave was a bad life, but if you were to be enslaved, it was better to be enslaved in the United States.
The clearest metric on this is that the U.S. slaves' population kept growing after slave imports were banned in 1808.
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.
And one reason for the better conditions could be incentives.
With the import ban, slave owners' best source of slaves was high birth rates.
Buying more was really expensive.
Typical price for an able-bodied male field hand in New Orleans in 1860 was about $2,000.
And if you track inflation based on the price of gold, that'd be over $100,000 today.
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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In 1800, there was not a single country on earth that had abolished slavery by law.
Not one.
By 1900, Britain, France, the United States, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal had all outlawed it.
Every single abolition took place in societies under European control or heavy European pressure.
In a perfect Orwellian twist of irony, it turns out white men are the heroes of the slavery story.
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.
It was the nearly 400,000 Union soldiers who died in the American Civil War, and the entirely white Congress and white legislatures that passed the 13th Amendment, ending slavery.
If the legacy of slavery is a permanent, unpayable debt that justifies racial redistribution in perpetuity, then literally every ethnic group on the planet owes every other one.
The descendants of the Kingdom of Dahomey, which sold millions of their fellow Africans, would owe reparations to the descendants of their victims.
The Arab world would owe West Africa and Europe.
The Ottomans would owe the Balkans.
The Irish would owe the English and the English would owe the Irish.
The list is endless because slavery is the norm, not America's unique shame.
But only one civilization ever decided the guilt outweighed the profit and bled itself dry to end it.
Every Group Owes00:00:53
That's the real story.
They don't teach.
What do Snow White, Cinderella, and smallpox blankets have in common?
They're all fairy tales.
For decades, you've been told that you live on stolen land.
We are right now on stolen land.
That the Indians were peaceful.
Native Americans, we massacred them.
Your ancestors committed genocide.
And guess what?
None of it is true.
The Native Americans were some of the most savage fighters ever known to man, raiding, scalping, torturing, even eating enemies.
It was better to lose a battle to the U.S. Army than to get wiped out by a rival tribe.
And why did the story completely change in the 1960s?
It turns out there's a lot more to the American Indians than Hollywood directors and school teachers want you to know.
This month, we blow up the biggest myths about the American Indians and reclaim the real history that was stolen from us.