Feb. 20, 2023 - Human Events Daily - Jack Posobiec
24:49
EPISODE 399: WAS AMERICA FOUNDED ON SLAVERY?
On today’s President’s Day Special Edition of Human Events Daily, Jack Posobiec is joined by Editor-In-Chief of The Post Millennial, Libby Emmons where they dissect the founding of America and the misconception, perpetuated by the 1619 project that the country was founded on slavery. From the economics of the industrial revolution to the founding fathers valiant battle to abolish slavery, Poso and Libby deliver all the facts with zero static. They dive deep into the regional aspect of the sla...
Welcome to the Human Events Daily President's Day special.
We're going to be asking a simple question.
Was America founded on slavery?
Was the 1619 Project correct in that?
I don't think they were, but we're going to have a discussion all about it.
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Let's get into it.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard to today's edition of Human Events Daily.
Today is our President's Day special, and I decided to take aim at the 1619 Project today and to really focus on this indelible question that they've posed for us.
Was America founded on slavery?
Was the founding of America done in order to perpetuate the institution of slavery to protect and potentially expand?
Slavery in the 13 colonies.
And that is why America, of course, as we know, the early and the early presidents led this revolution against the British Empire, pulled the United States, pulled the 13 colonies out of the British Empire, which was sort of the global international trade system at the time, set themselves up as their own shop, created their own country, their own declaration.
Constitution was all of this done.
All of the stories that we've been told for generations in this country.
Was all of it done in furtherance of slavery?
Well, to help me on this, bringing back to the show, Editor-in-Chief of the Postmillennial, Ms.
Libby Evans.
Libby, thank you so much for joining us today.
Sure thing, Jack, thanks.
So Libby, I mean, I've actually did a little research.
I know, crazy, right?
But it turns out that Posto has the receipts as usual.
British imports from the colonies, 1768 to 1772.
Turns out, That from New England, hardly any.
From the Middle Colonies, hardly any.
From the Chesapeake, maybe if I were being generous, I'd say 8%, but it looks like about 10.
From the Carolinas, maybe 5%.
Yet the West Indies, it turns out, the British imports, over 30% Now, Libby, correct me if I'm wrong, were the West Indies part of the original 13 colonies?
They were not part of the original 13 colonies.
No, they were not.
So the Caribbean was not part of the revolution, at least in terms of the the the areas that rebelled.
They had they had revolutions and rebellions later on that were not connected.
Many of them were, by the way, slave driven.
Obviously, Haiti is, of course, a great example of this, even though it was French, not British.
But when when you look at this and in fact, we're all taught in school about the triangle trade, you know, the triangle trade, British goods, And then raw materials from America become British goods.
British goods are then sold for slaves in Africa.
Those slaves are then brought to the United States.
That's the triangle trade.
But it turns out that the majority of those slaves are actually going, again, to the Caribbean.
They were not going to what later became the 13 colonies in North America.
And I think a lot of people miss this, that the British Empire at the time – Right, for sugar, for rum, etc.
That the British Empire wasn't just the Thirteen Colonies, and so we have this kind of warped view of what colonial America was like, because obviously there were even Canadian colonies that ended up becoming the Tories, that were Royalists, that didn't rebel.
And so, you saw, by the way, a lot of Royalists move up there.
This was the only time, of course, That liberals actually left the country and fled to Canada, even though they always claim they're going to and an election doesn't go their way.
But this idea that, you know, I'm not going to sit here and say that slavery didn't exist.
Of course it existed.
We knew it existed everywhere in the world prior to the events of the Christianization of Western civilization, the Western world, et cetera, that these are the areas where slavery was done away with.
There still is slavery in parts of the world today.
There's the fact, depending on how you Judge it how you measure it.
There is potentially even more slavery in the world today than there has ever been in the past.
And if you're if you're looking at it in terms of human trafficking, which is arguably the same thing, we're talking about human trafficking of the 1700s versus human trafficking today, it essentially becomes the same deal.
But this idea that, OK, the southern colonies had slaves, but Libby, did the northern colonies reliant on slavery as well?
Is this true?
No, their economy was not reliant on slavery.
You do have New Jersey, which was an agricultural colony, and so they outlawed slavery in that colony in 1804.
The rest of the northern colonies had outlawed slavery, for the most part, shortly after the Declaration of Independence, which actually opened many Americans' eyes to the horror of slavery because the language in that document is unequivocal.
I would say as regards to slavery globally now, I think one of the reasons that American slavery comes under such a microscope is because it was the last government sanctioned slavery that we that we really see.
So now a lot of that is it's black market slavery and things like this.
I mean, unless you want to talk about Dubai and the the the men there who are building Dubai and their passports are confiscated.
That's a thing for sure.
I mean, human trafficking is so people should understand that that when we're talking about trafficking, we talk about it in terms of labor trafficking and sex trafficking.
So you see this currently in the United States, there's labor trafficking.
Of course, there's sex trafficking.
It's rampant in the Middle East.
It's rampant in Asia, particularly Southeast Asia.
And yet we're supposed to act.
Yeah.
And and we're supposed to pretend like none of this is going on.
And the United States is the only country that's ever done anything like this.
Yeah, certainly the United States is not the only country that ever had sanctioned slavery.
But it is, I believe, thoroughly to our credit that we eradicated that practice and that we even went as far, you know, in eradicating that practice, we fought a war over it.
It's interesting, too, we're constantly taught as children, you know, we're taught that the Civil War was about slavery and then we're taught that the Civil War wasn't about slavery.
And then it turns out that, in fact, the Civil War was about Slavery and it was about eradicating that practice.
And our Founding Fathers, John Adams, who is absolutely one of my, maybe my favorite of the Founding Fathers, you know, was entirely opposed to slavery, as was his wife.
And they fought against it really hard.
So did Ben Franklin.
I mean, you know, the Founding Fathers, all of them there, you know, Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Adams, Franklin, they all knew that slavery was a scourge and was not in keeping with human dignity.
And to be sure there, there are, by the way, if you talk to someone from the South, and I know we have a lot of, a lot of viewers down there that I'm sure someone will say, well, it was, it was also about states rights.
We didn't want it imposed on us from the federal government.
We were working this out internally, this institution, putting all that aside.
I'm putting all that aside right now because we are talking specifically here today about the founding of the United States itself.
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And we're back with Libby Edmonds.
So Libby, when we left before, you were telling us how racist the country has always been from the start, how much you hate the Declaration, the Constitution, our founding documents, and that when the next time that we take our kids down to the National Mall, you're just going to be pointing out how the Washington Monument, while that's nothing more than a phallic symbol, That doesn't sound like me.
I think you got me confused with Nicole Hannah-Jones.
Oh, I must have been listening to another podcast in my ear.
And Producer Angelo, you're fired again.
That must be it.
Doesn't sound like me.
I think you got me confused with Nicole Hannah-Jones.
Oh, I must have been listening to another podcast in my ear.
And producer Angelo, you're fired again.
That must be it.
That must be the thing.
Yeah.
You know, I think that obvious.
I think it's so clear when you look at the 1519 Project and when you listen also to the historians that came out after that work of journalistic madness was released in the New York Times.
Complete with educational manuals so that it could be shipped off to all of the schools across the country, colleges, high schools, you know, it's.
It came with a whole manual of how to teach the 1619 Project.
And if you actually read the essays, some of them are interesting personal accounts.
The writing is not necessarily bad, but the facts are tortured into the submission of this ideology of the founding of our country that actually does not hold up to scrutiny.
I got to tell you this one.
So as I was doing some research for this, I said, look, we've only got Uh, so much time on the show today.
We can't bring up everything because I really want to talk about this, that the colony of British North America, the economy, was not reliant as a whole on slavery.
It just wasn't.
Certain regions, sure.
But those weren't the only regions that rebelled.
There were other regions that had economies like the North, which was primarily industrial, that were not reliant on slavery, that also rebelled.
So just right there, just based on that, then they had widely, as to your point, widely divergent views on the institution of slavery.
Extremely divergent views.
I mean, as a You know, a son of the Philadelphia area, very familiar with Benjamin Franklin and his outspoken opposition to the institution of slavery from the very start.
But what's what's what gets me is actually there is a line in the 1619 Project, one of the essays, I forget exactly which which one of the writers it is.
Well, we can look it up later.
He says that the system of accounting that we have today, Microsoft Excel and even the spreadsheet itself, No, no, no.
Double entry bookkeeping was not invented in America.
It was invented far before that.
No, no, no, no.
- Double entry bookkeeping was not invented in America.
It was invented far before that.
No, no, no, no, no. - We literally have evidence of this in Egypt, by the way. - In Byzantium, I'm pretty sure. - Byzantium, yeah.
- Yeah, I mean, the double entry where you have the credit and the debit, you know, and you can actually see things.
And then it really came to the fore in Venice with their whole shipbuilding thing.
And that's how Venice got rich.
Venice got rich because they figured out how to properly account for things.
I'm pretty sure that's right.
For a while, I was really obsessed with accounting.
I thought it was really fascinating.
I know that's really dorky.
But it's so interesting, double entry bookkeeping.
And no, it was not created.
We found Libby's trigger on this one.
So double entry bookkeeping, it's all based on slavery, right?
No one had ever done this before.
No, it was distinctly not.
The Medici Bank was doing this in the 14th century.
Literally.
Yeah, that's because it was invented in Europe, double entry bookkeeping.
I think Florence, the Medici's, I mean, of course it was the Italians, right?
And it was actually invented in Byzantium.
Yeah.
But right.
It actually is saying I'm just looking at something now.
It's saying that it was pulled from it was brought there by by merchants.
And, you know, I'm sure if I can.
And then Venice got rich because they were able to not only track what they spent, but what they earned.
And they were able to track inventory.
Why would they do that?
Why would they?
Why would they lie to us about technological developments of the Middle Ages?
What?
Why would they lie to us about something so obviously wrong, just so obviously false?
You can.
There's a couple of different ways you could look at it.
Right.
I mean, for example, they could be lying in order to prop up a perspective that doesn't actually hold up to scrutiny.
Maybe they actually believe it.
I mean the, you know, the best liars are the ones who actually believe what they're saying.
But there is this penchant for revisionist history in the United States right now and we see it all over the place.
We see it also on Disney+, which some of the viewers may have seen the reboot of The Proud Family on Disney+.
There were some clips circulating of some teen Some teenagers on a high school stage.
It was a cartoon and they were doing basically like a spoken word thing about how the country was built on slavery.
Uh, and this was the, this was the entire purpose of the little song and dance that they did.
I'm going to point this out that I saw conservatives defending that.
I saw conservatives that were saying... Yeah, it was not particularly defensible.
Um, I saw conservatives saying, well, you're just, uh, Your white fragility is showing because you are threatened by the true history that's being portrayed here by Disney.
And I said, no, I'm pointing out that it's wrong.
Number one, it's historical revisionism saying things like Lincoln didn't free the slaves.
Lincoln not only freed the slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation, which he could have titled it anything.
He could have titled it something very simple about the law or what have you.
But he chose to title it the Emancipation Proclamation so that anyone upon hearing the title of this speech would know what it was about and know what it was intended to do.
So if you're an enslaved person and you hear that there was an Emancipation Proclamation given by the President, you know right away what that's about.
You don't even have to read the whole thing, which probably, you know, you can't read anyway.
But you can understand those words for sure.
Keep in mind, as we talk about the Civil War, we're still a hundred years after the founding of America.
We're talking about things that occurred a hundred years after the founding.
So this is what the 1619 Project does again and again, is that they constantly jump between the singular founding project and the founding generation of America.
And then they'll jump forward to things like the Emancipation Proclamation, which, of course, affected the Confederate states that were that had been occupied by Union troops first.
Later on, the amendments to the Constitution, the 15th Amendment came in and freed the rest of the slaves in the Union states.
Again, we're not going into all of the nuance here, but we're pointing out as you're teaching children, number one, lies about the United States.
You're teaching them to hate their country and you're teaching them that there is something wrong with them because of the color of their skin inherently.
And that is insane.
There's also something very important, which is the history of slavery in the United States is not a straight line at all.
There was an awful lot of nuance.
And in preparation for talking to you about this today, I did a bunch of research.
We're coming up on a break here.
But I want to get into that research.
We're going to use that, folks, as our teaser for when we come back after the break.
Libby is going to explain to us the true history of slavery in the United States.
And it's certainly not what Disney Plus So Libby, I gave everyone a huge teaser and you were about to tell us how slavery was not a straight line in U.S.
history.
Libby, are you telling us that the history of slavery wasn't all black and white?
Oh my goodness.
Yes, I'm telling you that.
I'm a dad, I can do that.
You're allowed to make these kind of jokes.
Yeah, there were black men, African men in the South prior to the cotton mill and all of that who owned Yes, there was probably bias and that started to rear its ugly head.
And some of these men were later disenfranchised of their property.
and had good standing in the community.
And this was true for a long time, that this was acceptable, that this was all right.
Yes, there was probably bias and that started to rear its ugly head.
And some of these men were later disenfranchised of their property, but it does stand that they were engaged in these same practices as the white landowners that were their neighbors.
And they were all on equal footing with that.
And I learned that information in a podcast from Slate in 2015 that was reported by Jamel Bowie.
I'm even getting this from the progressive lion's mouth.
Right, so there actually was this period where in the second Obama administration and, you know, a lot of wokeness came about in Obama's second term because, you know, I think he harbored a lot of these sentiments, probably because he got too many driving tickets, too many speeding tickets going between Chicago and Springfield.
He actually talks about this.
He's actually mentioned this before, that he believes he was pulled over so much because, no, it was because you were speeding.
It wasn't the color of your skin, it was because you were speeding.
Senator, you know, yeah, I'm state senator.
That's it.
That's all it was.
And and yet somehow this all, you know, I really think that all of wokeness goes back to Barack Obama's speeding tickets.
And that's a really funny theory.
You have this period where there were people in academia that were completely opposed to wokeness and would just talk about history the way that it were.
I should say not opposed to it, but, you know, it hadn't quite hit yet.
It wasn't quite all the way there.
Right.
And you know, it was interesting listening to this podcast about the history of American slavery because so much of it was
Just straightforward and honest and nuanced and really fascinating to hear the way that things change like the change in America to change so that the status of a child was not the father's status but was the mother's status instead and that was an adjustment from British common law at the time or to hear also about and this is something I've read and I know that you've read to hear about the founding fathers even those who owned
slaves and who were engaged in that economy knew that it was not an appropriate way to treat their fellow men.
They wrote about it.
They spoke about it.
Jefferson was sort of amazing on this, and he was very troubled.
And so was Washington.
They were both very troubled by the institution of slavery.
They were concerned about the future and how harshly they would be judged and how the nation would be judged.
And they talked directly about this.
And it's sort of fascinating that they went to their better angels.
They did.
No, I believe they did.
And I would highly encourage everyone to listen to those those podcasts the way you can find them, but also encourage you can find on YouTube.
You can actually find recordings of former slaves, some that were made later on in their years.
The left never, ever plays those recordings.
But I just, I find that stuff to be absolutely fascinating when you can hear people in their own words.
Yeah, you shared those with me a few months ago.
Describe what the, I did, I remember that.
I don't even think I posted it.
I think it's just fascinating for us to be able to hear the living history and the fact that with the internet we have the ability to find this stuff now and share it.
That's why they're always trying to shut us down.
This historical revisionism that we're engaged in in this country, this idea that we should go throughout all of the past and judge it with the social mores and the moral scruples of today, this is a huge problem.
And I think that for a lot of the time that we judge people not based on the world they were born into, and that's what the Founding Fathers were I think abortion is something that will certainly be judged for as a country.
their time to take someone out of and keep it.
Keep in mind, they were using bloodletting and leeches and all these.
We don't judge them for that.
We just know that that's the point that they were at at that time.
And I think there's going to be things that were judged for today.
I think abortion is something that will certainly be judged for as a country.
I think that's also certain things that we'll take as precepts just from a medical perspective, right?
Take the moral element out of it.
The idea that we fatten ourselves with seed oils and synthetics and this plant-based crap that is actually chemical-based crap and tell ourselves that it's health food.
It's something that will obviously be judged on in the future.
And so I don't think that we should necessarily judge them in a vacuum, I guess is all I'm trying to say.
And how dangerous is it if you teach people to do that?
Yeah, I think that's really important.
And I also think that there's something else that we can consider when we do seek to judge these men who, you know, it's so amazing that they all found each other at the exact same place and were able to found this glorious country.
But when we look back and we think about John Adams, and we think about Jefferson, Washington, Madison, John Jay, Hamilton, in a lot of cases, when they did have the power, they were not necessarily able to just go out there and abolish slavery outright, in large part because of the political climate at the time.
And you had to get everyone on board.
We think about, yeah, and if we think about that from our current perspective, how many and things are there today where we would really like to just have there be a decisive, you know, decision made to abolish something or to uphold something.
And people are not able to do it.
Politicians, our elected leaders are not able to do it because of political expediency.
For me, it's just straight up cargo shorts.
Abolish, criminalize, federal law, absolutely.
A Lock everybody up.
Sure, but you know what I'm saying.
Public executions, you know, I'm just saying.
Not everyone who dares them, but maybe just, maybe the manufacturers, the makers, the importers.
But Congress is not going to go forward with a full abortion ban because it's not politically expedient and they can't get it through right now.
So when we look at that, Yeah, and so the country wasn't ready for the abolishment of slavery prior to the time when it was abolished either.
And even then, it was very difficult.
But I think that we need to consider that.
When we judge our founding fathers, yeah, with this, we actually should be looking at ourselves with these concerns as well.
Couldn't agree more.
And I think that we also run the problem of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, that the Declaration of the United States, the Constitution, the founding of this country as a nation state, which was meant to be separate from the global system at the time that we discussed with Norbin Laden, the British Empire was The was globalization, right?
We had globalization before.
It was called the British Empire.
They were the the world government.
They weren't just the government of of one.
I've never said the sun never set on it.
And so the idea that the United States would be founded as a country that was completely separate to that, it didn't mean that the country was perfect.
OK, it didn't mean the country it was, hey, we're you know, we're buying this thing warts and all.
But at the same time, it also set forward a plan For a new nation that would be separate.
They weren't going to join the Spanish Empire.
They weren't going to join the French Empire.
They weren't going to do any of these other things.
They were going to form a nation state.
Libby Emmons, where can people follow you?
You can find me at Libby Emmons on Twitter and you can check out what we're doing at thepostmillennial.com every day.
