Was slavery in the USA started by the "good Christians" in southern USA and eastern USA?

Question

Don't you think every Christian in the eastern and southern USA that had ancestors that had slaves should apologize for having slaves?

Let me rephrase the question. Was slavery in the USA started by good christians?

Lilmissy- That was my point exactly. People should not be held accountable for things their family or ancestors did. Why do people still hold current day Mormons accountable for things like polygamy that happened over 100 years ago?

Answer 1

I do not think someone should be held responsible for something their family did. no

Answer 2

Actually, slavery in America was in full swing way before it was an independent country.
The British and European countries brought slavery to America.
Yes there may have been a type of slavery practiced by Native Americans, but that was different from the slavery of Africans, brought to America. In most cases it was Africans themselves selling people from different tribes to the European slave traders.
Should the descendants of these Africans apologize to their country men and women as well?
Should we also apologize and make reparations to the Native Americans that were killed or moved to uninhabitable land when the Europeans invaded an already peopled country?
I think the time is long past for that.
No one alive today, in America (as far as I know) has ever owned a slave.
I believe that it is time that people give up their fears and prejudices of any group of people who are different from them.

Answer 3

When the "Good Romans & Minerva " apologize to Christians , When the "Good Egyptians & Isis" apologize to the Jews , and when the "Good Japs & Their Emperor" apologize to China , and last but certainly not least , When the Africans apologize to the Africans for selling each other into slavery.

Answer 4

Uh, they are all dead now. My ancestors owned slaves. I joined a church that is anti-slavery and left the Methodist because of that. Do I have anything to apologize for? Nope.

Answer 5

I think slavery started before the USA existed.

Answer 6

No.

Answer 7

well yes there were Christians that owned slaves. but for your information it was Christians that ended slavery. there is a great movie called Amazing Grace that shows William Wilberforce fighting againtist the slave trade. go see the movie it is excellent.

How William Wilberforce Changed the World
By Eric Metaxas

Remembering the Impact


We often hear about people who “need no introduction,” but if ever someone did need one, at least in our day and age, it’s William Wilberforce. The strange irony is that we are talking about a man who changed the world, so if ever someone should not need an introduction—whose name and accomplishments should be on the lips of all humanity—it’s Wilberforce.

What happened is surprisingly simple: William Wilberforce was the happy victim of his own success. He was like someone who against all odds finds the cure for a horrible disease that’s ravaging the world, and the cure is so overwhelmingly successful that it vanquishes the disease completely. No one suffers from it again—and within a generation or two no one remembers it ever existed.

The roots of the thing Wilberforce was trying to uproot had been growing since humans first walked on the planet, and if they had been real roots, they would have reached to the molten core of the earth itself. They ran so deep and so wide that most people thought that they held the planet together.

The opposition that he and his small band faced was incomparable to anything we can think of in modern affairs. It was certainly unprecedented that anyone should endeavor, as if by their own strength and a bit of leverage, to tip over something about as large and substantial and deeply rooted as a mountain range. From where we stand today—and because of Wilberforce—the end of slavery seems inevitable, and it’s impossible for us not to take it largely for granted. But that’s the wild miracle of his achievement—that what to the people of his day seemed impossible and unthinkable seems to us, in our day, inevitable.

There’s hardly a soul alive today who isn’t horrified and offended by the very idea of human slavery. We seethe with moral indignation at it, and we can’t fathom how anyone or any culture ever countenanced it. But in the world into which Wilberforce was born, the opposite was true. Slavery was as accepted as birth and marriage and death, was so woven into the tapestry of human history that you could barely see its threads, much less pull them out. Everywhere on the globe, for five thousand years, the idea of human civilization without slavery was unimaginable.

The idea of ending slavery was so completely out of the question at that time that Wilberforce and the abolitionists couldn’t even mention it publicly. They focused on the lesser idea of abolishing the slave trade—on the buying and selling of human beings—but never dared speak of emancipation, of ending slavery itself. Their secret and cherished hope was that once the slave trade had been abolished, it would then become possible to begin to move toward emancipation. But first they must fight for the abolition of the slave trade; and that battle—brutal and heartbreaking—would take twenty years.

Of course, finally winning that battle in 1807 is the single towering accomplishment for which we should remember Wilberforce today, whose bicentennial we celebrate, and whose celebration occasions a movie, documentaries, and books. If anything can stand as a single marker of Wilberforce’s accomplishments, it is that 1807 victory. It paved the way for all that followed, inspiring the other nations of the world to follow suit and opening the door to emancipation, which, amazingly, was achieved three days before Wilberforce died in 1833. He received the glorious news of his lifelong goal on his deathbed.

Wilberforce was one of the brightest, wittiest, best connected, and generally talented men of his day, someone who might well have become prime minister of Great Britain if he had, in the words of one historian, “preferred party to mankind.” But his accomplishments far transcend any mere political victory. Wilberforce can be pictured as standing as a kind of hinge in the middle of history: He pulled the world around a corner, and we can’t even look back to see where we’ve come from.

Wilberforce saw much of what the rest of the world could not, including the grotesque injustice of one man treating another as property. He seems to rise up out of nowhere and with the voice of unborn billions—with your voice and mine—shriek to his contemporaries that they are sleepwalking through hell, that they must wake up and must see what he saw and know what he knew—and what you and I know today—that the widespread and institutionalized and unthinkably cruel mistreatment of millions of human beings is evil and must be stopped as soon as conceivably possible—no matter the cost.

But how is it possible that humanity for so long tolerated what to us is so obviously intolerable? And why did just one small group of people led by Wilberforce suddenly see this injustice for what it was? Why in a morally blind world did Wilberforce and a few others suddenly sprout eyes to see it? Abolitionists in the late eighteenth century were something like the characters in horror films who have seen “the monster” and are trying to tell everyone else about it—and no one believes them.

To fathom the magnitude of what Wilberforce did, we have to see that the “disease” he vanquished forever was actually neither the slave trade nor slavery. Slavery still exists around the world today, in such measure as we can hardly fathom. What Wilberforce vanquished was something even worse than slavery, something that was much more fundamental and can hardly be seen from where we stand today: He vanquished the very mindset that made slavery acceptable and allowed it to survive and thrive for millennia. He destroyed an entire way of seeing the world, one that had held sway from the beginning of history, and he replaced it with another way of seeing the world. Included in the old way of seeing things was the idea that the evil of slavery was good. Wilberforce murdered that old way of seeing things, and so the idea that slavery was good died along with it. Even though slavery continues to exist here and there, the idea that it is good is dead. The idea that it is inextricably intertwined with human civilization, and part of the way things are supposed to be, and economically necessary and morally defensible, is gone. Because the entire mindset that supported it is gone.

Wilberforce overturned not just European civilization’s view of slavery but its view of almost everything in the human sphere; and that is why it’s nearly impossible to do justice to the enormity of his accomplishment: It was nothing less than a fundamental and important shift in human consciousness.

In typically humble fashion, Wilberforce would have been the first to insist that he had little to do with any of it. The facts are that in 1785, at age 26 and at the height of his political career, something profound and dramatic happened to him. He might say that, almost against his will, God opened his eyes and showed him another world. Somehow Wilberforce saw God’s reality—what Jesus called the Kingdom of Heaven. He saw things he had never seen before, things that we quite take for granted today but that were as foreign to his world as slavery is to ours. He saw things that existed in God’s reality but that, in human reality, were nowhere in evidence. He saw the idea that all men and women are created equal by God, in his image, and are therefore sacred. He saw the idea that all men are brothers and that we are all our brothers’ keepers. He saw the idea that one must love one’s neighbor as oneself and that we must do unto others as we would have them do unto us.

These ideas are at the heart of the Christian Gospel, and they had been around for at least 18 centuries by the time Wilberforce encountered them. Monks and missionaries knew of these ideas and lived them out in their limited spheres. But no entire society had ever taken these ideas to heart as a society in the way that Britain would.

That was what Wilberforce changed forever.

This article was adapted from the introduction of Eric Metaxas’ new book, Amazing Grace (Harper, 2007).

Eric Metaxas is the author of the new book, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery. Prior to that he wrote Everything You Always Wanted to Know About God (But Were Afraid to Ask) and thirty children’s books. He is founder and host of Socrates in the City in New York City, where he lives with his wife and daughter. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Washington Post, Books & Culture, Christianity Today, Mars Hill Review, and First Things. He has written for VeggieTales and Rabbit Ears Productions, earning three Grammy nominations for Best Children’s Recording. © Copyright 2007. Used by permission.