Were all the slaves in colonial America and antebellum USA blacks? Were all of the owners whites?

Question

It often sounds as if Americans today are taught to believe that slavery is an activity that whites are especially prone to engage in. But I've recently found literature that indicates the contrary. What is the truth? Why has the historical record about slavery in America been distorted into an anti-white public myth?

Answer 1

No - there were also many White slaves.
No - some slave owners were Blacks.
Yes - there is a conspiracy to falsify history.
Yes - falsifying the history of slavery in America is part of a more general program of historical falsification and academic fraud, which in turn is part of a program to demoralize and dissolve the White race.

Almost from the moment Europeans began colonizing the American continents, White people were sent to the New World involuntarily as slaves. Some of them were exiled from their homelands for crimes, others for debts, others simply because they were poor and "in the way." Between the founding of Jamestown and the signing of the Declaration of Independence, more than half of the slaves brought to North America were Whites who had been enslaved by Whites.

The guilt of White slave-owners with respect to Black slaves is limited to buying the slaves and making them work; it doesn't extend to enslaving the slaves. The Black slaves who ended up in the New World were originally enslaved by other Blacks, following a war in which the slaves' side lost. Jewish merchants sent their ships to West Africa to buy up slaves along with other cargo. These Blacks were transported to both North and South America, and to the Caribbean islands, for purchase by landowners as farm labor.

The slave trade itself was almost entirely a Jewish business. The slave ship named "Abigail" was owned by Jews Aaron Lopez, Moses Levy, and Jacob Franks. The slave ship named "Crown" was owned by Jews Issac Levy and Nathan Simpson. Jews Moses and Sam Levy also owned the slave ships named "Nassau", "Four Sisters", "Charlotte", and "Caracoa". The slave ships "Anne & Eliza", "Prudent Betty", "Hester", "Elizabeth", "Antigua", "Betsy", "Polly", "Expedition" and "White Horse" were also owned by Jews. The Jews of Newport kept 300 slave trading ships in continuous operation between Newport-Africa and Charleston, South Carolina.

Whites did not maltreat their slaves, relatively speaking. A Black slave in colonial America or in the antebellum United States was far better off than his cousins in Africa. Without the slave trade to give victorious African chieftains a reason to keep the vanquished alive, they'd have been tortured for sport, slaughtered, and, maybe, eaten. American slavery probably prevented African genocides. Even if the defeated Blacks been kept alive in Africa, their circumstances would have been much harsher than those given to transported slaves by Whites in America.

The whole talk about "reparations" for slavery is, therefore, foolishness. If anything, Blacks owe Whites, not the other way around.

Besides all that, the fact is that many slave-owners were Blacks themselves. Blacks were represented among slave-owners in a proportion higher than the Black fraction of the population, which means that, on the average, a free Black was more likely to own slaves than a free White was.

"According to federal census reports, on June 1, 1860 there were nearly 4.5 million Negroes in the United States, with fewer than four million of them living in the southern slaveholding states. Of the blacks residing in the South, 261,988 were not slaves. Of this number, 10,689 lived in New Orleans. The country's leading African American historian, Duke University professor John Hope Franklin, records that in New Orleans over 3,000 free Negroes owned slaves, or 28 percent of the free Negroes in that city." (Robert M. Grooms in "The Barnes Review.")

The percentage of White Americans who owned slaves in 1860 was much smaller: only a little over one percent.

The best treatment of this subject that I know about is a 137-page historical documentary by Michael A. Hoffman: "They Were White and They Were Slaves." It reveals that White slaves, although they were sometimes called indentured servants, were more badly treated and had fewer rights than Black slaves did. Also, White children were frequently impressed and sent to the American colonies as slaves.

Answer 2

There were white indentured servants, but that was a step up from being a slave. There were a lot of both black and Native American slaveholders. The Cherokee nation in particular had many slaveholders as part of their population.

And let's not forget that whites were but only a part of the slave trade. The Arabs were the originators of the sub-Saharan slave trade which had been in practice for hundreds of years before the Europeans found their way there, and were the main purveyors of slaves throughout the time it was practiced. And without the black slave gatherers in Western Africa who captured and sold their brethren into slavery, the trade would never have existed.

That said, it was the inestimable ability of White traders to economize and streamline the process, allowing an exponential increase in the number of slaves shipped across the Atlantic. Without the commercial abilities of the European traders, the slave trade would have remained a minor thing, instead of devastating much of Western and Central Africa.

Answer 3

I will only add to the other posters by saying the Indian nations from Canada on down held captive whites as slaves; the Cherokees in what is now Alabama / Mississippi held almost as many blacks in slavery as there were members of the tribe...

having said that, there is no doubt that the majority of slaves were Africans, captured and sold by other Africans for shipment across the Atlantic;

that 75% sent across went to Brazil and the Caribbean, not the USA

that the vast majority of slave owners in America were whites


and that any need for reparations was paid for, in blood, during the Civil War, where white men killed white men ( to the tune of 650,000, more than all our other wars COMBINED) so that black men could be free.

Answer 4

The slave owners were predominantly white. And the slave were mostly black. It's not a matter of absolutes, but proportion. Since it was not legal for blacks to own property in many states, it was really hard for them to own slaves. In the US slavery was almost exclusively based on black slaves and white owners. However in other parts of the world, that was not the case. Almost every culture had slavery in one form or another. And it was not always delineated by racial lines. Sometimes is was a fair and just arrangement for a specific purpose, such as paying a debt. But often it was forced and a violation of what we now see as basic rights.

Answer 5

Revisionists would have you believe that there were other people that were termed slaves in colonial America, but this is not quite accurate. There were indentured servants, who worked off the cost of their passage to the U.S. Some Native Americans were pressed into servitude as well. Colonial America had not, at the time begun importing asian workers, who were enslaved as well, so they do not figure in. African slaves were the only ones brought unwillingly to the U.S. and sold like cattle at auction. Slavery itself was not invented by the colonists, but simply brought over from Europe.