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Home » What the NY Times got wrong about slavery in the US

What the NY Times got wrong about slavery in the US

The New Neo Posted on by

Nearly everything. But that’s no surprise.

Interesting article, with many facts I certainly hadn’t known before.

Comments

What the <i>NY Times</i> got wrong about slavery in the US — 37 Comments

  1. A fine article, though I do wish he’d mentioned that in 1860 there were over 3000 black slave owners in the South.
    https://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=9764

    As well as articulated a bit more clearly that besides Arab slavers, it was black Africans who captured, enslaved and then sold their black ‘brothers and sisters’ to European slavers.

    These facts are easily confirmed but of course those facts do not advance the left’s agenda. It’s all about gaining power and control at any price.

  2. A good article and thought provoking to those that want to think about things. I am a History Major (BA/MA) but not much in American History. But I did have a very good Professor of American History (he was from VA I believe) that centered on The South. Reading the article and thinking about what I learned and was exposed to in the 60’s leads me to agree with his premise.

  3. The tribal chiefs treated the Africans of their tribe(s) as a crop to be partially harvested whenever Arab slavers with a good deal came along. It is to be contemplated they were happy to sell their “uppity” males first, and so maintain their rule without disturbance. Did this have a DNA-selection consequence over the generations before African slaves were first sold into the West?

    As a non-subscriber I cannot read the NYT online! I hope others will post the fascinating details outlined in the article.

  4. Charles C Mann’s books titled 1491 and 1493 both delve into the history of slavery in the whole of the Americas (as well as a bit in Africa too) and how it was very much a case of “everyone enslaved everyone” to begin with, how it was so awful in Spanish-held South America that parents would deliberately maim their own children in order to make them unsuitable as slaves, and how the racial component in the English colonies and Caribbean islands came about largely due to the superior disease resistance of the African race that allowed them to shrug off Yellow Fever as a nuisance (while it had about a 90% mortality rate for Europeans and Indians) and to recover from malaria at about a 90-95% rate, while Euro’s and Indians died at about a 70-80% rate from it. It simply made better sense to buy slaves that probably weren’t going to die from very common diseases within a year.

    He also went into the nations created by escaped slaves which was also quite fascinating.

  5. It’s doubtful the minions of Baquet / Sulzberger have the slightest interest in history per se. It’s about what bits of historical data (or historical myth) can be put to work constructing narratives for latter-day political propaganda. The disreputable Mr. Sailer has had some sport with the Sulzbergers’ periodic repair to late breaking news about…Emmett Till. The Till case does say something about social relations and culture in Mississippi in 1955, but it’s not topical. Not a story for a newspaper at all and not of such intense interest.

  6. The NYT along with 90% of the MSM are of the “if only Stalin knew” mentality. And their historical guidance comes from that SOB Howard Zim. America the evil devil and totalitarianism the only solution.

  7. pkudude99:
    the introduction of an infectious disease to a population never before exposed to it (i.e., native Americans) is associated with a much higher mortality rate. Smallpox is an example, wiping out most native americans while only leaving scars in Europeans. The severe and pretty rapid reduction of the American Indian populations was due to diseases like smallpox, not due to violent slaughter by the Spanish, the Americans, or anyone else.
    Charles Mann may have made these points. Or was it the author of Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond?

    Yellow fever did come with slaves from Africa.
    Europeans had long been exposed to some strains of malaria. The word comes from Roman times, in Latin “mala aria,” or “bad air”.

  8. Mann is very good. Diamond, imo, is looking for some kind of excuse for differing development levels. In that line, see Sowell, Conquests and Cultures.

  9. @Cicero — He goes in to all of that, even going so far as pointing out that malaria was largely brought to the new world by the English. it was still highly lethal to those of European descent. It could be argued that malaria won the Revolutionary War as it induced more casualties among the British Army and their mercenaries than did Washington’s Army.

    Yellow fever came from Africa with the blacks as they were largely immune to it — it was to them essentially like chicken pox is to us now. but it was highly lethal to both the native and white populations.

    He also goes into how it was mostly disease that killed the natives, even going so far as to show a timeline of Spanish censuses of the central plateau in Mexico showing population dropping from about 25 million to about 2 million over the course of 300 years and about 15 different plagues during that time – sometimes identified, sometimes simply listed as “plague” in the Spanish records.

    His books are meticulously sourced — each of them is about 20% bibliography in the back. They’re fascinating reading.

  10. Interesting piece re yellow fever — “When Mosquitoes Brought Yellow Fever to the Caribbean, They Also Spread Slavery”:

    When the Portuguese began to ship thousands of enslaved Africans from Angola to Brazil in the early 1600s, infected people and mosquitoes surely made part of the journey. But the mosquitoes must have died or flown away before causing an outbreak. In any case, the virus could not find enough virus-carrying insects and virus-prone people living in close proximity in the Americas.

    In the fall of 1647, that all changed on the British colony of Barbados.

    Like their counterparts in Virginia, the English settlers who first came to this eastern Caribbean island in 1627 initially relied on white servants, even as small numbers of black slaves arrived via Dutch traders. (The island’s indigenous peoples had been essentially wiped out long before, possibly due to European diseases or slave raids.) In 1642, however, England and Portugal signed a treaty opening Portugal’s slave dungeons on the African coast to London merchants. English slave vessels were soon showing up in Barbados.

    When a few mosquitoes flew out of those ghastly ships, they found their own tropical paradise. Unlike other Caribbean islands, Barbados lacked readily available running water, so the settlers had built watering holes to catch the rains—perfect breeding grounds for mosquitoes. After each rainfall, these eggs hatched by the millions, releasing clouds of hungry A. aegypti on the dense population. Once these insects bit someone with the virus, disaster struck.

    After suffering flu-like symptoms, the victims of the 1647 outbreak began to vomit a black, grainy discharge. Their eyes and skin turned yellow as the virus consumed their livers, and up to 75% of them fell unconscious and never awoke. “The living were hardly able to bury the dead,” wrote one eyewitness.

    Poor men working half-naked in fields were more vulnerable to A. aegypti bites than were women laboring in homes or rich men riding on horseback. More importantly, yellow fever mostly hit the European servants, because many of the African slaves had already survived the virus on the other side of the ocean.

    Its arrival a direct result of the slave trade, yellow fever thus helped slavery take over on Barbados. As white servants died by the thousands, the planters replaced them with black slaves. British emigrants now avoided Barbados, making its demographic change even more dramatic.

    By the 1660s, Barbados was the first full-blown slave society in the British Empire, a tropical gulag ruled by haughty masters. Their slave code—and their excess slaves—then went to Jamaica, South Carolina and Virginia.

  11. pkudude99 on October 28, 2019 at 6:30 pm said:
    Charles C Mann’s books titled 1491 and 1493
    * * *
    Just finished “1491” – highly recommend it.

  12. Comment at Avery’s post:
    David Franklin says:
    October 2, 2019 at 4:45 pm
    Fantastic and obviously informed article. I learned a few new things as well.

    While it is obviously our moral duty to hate the institution of slavery at all times, the current emphasis of so many on the Left in trying to tie the whole establishment and success of our government and society to that institution is obviously an error of extreme bias and power-seeking at the highest level.

    Yes, we are imperfect. And, yes, our American predecessors on this land were imperfect as well. But, that is no reason to turn around, in Jacobin fashion, and pillory the entire American project that has brought our citizens and the rest of the world unprecedented benefit and the raising of the ideals of political equality (not absolute economic equality) everywhere.

    Reply
    George Avery says:
    October 4, 2019 at 10:49 am
    Thank you – and you nailed my intentions with your comments. It is always rewarding to have readers understand what you are trying to say.

  13. From the article: The artisans, tradesmen, and unskilled labor pool necessary for developing a thriving, diverse economy were discouraged by competition from bonded labor, and the slave-owning class showed little interest in such an economy.

    Such is also true of the oligarchs who offshore our industries, bring in H1Bs to replace our professional class, and import Mexican “labor” to replace the American working-class.

  14. History itself is too complex to be completely understood as it was in reality. People are always at work to craft a “usable history” out of the raw materials. “Usable” means “useful in the here and now.” Inevitably, what is broadly useful as a Master Narrative is also simplified and distorted by foreshortening.
    What is going on is the attempt to cement into place a new Master Narrative. Let’s call it “The African-American Experience: Slavery and Civil Rights.” What is interesting for me in not that the facts and interpretation are sloppy and self-serving, but that there is a widespread and coordinated effort to promote the story. People tell stories for a reason. What is their reason?
    My short answer is that it is about an attempt to keep the Democrats ethnic coalition together. It may not be a usable Master Narrative for the whole of the country, but it is absolutely vital for the urban Democratic machine. The African-American experience provides the essential proof points for the entire edifice of criticism against the historical Establishment. Without those claims, all of their coalition’s claims (which are also claims for jobs and money) would look pretty paltry.
    It may be useful to name some of the other Master Narratives that are devalued or thereby repealed, and recognizing that many or most of us will identify with some of them. This Master Narrative differs from previous Master Narratives in not being backward compatible with previous versions.
    “The Ellis Island Story”
    “The Arsenal of Democracy”
    “The Columbia Project”
    “Saving the Union”
    “Manifest Destiny”
    “The Great Republic”
    “Sons of Liberty”
    Maybe others will have suggestions.

  15. Highly recommended: Alfred Crosby’s “The Columbian Exchange”.

    Remarkable that Vegan Atheist Brown graduate A.G. “Son of a Pinch” Sulzberger is either unfamiliar or dismissive of Crosby’s work.

  16. I lived and worked for two years in what was then Dahomey, now the Peoples’ Republic of Benin. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Dahomey was knows as “Slave Coast,” just as Ghana was known as “Gold Coast”, Liberia was known as “Wood Coast” and Ivory Coast was (and is known) by that name. These names grew up in reference to the main economic activity of the people who lived there and traded with traders who began to show up in the seventeenth century.

    The coastal city of Ouidah, to the west of present-day Cotonou, was a major slave-trading center. Visit the remains of that city and you will see large historical panels describing the tens of thousands of black Africans who were captured up-country and transported to Ouidah, there to be sold to slave ships (largely Portuguese at first) and transported mainly to Brazil (the only country in South America that uses Portuguese as its national language.) The custom in Ouidah was originally to kill the people who were captured and brought there — it was only when their economic value was made evident that the trade with slave ships began.

    The Portuguese and Lebanese were the first non-Africans to show up in any numbers in west and central Africa, and you still find people who trace their lineage to Portugal and Lebanon peppered around west and central Africa, many engaged in small trading enterprises. One can be driving through the middle of the bush in East Africa and come across a lone duka (store or trading post) run by a family of Indian descent. The same thing happens with Portuguese in west and Central Africa. The French occasionally refer to the Portuguese as “petits-blancs.” Small whites — as if they are not entirely European in lineage.

  17. Those slaves that made it to North America were the lucky ones.
    Of the slaves sent to Arabia (a long foot march through jungles and deserts) or South America (under Spanish and Portuguese mastery) fared far far worse.

    And their descendants are still the lucky ones, being able to live in a pretty wealthy country with good education, infrastructure, healthcare, jobs, etc. etc.

  18. Good points on indentures being so common. An uncle was the son of an indentured English father who had been apprenticed to a bricklayer in England. Part of the apprenticeship was an indenture. I’ve seen the document. His indenture was purchased by a farmer who paid his way to America. After arrival, the farmer who owned his indenture found that he could make more by “renting ” out his employee as a bricklayer. Thus he continued in his trade until the indenture expired. He eventually became superintendent of bricklayers at a steel mill in Chicago. His son succeeded him.

    The main threat of this distortion of history is that children are being taught this. Movies are also being made by the left, which is willing to take a loss, that distort history. Kids learn in school and from movies.

  19. I understood that the first American slave was owned by a black slave owner.

    The last slave from Africa was captured by black slavers and sold by those blacks into slavery and shipped to America. Was young thru the civil war, lived after, there are some oral history recordings of his voice and story.

    Slavery was one sin, a global sin including America. Jim Crow laws, after the Civil War, are actually a sin by the Democrats. Or perhaps we should be calling them the Demo-KKK kratic Party – never, ever, wanting blacks to be treated equal to whites.

    Under Jim Crow, the Dems believed it was OK to treat blacks worse, and whites better, because blacks were inferior. The Dems have now changed, and believe that being a victim makes one better. So, now, the Dems believe it’s OK to treat blacks better, and whites worse, because blacks were victims.

    However, the black humans to be treated better today are NOT the same humans, usually, that were victims in the past. It was parents, grandparents, and ancestors. This is part of the individual injustice from the Social Justice idea — group guilt, group punishment. Tribal warfare.

    It’s sad, but also clear to me, that the Dems will keep up with tribal warfare until they start losing, and feel like they’re losing. And even then, it will be the new generation of Dems, after losing the culture war, that lives in a “live and let live” view with Reps.

    Reps are not yet really fighting this culture war, which is why we’re losing. The Dems ARE fighting, and even fighting dirty. I think Reps can win by fighting more cleanly — but they need to know it’s a fight.

    More cleanly is more lawsuits, and more clearly anti-Dem / anti-SJW laws and policies.

    Plus stopping the huge tax subsidies to Dem indoctrination centers (that are no longer really colleges).

    We need more black thinkers like Sowell and Walter Williams, and more white Reps to be quoting them, honoring them, and showing that blacks don’t have to be on the Dem boot-licking plantation.

    Kanye West is great. (Not my style tho; not at all.)

  20. The bible recommends slavery.
    “If a thief be found breaking up, and be smitten that he die, there shall no blood be shed for him. 3If the sun be risen upon him, there shall be blood shed for him; for he should make full restitution; if he have nothing, then he shall be sold for his theft.”
    Exodus 22:2-3

  21. Tom Grey
    The last slave from Africa was captured by black slavers and sold by those blacks into slavery and shipped to America. Was young thru the civil war, lived after, there are some oral history recordings of his voice and story.

    Zora Neale Hurston’s recently published book is about that.Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”.

    In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview 86-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation’s history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo’s firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage 50 years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States.

    In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau, the African-centric community three miles from Mobile founded by Cudjo and other former slaves from his ship. Spending more than three months there, she talked in depth with Cudjo about the details of his life. During those weeks, the young writer and the elderly formerly enslaved man ate peaches and watermelon that grew in the backyard and talked about Cudjo’s past – memories from his childhood in Africa, the horrors of being captured and held in a barracoon for selection by American slavers, the harrowing experience of the Middle Passage packed with more than 100 other souls aboard the Clotilda, and the years he spent in slavery until the end of the Civil War.

    Based on those interviews, featuring Cudjo’s unique vernacular, and written from Hurston’s perspective with the compassion and singular style that have made her one of the preeminent American authors of the 20th-century, Barracoon brilliantly illuminates the tragedy of slavery and of one life forever defined by it. Offering insight into the pernicious legacy that continues to haunt us all, black and white, this poignant and powerful work is an invaluable contribution to our shared history and culture.

    He was enslaved in 1860.

    Following are some more examples of slavery that do not fit the standard slavery narrative.

    One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life–A Story of Race and Family Secrets. The author’s investigation of her family roots found black slaveowners in Louisiana. IIRC,the blogger Michael Bowen (Cobb is the name of his blog), who is also black, found black slaveowners among his Louisiana ancestors.

    My sister-in-law spent a lot of time updating our family history. One gem she found was a notice about a slave who had escaped from some 18th century umpteenth great-grandparents. This escape did not fit the standard US slavery narrative. For one, the slave didn’t escape from the South, but from the Pennsylvania frontier,where my ancestors lived. At one time there were slaves all over colonial America- not just in the South. Another narrative-buster was that the slave owning couple included my umpteenth great-grandmother, who was Indian/Native American(Shawnee, actually.).

    Glad the 5-minute edit function is working now.

  22. Having connectivity problems today. I’m writing this comment from my phone and hope the problems will be fixed by this evening. Apologies!

  23. Ray, on Exodus and slavery: The civil laws governing ancient Israel aren’t observed by Jews or Christians today. Ancient Israel is gone. The ritual law is observed by orthodox Jews, but this civil slavery statute isn’t included in that. Nor is this slavery statute part of the “moral” law, which Christians and Jews both consider binding on them.

  24. Ray:

    Exodus 21:16 — “Whoever steals a man and sells him, and anyone found in possession of him, shall be put to death.”

    Good discussion of the Bible and slavery here.

  25. Simple statistics dictate there are a great many more descendants of slaves living today than descendants of slave owners. More descendants of serfs than kings. Is there any race or ethnicity that has not been enslaved? Is there any geographic region bound by a political system (including theocratic) that has not given quarter to slavery? If you do a family tree of the House of Windsor you’ll probably find Windsors in bondage on some branch or limb, if not the trunk itself.

    Just as Progressives get it backwards when they ask, “Why is there poverty?” they get it backwards on slavery.

    Why is there wealth among a greater percentage of humanity than ever before? Why is there freedom among a greater percentage of humanity than ever before? Since we’re doing everything wrong according to Progressives, I guess it must simply be luck.

  26. Richard Aubrey,

    I don’t think that Jared Diamond was so much looking for excuses for unequal levels of development as he was bending over backwards to avoid being politically incorrect.

    Regardless, I find his reasoning to be compelling.

  27. I was aware of most of the history regarding the slave trade in the referenced article. This made reading the NYT narrative even more painful.

  28. Ray on October 29, 2019 at 3:32 pm said, “If a thief be found breaking up, and be smitten that he die, there shall no blood be shed for him. 3If the sun be risen upon him, there shall be blood shed for him; for he should make full restitution; if he have nothing, then he shall be sold for his theft.”

    I agree with the implication that it would be better to kill the offender than allow him to offer compensation in money or as a bondsman. The expression of my freedom and personal honor (and the right of retaliation) is, as you imply, way more important than being yoked to responsibility for a slave as some kind of alternative “compensation”.

    Better thieves dead and gone than a society littered with unfree miscreants hanging about.

    Thanks Ray!

  29. One of the greatest disservices done to Americans of African ancestry is to associate them with slavery.

    As others have already pointed out, Africans owned slaves and all other races have been enslaved. Why must African Americans always carry the label, “slave?”

    In the book and movie, “Roots” there is a scene where a man from Africa is purchased at a slave auction and his owner asks him his name. “Kunta Kinte” the African replies. The man whips him and says, “Your name is, Toby!” He asks his name again. “Kunta Kinte” is the reply. The brutal scene is repeated many times until the African, horribly scarred weakly answers, “Toby.”

    It’s 2019. Why do so many insist on keeping the subjugation of races alive?

  30. “Why do so many insist on keeping the subjugation of races alive?”

    Perhaps, if we follow Shelby Steele’s analysis of the matter, the cause comes to **because there is useful power in it, deriving from the guilt of the whites**.

    Shoes for industry, shoes for the dead.

  32. “Another narrative-buster was that the slave owning couple included my umpteenth great-grandmother, who was Indian/Native American(Shawnee, actually.).”

    The only known slaver-holder in my ancestry was my great-grandfather … said to have been 1/2 Cherokee … who freed his slaves “two years before the Emancipation Proclamation”, which year the reader may recall would have been the fateful 1861. My father believed he freed them because he became a Christian; and, contrary to what some Christ-haters claim, neither the Bible nor Christianity *endorse* (or, as Ray put it, “recommend”) slavery.

  33. These facts are easily confirmed but of course those facts do not advance the left’s agenda. It’s all about gaining power and control at any price.

    I dug into the historical files and sources, GB, and found all of that some time ago.

    I also found out a lot of other things like the Italian patriarchs selling white blue eyed virgins captured in Spain and from christian holy wars, to the Caliphates. Or the Viking slave raids for women.

    Not exactly stuff that promotes the narrative of West good vs bad everybody else.

  34. Ray on October 29, 2019 at 3:32 pm said:
    The bible recommends slavery.
    “If a thief be found breaking up, and be smitten that he die, there shall no blood be shed for him. 3If the sun be risen upon him, there shall be blood shed for him; for he should make full restitution; if he have nothing, then he shall be sold for his theft.”

    That’s closer to the debt/peonage/slavery 1.0 system of American centralized banking and inflation than what Americans think of as slavery (2.0) from the Southern slave masters.

  35. Ray:

    That’s a horrible translation. Hebrew is a very succinct language, so you have to understand the Bible with the necessary interpolation. You also have to understand the context: A thief breaking into a house at night is presumed to know the family is home and is therefore prepared to kill, and therefore a resident of the home (presumably, but not necessarily, the husband) may kill him. In daylight, however, he doesn’t expect the family to be home, and therefore wasn’t prepared to kill, besides which, you can see him, so you can’t just kill him outright. In modern terms, that would be “excessive force,” leaving you subject to a murder charge, or manslaughter (retribution by blood-feud), as the case might be. With that in mind, here’s how you would read the passage:

    Exodus 22

    1. [General Rule] If a thief is found breaking in, and is attacked so that he dies, the defender of the home shall not be guilty of murder or manslaughter [subject to trial and punishment by the courts or retribution by the thief’s family, respectively].

    2. [Exception to the General Rule: However,] if the break-in happens during daytime, [when the thief expected the family to be out of the house], then [the defender of the home] shall be liable for murder or manslaughter [if the thief is killed. Instead of the thief being killed,] he shall make restitution. If he has nothing, then he shall be sold for his theft.

    3. [Specification as to punishment in the case of theft of a live animal] If the thief is caught with a live stolen farm animal, his restitution shall be two of the animals [or the equivalent].

    The structure is very similar to modern U.S. tax law: first the general rule, then the exceptions and exemptions, then additional qualifications. Note also that the slavery is only permitted as restitution. When the thief had paid his penalty, he would be released.

  36. “History itself is too complex to be completely understood as it was in reality.” — Oblio

    This sentence is so fine — is itself so bursting with complexity as to likely be incompletely understood — that I felt it necessary to see it repeated again. And I thank Oblio for the original.

    “In reality” I take as a time bound unknown. “Reality” — this word here — I would like to call readers to invoke their imaginations to hold as if this word were set in a bright blinking red light.

    Because that’s the thing we don’t actually understand completely on account of o’erweaning complexity, even before we think we might understand something by “history”, whether history “itself”, as Oblio’s sentence has it, or history simply taken as an current account of a past time of events, of lived experience for someone(s).

    (In passing, I don’t think this word “reality” is a very old word, but seems to emerge from deed contract language sometime around the 14th/15th centuries. It then acquires its wider ontological connotations only a short bit later. And has grown to be highly commonplace today.)

  37. Ann’s lengthy citation yesterday is from Time magazine, and I am not convinced of its factual assertions, particularly that the yellow fever virus could not find sufficient hosts in Brazil, or that the aegypti mosquito could not survive the ocean voyage from Portugal to Brazil, but could survive the same trip, typically slow sailing, from Angola to Barbados. The geographic distance of the latter might be shorter, but the sailing time, in slower winds?
    In any event, I am not clear whether that virus only infects humans and not other species.

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