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Chapter 1: What misconceptions about slavery in America are addressed?
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, they 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 percent 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.
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Chapter 2: How did the Kingdom of Dahomey contribute to the slave trade?
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 Heimaey 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 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, and even stabbed fiercely at the poor burning bodies.
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