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The “slavery debate” undermines appropriate pride in this nation’s role as history’s most potent force for freedom and human betterment. Like the displacement and mistreatment of Native Americans, the enslavement of literally millions of Africans offers a ready-made opportunity for those who fear and resent the United States to highlight our society’s allegedly racist and rapacious character. The guilt-mongers seize on slavery to spread ubiquitous lies about America — that this nation bears unique culpability for the devastation of Africa and the enslavement of its sons and daughters, and that the United States based its formidable wealth and power on stolen labor of countless slaves.
The proper response to these distortions rests on four important propositions:
- Slavery is a timeless, universal institution, not an American innovation.
- The slave economy played only a minor role in building American power and prosperity, and for the most part retarded economic progress more than advanced it.
- America deserves unique credit for rapidly ending slavery, not distinctive blame for its establishment.
- There’s scant reason to believe that today’s African Americans would be better off had their ancestors remained behind in Africa…
Islamic Guilt, Greed, and Cruelty
…The Islamic slave trade involved barbarity and greed that resembled and sometimes exceeded the monstrous cruelty for which European slave merchants stand rightly condemned. Ronald Segal, author of Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora, said in an interview that in the Muslim world “the casualties involved in enslavement wars were absolutely unspeakable.” Moreover, slave ownership was more widespread in Islamic societies, so much so that “even small shopkeepers owned slaves.” The wealthy collected concubines as status symbols “the way people in the West collect motorcars”; one ruler had fourteen thousand…
Slavery continued openly in the Islamic world for nearly a century after its elimination in the West. Muslim slavers filled the vacuum left by the British abandonment of the slave trade in royal possessions in 1822. In Britain and Slavery in East Africa, Moses Nwulia asks, “What earthly comfort did the slave derive from being told that henceforth he was beyond the reach of the grasping hands of the white Europeans but good game for the supposedly benign whites from Asia? What spiritual enlightenment did he derive from being told that the same God who created the Christians and Muslims frowned upon Christian slave trade but sanctioned Muslim slavery?”
That same “divine sanction” continued for the Islamic world well into the twentieth century: Saudi Arabia outlawed slave owning only in 1962. The Islamic Republic of Mauritania finally moved toward abolition in 1981, but the practice continued unabated, even after a 2003 law that made slave ownership punishable with jail or a fine…
The organization Christian Solidarity International continues to purchase Sudanese slaves in order to free them, recently paying $100 (or two cows) for an adult captive. A press release revealed that in March 2007 alone the group bought ninety-six male slaves, who had been seized as part of the Muslim northern government’s “jihad” on the nation’s Christian and animist south. Six of the young men had been raped by their Islamic masters, and 99 percent had received frequent and sadistic beatings.
The long, savage history of Muslim slavers and their depredations in every corner of Africa makes a mockery of the trendy sentimental attachment of many African Americans to an alien Islamic culture that not only abused their ancestors but still afflicts their cousins. The fascination with Arab names (Jamal or Ayesha, not to mention Muhammad Ali or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), even among non-Muslims in the black community, and the glamorization of Arab civilization as somehow authentically African grow in spite of the incontrovertible evidence of more than a millennium of brutal Islamic enslavement.
Activists and agitators who obsess over America’s dark history with slavery make scant mention of the undeniable record of Islamic exploitation and viciousness, even though by the most conservative estimate the Muslim world transported and enslaved at least twenty times as many Africans as ever made their way to the British settlements that later became the United States.
Promoting Poverty, Not Prosperity
…the persistence of slavery in southern states limited the pace of economic development, while abolition in the commercial states of the North led to quickening growth in population, wealth, and productivity…
Anticipating the “irrepressible conflict” with the North, the editor of the Lynchburg Virginian understood his region’s painful vulnerability. “Dependent upon Europe and the North for almost every yard of cloth, and every coat and boot and hat that we wear, for our axes, scythes, tubs and buckets, in short, for everything except our bread and meat, it must occur to the South that if our relations with the North are ever severed,” he wrote, “we should… be reduced to a state more abject that we are willing to look at even prospectively.” By the census of 1860, the percentage of the population that was enslaved had slumped to 12.5 percent (due to robust immigration to the free North) and citizens of the Union states outnumbered white Confederates by a ratio of more than three to one.
The prewar statistics comparing the booming, bustling North to the underdeveloped, agrarian South hardly show a national economy dependent on slavery. Even if we leave out the four “border states” (Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, and Kentucky) that ultimately stayed in the Union, the North enjoyed every advantage for a protracted struggle. In northern states, railroad mileage (covering a similar geographic area) beat the South by a three-to-one ratio, and southern commercial shipping proved virtually nonexistent. In terms of bank capital, the North topped the South by more than four to one, while the value of the North’s manufactured goods exceeded southern production by a staggering ten to one. In short, by every measure the slave-based economies developed far less prosperous and powerful societies than their northern, industrialized counterparts — an economic gap that dictated the outcome of the nation’s most devastating conflict…
Credit for Abolition
Present-day anguish over the historic shame of slavery plays an increasingly prominent role in even the most glowing accounts of the nation’s origins… Contemporary sensibilities indict the patriot generation for its failure, in the midst of launching its unprecedented experiment in self-government, to uproot instantaneously an ancient institution passed on to them by their fathers and grandfathers.
Nevertheless, the debate over the slave trade at the Constitutional Convention showed that even Founding Fathers from southern states had developed profound discomfort with the continued seizure and enslavement of Africans. George Mason of Virginia condemned the “infernal traffic” and Luther Martin of Maryland viewed any protection of the slave trade as “inconsistent with the principles of the Revolution and dishonorable to the American character.” Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania, who crafted the language for large sections of the final draft of the Constitution, thundered against slavery itself, denouncing it as a “nefarious institution” and “the curse of heaven.”
The opponents of the slave trade succeeded in securing a constitutional provision for ultimate elimination of the importation of human cargo. Later, in urging ratification of the Constitution, slaveholder James Madison argued in Federalist No. 42 that this provision constituted “a great point gained in favor of humanity, that a period of twenty years may terminate for ever within these states” what he termed “an unnatural traffic” that amounted to “the barbarism of modern policy.”
Within a mere hundred years of these founding arguments, the successors and allies of these men of principle and practicality had succeeded in abolishing slavery not just in their fledgling Republic but in all the nations of the West. During three eventful generations, one of the most ancient, ubiquitous, and unquestioned of all human institutions (considered utterly indispensable by the “enlightened” philosophers of classical Greece and Rome) became universally discredited and finally illegal — with Brazil at last liberating its enslaved hordes in 1888. This worldwide mass movement (spearheaded in Britain, the United States, and elsewhere by fervent evangelical Christians) brought about the most rapid and fundamental transformation in all human history.
While the United States (and the English colonies that preceded our independence) played no role in creating the institution of slavery or even the trade in African captives (pioneered by Arab, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and other merchants long before the establishment of British North America), Americans did contribute mightily to the spectacularly successful antislavery agitation…
Michael Medved
“The United States is Uniquely Guilty for the Crime of Slavery…”
The 10 Big Lies About America
