American Slavery and Why it Was Wrong

The Conversations That Matter podcast, my name is John Harris. We got a lot of material to go through and a short time to do it. The subject is why American slavery was wrong, but we're gonna go through kind of a little bit of a crash course.

I can't cover everything in a very short period of time, but I'm gonna give you a lot of information about slavery in the United States. And then I'm gonna talk about why I think it was wrong overall as a system, the slave system.

And we're gonna talk a little bit about people that were Christians who owned slaves and the attacks on them as if they were sinning because they were participating somewhat in the institution that was attached to evil.

A Reporter Calls About Glenn Youngkin and a Planned Hit Piece

So we're gonna talk about all that, but I wanna preface, I wanna start this off by saying, I got an interesting phone call this morning. I've been planning on doing this episode for a few weeks, but the phone call I got this morning made me think, maybe I should do this now.

It was a reporter from, I believe it was the Huffington Post. My connection was a little bad. It was either Washington or Huffington Post, who basically said they were doing a hit piece on me. And it's related to the gubernatorial election here in Virginia.

The primary for the Republicans is on Saturday. And basically, the reason I'm smiling is because this actually, this could backfire in a way. This tells you two things about Glenn, well, about the race and Glenn Youngkin in particular.

But I made the case in a video that Glenn Youngkin, one of the guys running for Republican, is a progressive. The guy's not a conservative at all. He goes to a woke church, endorses a book that's basically critical race theory.

I showed that. Anyway, I did all that. And then I had gone on a show, the John Frederick Show, and I had talked about it a little bit. They didn't know who I was really, other than I had done this piece on Youngkin.

And apparently, the reporter's telling me that they were fans of Pete Snyder. Now, I had heard them saying positive things about Pete Snyder when I got there, but it wasn't until actually after my interview that I even heard them saying anything about Pete Snyder in a positive way.

I didn't know that they were Pete Snyder fans. The reporter, though, was really badgering me to try to find a connection between me and the Snyder campaign. He started off by saying, hey, you know, I got this, you know how they start off, very respectful and kind of innocent?

I got this text message from someone saying, from the Pete Snyder campaign or something. Someone connected to Pete Snyder. He thought, I have no clue. I've never seen this text. And they were using your video to kind of get dirt on Glenn Youngkin.

And I said, I'm not aware of that. I don't know anything about it. What do you wanna know about it? And he didn't really know where to go from there, kind of. But he kept kind of like trying to ask me questions about what my relationship was with Pete Snyder or the Snyder campaign.

And I said, look, I posted on my Facebook yesterday, I'm gonna vote for Pete Snyder. But the reason I posted was because he's the best chance of beating Glenn Youngkin. And I don't think Glenn Youngkin is a conservative.

He's running in the wrong primary. He just really wanted to know what my connection was with Pete Snyder. And I said, I've never met Pete Snyder. Not connected to the Pete Snyder campaign. They're not paying me anything.

I've never been at an event for Pete Snyder. You know, I'm against Glenn Youngkin. And I think Pete Snyder has the best chance of actually beating Glenn Youngkin. And Pete Snyder seems to be a conservative.

That's it.

And I don't think he liked that. But it was clear that he really wanted to establish that connection. And I finally said, what is this about? And he said, well, I'm doing this piece. And we're gonna talk about your views on your defense of slavery and your defense of the Confederacy.

And I said, okay, well, I don't defend slavery. If you mean American slavery, I'm not defending that. I think there are many problems with it. One of them being how often it was predicated on the idea of some kind of racial superiority.

And he said, you know, often? You know, kind of in that shocked, surprised, often? And I was like, yeah, I think often it was. I think he wanted to, you know, unless you think it was all the time built on that and it was the assumption in everyone's minds that that's what it was predicated on, then, you know, you're, I guess, you're somehow racist.

Or I don't know really what he thought. But, you know, we stayed on the phone probably for like 30 more seconds. But he wanted to know all the reasons I didn't like Glenn Youngkin. And I'm like, look, I made a video about it.

You can go watch it. But after that, I was like, okay, they're doing a hit piece on me and they're trying to connect me, it sounds like, to the Snyder campaign. I told them there's no connection there.

They're not paying me. I don't know them. I've never met Pete Snyder. I've never been to a campaign function. But that's the angle they wanna go. And so, I don't know if this story is actually gonna come out or not, but I thought, you know, this tells you two things.

The first thing it tells you is that number one, the Glenn Youngkin is working somehow with people in like the Huffington Post, a very progressive people. The progressive liberal media that Republican voters don't like, Glenn Youngkin's working with them somehow.

There's some relationship there. They want Glenn Youngkin. That should tell Republicans voting in the primary this Saturday something about Glenn Youngkin, that he's got these friends in these places.

So that's one thing. The other thing it tells me is that they're kind of desperate. You know, if they wanna do a hit piece on a guy with a small following like myself, it seems like, you know, what are we at right now?

Like not even two days, not even two days before the primary starts. You know, they're grasping at straws at this point. And it should encourage us that what I've done, the information I provided on Glenn Youngkin, and it's all I did.

I just gave, here's the information. That's been explosive. That's been helpful. We're hitting the target. And so I'm encouraged by that. But beside those things, I know that if they do come out with something, which will probably be a lot of things I've said supporting the Confederate monuments, a lot of things I've said about what the Bible specifically says about slavery.

I've wrestled with that topic. I've written about it. Mostly, most of my writing is, you know, blogs and stuff are probably from like 10 years ago. I thought, you know, I should probably, I've talked about it before on the podcast, my views on this, but I should probably do another one.

And I should probably express to you why I think American slavery is wrong, because I have been in apologetics ministries in a sense. I mean, I've been doing like evangelism and college ministry, and apologetics is very much part of that.

And this is one of the main questions you get. And so I've had to deal with this for years. Well, doesn't the Bible support slavery? That's something I've had to actually grapple with and think about as a Christian.

And I've been surprised because I think most Christian apologists even haven't actually grappled with this. They haven't thought through it. They try to minimize anything the Bible says about it. They try to make it out like Hebrew slavery wasn't even really slavery, and then Roman slavery wasn't really slavery, but the American slavery was the worst thing possible.

They create these huge barriers, which by the way, I'm reading a book right now called First Century Slavery in 1 Corinthians 7, 21. That's just not the case. I mean, I've said before, you know, there weren't any gladiatorial arenas in Alabama.

You wanna talk about the evils attached to Roman slavery, that pagan slave system, it was different. It was a different context in time than in American slavery. And there's different evils attached to both, but there were some pretty bad things in that Roman slave system.

And so to then try to build this huge wall saying that, you know, it wasn't a sin in Roman times because Paul basically says slaves submit to your masters, masters treat your slaves in the right way according to God's law.

If you wanna say that that's okay because we gotta defend the Bible, but then no, it's not okay to be Jonathan Edwards, not okay to be George Whitefield or Robert E. Lee or Thomas Jefferson or something.

You're just, you're playing politics is what you're doing. You're not actually grappling with the actual issues. And what I've tried to do is grapple with the actual issues. Now I've said things probably, you know, 10 years or 11 years ago that now, you know, I look back at them and I'm like, okay, well, I didn't write as well as I do now.

I didn't think as well as I do now. Probably, I probably said things that I wouldn't have said the same way now. But I think in general, and I haven't read everything I've read, you know, written from back then.

So I'm fine saying, you know, saying like, oh, you know, I don't agree with that anymore. I retract that. But I haven't, I don't know of anything that I would retract at this point. I don't, I'm not aware at least of anything.

One of the blogs that I think it was someone, I think I'm suspicious it might've been someone from the Yunkin campaign, but someone was kind of trolling me on Facebook not too long ago. And they brought up this blog.

And one of the things, I'm gonna read for you a quote. This is something that I wrote in 2010. So yeah, we're talking 11 years ago. I was, I guess I, 2010, yeah. So I would have been 20 years old at that point.

And this is what I wrote. I said, still in spite of all the wrongs done, both in the North and South, God's purposes were served. Former pagans were exposed to the gospel in Christian homes. Western civilization has blessed.

I think I meant was blessed or no, has blessed. Okay, those who continue to work hard for their living, even today in what was once the slave community. It is for this reason that I can look at all the problems with it, meaning slavery, i .e. man capture and racism, which were both forbidden by scripture, and say, thank God that the slave trade brought the heathen gospel, the gospel to the heathen.

Insofar as the slave masters lived in accordance with the word of God, they were doing nothing wrong, even if their government was. And I think what I might do for a podcast, I might actually read through this whole blog that I wrote called A Few Thoughts on Slavery from 2010.

And I might just go through and say, okay, I would have said this differently, or I don't agree with that anymore, or I do agree with this. But that statement, which I think is the, that's the kind of thing I'm assuming is gonna go into this probably quote unquote hit piece.

That statement, I'd say I would probably phrase it a little differently now, because I realize the climate we're in now is a little different than it was in 2010, and the assumptions people are bringing to this are much different.

You gotta kind of start five steps backward, which is what I'm doing in this podcast. But in general, I think I would agree with that. I don't think, you know, thanking God for slavery is different than thanking God for the things that he, for instance, spreading the gospel, the good things that he brought from a bad situation.

This is just like Joseph and his brothers. This is a providential view. Booker T. Washington had a similar view, and I'm gonna read for you some quotes from him. But Joseph, when he was sold into slavery, completely unjust, right?

And then later on he says, hey, what you meant for evil, God meant for good. And he meant for me to get into this position where I could save others. And so that's essentially what I'm saying there. And I wouldn't distance myself from Joseph or his logic in that.

I think that's correct. I think that's just biblical Christian understanding of things. Now, this, I don't expect the world to understand this, but the world's sins are just, they're so much greater, and they don't even realize it.

I mean, someone, the Huffington Post, I mean, we're talking about an organization, very left, and you know, they would support things like abortion. They wouldn't see the problems with things that today I would identify, at least some of them, as similar to slavery, or in some cases, almost worse than slavery with the effect that they have.

And I'll go through some of those as we go. But the, there's a proverb that talks about that. The mercy of the unrighteous is cruelty, or something, I don't remember what translation that that's from, but just kind of off the top of my head, I remembered that.

Let's keep going here. I wanna show you some things. Number one, here's a little, this is from March, 2019. So this is two years ago. I said this on the podcast. We don't wanna ignore the abuses within slavery at all.

I mean, far be it from me to do that. Absolutely disgusting. I mean, I believe that everywhere slavery was practiced pretty much, it was always bad.

Always.

With the exception, perhaps, of the Hebrew slave system, which was regulated by God, and even then, humans abused it, I'm sure, but slavery is not a good thing. Just to be clear, I don't like it at all.

I'm really glad that it's gone, like really glad. And I don't wanna minimize the abuse within it, but neither do I want to absolutize the abuse in it and say that's all it was. There were Christians who were involved in the institution of slavery.

There were Christian slave masters who taught Christian principles. So this has been my pretty consistent position for a while now, that there's a distinction between a system with many evils attached to it and then those who participate in that system without being sinful in their participation.

And if I let the clip play more, Stonewall Jackson was part of that, someone who ignored the laws of Virginia that said you cannot teach your slaves how to read. He had a Sunday school class for slaves.

He taught them how to read because he wanted them to know the scripture. There's actually, in Roanoke, there's a church that still has sort of a tribute to him. In their church, a historically black church, because one of the people he taught to read the Bible went and planted that church.

So I do think that's possible, but it's not based on the story of Stonewall Jackson that I think that, it's because of what scripture teaches about the relationship between master and slave in a pagan Roman context and what Paul teaches about it.

And Paul doesn't say, well, everyone, free your slaves right now because that's the right thing to do. He gives instructions for how to function in this system. And that may include that, but it doesn't, every situation is different and it may not include that.

So if you have an argument with that, your arguments with God's word, it's not really with me. Now, I wanna give a little bit of a crash course on this because I understand most people coming at this topic probably are, you have a lot of assumptions that you've been either caught or taught.

And some of those assumptions, I feel like I need to probably challenge a little bit. And the goal here is truth. The goal here is, hey, if I get something wrong, you let me know, put it in the comments, whatever.

But the goal here is to figure out the truth and then to apply rightly what the law of God says. And so I believe the American slave system had evils attached to it. So it was wrong for that reason. I'm gonna talk about that.

But I also want you to realize there's some reasons also that are given for why American slavery is so wrong. And they're either half truth, they're not giving you the full truth or they're actually wrong.

You're adopting a pagan egalitarian mindset. So we're gonna talk about those as well. I think it's really important to get this right. And I'll say this right before as well, because this is important for evangelism.

When you're out there evangelizing, I've heard this done so many times by people who desperately want to disconnect the Bible from slavery. And so, and it's not just slavery. There's other things that they wanna try to sort of, I don't know, get God off the hook for in a way.

And so what they do is they just will trash sometimes American history. And I've even heard it, you know, you find a scapegoat somewhere. We'll trash the founding fathers. It was the South, it was the South.

They were the problems. Let's trash them. They weren't practicing real Christianity, something like that. And it's just, historically, it's just not good because it's inaccurate. And I've known that when I've heard that.

And I'm like, ah, if someone just does a little digging, they're gonna realize that you're not really being honest with them. I think it's better to just be honest with what does the text of scripture actually say?

And then what historically actually happened? And if you can understand those things, then I think you can have a more intelligent conversation. And usually the first question I ask when someone really is challenging you on this, well, how can you be a Christian when the Bible, you know, has all these evils that it condones slavery being one of them.

And I'll usually ask, okay, why is it wrong? You tell me why it's wrong. And usually you'll find out they don't really have a moral justification for their own moral position. And so you say, okay, well, here's what, what my moral position is.

It comes from scripture. This is what God has said. And you go from there. So let's go through some of these assumptions though. One of the questions that I think many people, it needs to be asked because many people just assume here, they don't actually ask the question, is did American slavery form organically or was it universally approved?

In other words, was there a body of legislators who came together and said, yeah, we're gonna vote to have slavery. And this is supposed to be an artist's rendition of the first quote unquote slaveship coming to the United States in 1619.

However, that's actually inaccurate because when people portray it that way, like the 1619 project, it wasn't actually, these weren't slaves. They were actually indentured servants technically. That being said, the question is whether or not that was something that was approved by all the 13 colonies.

They all said, all right, we're gonna come together and we're gonna approve this. And the answer is no. And that's a modern state assumption many people have is that America itself, just this is the part of the founding of the country because everyone just approved of it.

Actually, what happened was this formed way more organically. It was regional. You wouldn't have even known about some of the things that took place in certain areas. It kind of formed over time. But 1619 really isn't the date you should be looking at.

And I'm gonna tell you the date in a minute. Here's a quote that I wanna read for you first. This is from John Thornton in Africa and Africans in the making of the Atlantic world, 1400 to 1800. And it's about the African slave markets.

It says, we must accept that African participation in the slave trade was voluntary and under the control of African decision makers. This was not just at the surface level of daily exchange, but even at deeper levels, Europeans possess no means either economic or military to compel African leaders to sell slaves.

This is from a standard textbook that has been used for years at the college level. On this topic, John Thornton in Africa and Africans in the making of the Atlantic world. And what he's saying is that the slave markets were already set up by the time Europeans got there.

It wasn't like Europeans just came and started capturing people, which is often what people assume. There actually was already tribal warfare going on and Europeans tapped into something that was already going on, both in Africa and in Muslims who came from the Middle East who predated them.

And so if there's, the reason I bring this up, I think it supports this idea that there was some organic, there's an organic nature to this. It wasn't this top down European scheming that we're gonna go capture people and bring them over and they all approved.

It was, hey, there's a market, we need people to do labor in this area and where can we get labor? Oh, there's already a market here in Africa that's already set up. Doesn't justify any of it. It tells you, it just nuances a little bit to show you that this, it wasn't like a European problem.

This wasn't like Europeans were the only ones complicit in this at all. And this is, you've heard it said before, slavery has been going on for thousands of years.

It is true.

It's just a recent invention, really an industrial revolution thing that now it's, it doesn't, chattel slavery at least does not happen like it used to or chattel slavery. There is still slavery though.

We're gonna talk about that. There's actually in some, I've heard some stats saying there's actually more slaves today than there ever has been in world history if you're looking at like the sex slavery market.

So, and that's a horrible thing. So, the year though you should be looking at isn't 1619. It's actually 1641. And this is when court records in 1641 indicate that Anthony was mastered to a black servant, John Casser.

Casser would become the first person to be arbitrarily declared a slave for life in the US in 1655, in a 1655 court case. So, maybe you could even say 1655 is the actual case. I wrote 1641 here. It's actually 1655.

And that's when Anthony's neighbor and white planner, Robert Parker, had momentarily secured Casser's freedom after he had convinced Parker and his brother, George, that he was an illegally detained indentured servant.

But Anthony fought to retain ownership of Casser in a lengthy court battle, and he won. John Punch, an African, was declared a slave for life as punishment for trying to escape his indentured servitude in an earlier case, but Casser was the first to be declared a slave for life as the result of a civil suit.

So, you could say 1641, where the court record says he's the master to a black servant, or really more accurately, 1655, when there was a court case in Virginia that basically enshrined that this was the first, this is the first case of slavery, and this was Anthony Johnson was the slave master.

Now, for those who are watching, if you look at this picture of Anthony Johnson, the first technical slave master, legally speaking, he is not a person of European descent. He's a person of African descent, primarily, if it may be 100%.

And that's something that you're not gonna hear, but it's important to recognize that. This is the first technical legal slave owner, slave master, I should say, in American history in the state of Virginia, and it's not a white, quote-unquote, white person.

So, I'm trying to poke a little bit of holes in this narrative to give you a little more understanding and nuance so that when we approach this topic from a moral standpoint, you're at least, you know what you're dealing with here.

So, the question, another question, so we've answered the first one, that slavery formed organically. It wasn't like everyone got together and voted on this. This formed over time. It got into the courts, not in 1655, and it was approved, but it wasn't like, you know, all the colonies got together and this is what they wanted or approved.

Second question, was the experience of American slaves always cruel? This is another assumption that's out there, and you see this picture here of a slave with a raw, beaten back, which is, this is posted everywhere.

You see, here's a depiction from Uncle Tom's cabin, that this is Simon Legree beating Uncle Tom. This is what slavery was, and it is, of course, is a fictional book, but this really stirred up a lot of anger, especially in the North.

Their issue wasn't that slaves weren't equal, race, it wasn't a racial issue for them. It was more of, it was more their circumstances they lived in, not their status, but their circumstance, and so they were, some people in the North who didn't have firsthand experience seeing slavery on a daily basis by that time were very concerned, and Uncle Tom's cabin made this concern more prevalent, that this is the kind of abuse that was just common, and I'm gonna read for you, this is an actual quote from the slave narratives, and this just shows, and there's a lot of quotes like this.

This is from Bill Collins. "'My master was so cruel to his slaves "'that they were almost crazy at times, "'an Alabama slave born in 1846 said,' named Bill Collins. "'He would buckle us around a log "'and whip us until we were unable to walk for three days.

"'On Sunday, we would go to the barn "'and pray to God to fix some way "'for us to be freed from our mean masters.'". I mean, this just breaks your heart. This is horrific stuff, evil. I mean, it's the kind of thing that it would evoke when you hear of a battered wife and what the husband does to a battered wife.

It's the kind of thing that, when you hear about abused children, it's that same emotion. It just, you wanna do something about it. It is horrible. And this did happen. This was a reality that took place.

I mean, there are things that still happen, unfortunately, in the labor system as regulated as it is in the United States that are very abusive. And we mourn for those things. We hate those things. And in slavery, in some instances, especially where you're off in a rural area and there's not as much accountability, you can get away with some of this stuff.

And that was certainly one of the problems. That being said, though, that wasn't the only experience, slavery experience. Here's a picture from 1863. This is family worship in a plantation in South Carolina.

This is during the Civil War. And you have the master and his family sitting there. You have the slaves sitting there, all integrated together, listening to a black preacher give the word of God at the pulpit.

This stuff did happen. It wasn't, and I'm not saying that this kind of a situation you see in this picture was common, but it wasn't necessarily uncommon to the point that it never happened. It did happen.

Here's another picture. I took this picture at the Raleigh Museum, History Museum a few years ago. And it's the picture of a black slave and a white, I guess, the child of a slave master. And they are hugging each other in this picture.

And this black slave is dressed very well. There seems to be some kind of a connection there as if he's part of the family. And that wasn't uncommon, guys, to think that they would be part of the family.

Here's another one. You have black slaves. You have the son of one of them with the slave children being pictured together. You might say, well, they're not smiling. Well, neither are the white people in the picture because you didn't really smile in those days when you took a photograph.

Here's another one of a black slave and a white child, or the son of slaves. I don't know if he's a slave or not, but they're friends with one another. And you have a picture like this. And I just have to comment because I can already hear the objection that, well, hey, John, weren't they just trying to prove that they weren't all that bad or something?

Well, if the society was so thoroughly racist and abusive that they didn't care about those things, then why would they feel the need to go to great lengths to prove that they're not these evil people if it was approved of?

So you gotta think through the assumptions here. It doesn't match the paradigm that we're given today. Here's another interview from the Slave Narratives that of Maria Hines. And she talks about, she's from Virginia, that the whole family was good to her, that she loved her master.

It goes through how good he was, how good their relationship was. Even when he said he didn't want them to work, sometimes they wanted to work to help him. I've read this particular one before, but there's a lot of these.

And if you wanna try to find a more objective way of viewing this, there's really three things you can do that I know of. Maybe there's more you can write in the info sections if you know of more. But if you wanna know the conditions, you can go to the Slave Narratives and you can try to study them.

And one person did do that. There's over 2 ,000 narratives, stories in those Slave Narratives. And in a book called Time on the Cross, Nobel Prize winner Robert Fogel demonstrated that nowhere in the Western Hemisphere were slaves better treated and cared for than in the South, in America.

After studying the Slave Narratives, he concluded that 60 to 80 of all respondents had only positive things to say about their masters and their life during slave days. Now, I'm not saying this. This is Time on the Cross and its analysis of the Slave Narratives.

This is the slave. This is the voice. We'd hear about the collective memory of the slaves. Well, this is that collective memory. This is that voice. Now, if you say, well, they were manipulated into giving these positive answers.

Well, the problem with that is you have situations where they did not always give, you know, what's up with the 20 to 40 that did have negative things to say? So obviously there is some of that. Also, this is all we have to go on.

And it's conjecture to just say, well, they weren't being honest in their testimony. We don't know. But what we have suggests that most of them did not have the same view that people today have of the institution.

And you have to deal with that. You can call me a racist all day for saying that. But what I'm trying to do is grapple with what the information we actually have available. And it's not racist. It's sad that anyone would call anyone racist for just identifying these facts and trying to grapple with actual information.

Otherwise, the scholarly, the academic pursuit cannot be pursued correctly if you're just barring someone from even asking these questions. Another metric you can use is the US Census. Now, many people might have a problem with this.

How can we trust the US Census? But in 1850, this was kind of controversial at the time. One out of every 1 ,000 white persons was deaf, dumb, blind, insane, or idiotic. In the Northern states, one out of every 506 black persons had the same handicaps.

For Southern blacks, it was one in 1 ,464 persons who possess such inabilities. This isn't me talking. This is the 1850 US Census. 10 years later, in 1860, the Southern black population was shown to have increased by 23%.

While the Northern black population only increased by 1 .7%. One of the barometers you can use to tell whether or not a population is being, is successful, is prospering, is the percentage of increase of their population.

Are they having kids? Are the kids being raised? Are they surviving? And in the Southern, in the South, the black population was doing a lot better according to that metric than in the North. Now, this is the 1850 US Census.

I'm not making any of this up. I'm just throwing it out there to say, okay, that's another thing you can look at if you're trying to measure this. Another, and there's a third thing. This is more subjective, but you can look at what foreign observers said.

Tocqueville, James Silks Buckingham, Frederick L. Olmsted, one from France, two from Great Britain. What were their conclusions about the slave conditions that are, and what did they think? And I'll tell you, I can put the quotes here.

I don't have time in this podcast, but their views would be disqualified from most of modern academia because Tocqueville said that racism was stronger in the North than the South. James Silks Buckingham and Frederick L. Olmsted basically said that the conditions of Southern slaves was better than the conditions of working class people in Great Britain.

I mean, those are the kinds of things that you'll find. Now, I'm not saying these things. They're saying these things. And I'm saying that whatever paradigm you come up with, you have to make sense of this information if you're gonna analyze the conditions.

So that's another, so that's the other question. And was the experience of African, of American slaves always cruel? And I think the honest answer has to be, no, it wasn't always that way if you're trying to be objective at least.

Race, Slavery, and the First Legal Slave Cases in Virginia

Now, here's a third question. Did racism always justify American slavery? That's the other thing is that racism was always the justification, that this was just built on racism. White people saw people that were a different color and said, because they're a different color, we're just going to capture them and make them slaves because of that.

And that's what our whole system is gonna be based on. Now, to a large extent, it was justified based on this sort of, at the very least, a civilizational kind of inferiority that even people who thought, well, this is good for slaves because we can, they need us to help them and give them a safe haven at our plantation or whatever.

I mean, you get the same kind of attitude in some ways from liberal academics today. They, minority people need us, right? But even that was, there was kind of an air of an arrogance in one's own civilization or one's own race.

That did exist.

But here's something that you don't often hear. It's very possible that the widow C. Richards and her son P .C. Richards were Gordon's masters. And you might say, well, who's Gordon? Well, if you're watching, look to the left.

That's, Gordon is the slave that you often see with the raw back from whipping. In other words, that slave was most likely not treated unfairly by a master of European descent. It was actually a black slave master who did this or someone working under them.

In 1860, 171 black slave owners, slave masters in South Carolina existed. And then Native Americans also owned thousands of black slaves. Almost 4 ,000 black people owned almost 13 ,000 slaves in 1830.

So our information's spotty, but we do know that there were thousands of black slave masters. William Ellison is one of them. Had the largest slave, was the largest slave holder in Charleston at the outbreak of the Civil War.

There's a picture of him there, William Ellison to the right there. And so the question is, well, to them, was this based on some racial power relationship thing? It couldn't have been because they were also descendants of Africans.

And so they weren't justifying it based on that. They couldn't have justified it based on that. So it wasn't in all respects based on race. It could have been, there were also aspects of this that were based on the availability and geography had a lot to do with that.

This is where the market exists for transporting people who can do labor. I guarantee you, if in Africa, there were people who looked different, who looked like white people, perhaps in many ways, but the markets were open, you probably would have that kind of slavery going on as well.