American Slavery and Why it Was Wrong

Welcome to 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 going to 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 going to give you a lot of information about slavery in the

United States, and then I'm going to talk about why I think it was wrong overall as a system, the slave system, and we're going to 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.

We're going to talk about all that, but I want to 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 could backfire in a way. This tells you two things 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 want to know about it? And he didn't really know where to go from there, kind of.

He was—but he kept kind of like trying to ask me questions about what my relationship was with Pete Snyder or the

Snyder campaign. I said, look, I posted on my Facebook yesterday, I'm going to 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.

I said, I've never met Pete Snyder. I'm not connected to the Pete Snyder campaign. They're not paying me anything.

I've never been at an event for Pete Snyder. 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 going to talk about your views on your defense of slavery and your defense of the

Confederacy. And I said, OK, 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, OK, 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 want to go.

And so I don't know if this story is actually going to 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 right 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 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 if they're trying to they want to do a hit piece on a guy with a small following like myself, it seems like, you know, what 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 and it should encourage us that what what I've done, the information

I provided on Glenn Youngkin, it's and it's all I did. 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 a lot of things

I've said supporting the Confederate monuments, a lot of things I 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've said before, there weren't any gladiatorial arenas in Alabama.

You want to 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 want to say that that's okay, because we got to 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 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 10 years or 11 years ago that now

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.

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, written from back then. So I'm fine 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 going to 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.

I do agree with this. But that statement, which I think is the, that's the kind of thing I'm assuming is going to go into this, probably quote unquote, hit piece.

That statement, I'd say I would probably phrase it a little differently now. Cause I realize the climate we're in now is a little different than it was in 2010, especially.

And the assumptions people are bringing to this are much different. You got to 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 going to 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, 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, the Huffington Post, I mean, we're talking about an organization, very left, and 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 there's a proverb that talks about that.

The mercy of the unrighteous is cruelty or something. I don't remember what translation 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 is 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 argument's 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 even heard it, we'll trash, 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, it's historically, it's just not, it's not good because it's just, 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 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 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, slave ship 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, 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 Muslims who came from the

Middle East who predated them. And so 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. It doesn't justify any of it.

It just nuances a little bit to show you that this 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 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 understand, you know what you're dealing with here.

So the question, another question, it's because 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.

It wasn't a racial issue for them. It was more of 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 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 got to 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, this is, 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 want to 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 want to 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 it's analysis of the

Slave Narratives. This is the slave. This is the voice. We 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 had 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 U .S. Census. Now, many people might have a problem with this. You know, how can we trust the U .S. 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 U .S. 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 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 South, the black population was doing a lot better according to that metric than in the

North. Now, this is the 1850 U .S. 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.

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 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 going to analyze the conditions.

So that's the other question. And was the experience 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.

Now, here's a third question. Did racism always justify American slavery? That's the other thing, 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 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 is the minority people need us, right?

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 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 slaveholder 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.

So it wasn't just race that this was based on. It wasn't just this power relationship between white and black people.

And that's what modern critical race theorists want you to think. And that that has extended into our time.

It's just simply not true. It's more complex than that. Now, the providential view that I hold, to some extent is not held just by me.

I want to give you a quote from Booker T. Washington. This is from his book, Up from Slavery. He said this, from some things that I have said, one may get the idea that some of the slaves did not want freedom.

This is not true. I have never seen one who did not want to be free or one who would return to slavery.

I pity from the bottom of my heart, any nation or body of people that is so unfortunate as to get entangled in the net of slavery.

I have long since ceased to cherish any spirit of bitterness against the Southern white people on account of the enslavement of my race.

No one section of our country was wholly responsible for its introduction. And besides, it was recognized and protected for years by the general government.

So one of the reasons I said in that last quote that I read from myself, that I believe

I included it, where I talked about the government was wrong in this for sanctioning this as long as they did for, but it wasn't, it doesn't mean every slave master was in sin necessarily.

I'm going to keep going. This is Booker T. Washington. He says, having once got its tentacles fastened on the economic and social life of the

Republican public, it was no easy matter for the country to relieve itself of the institution. Then when we rid ourselves of prejudice or racial feeling and look facts in the face, which is what

I'm trying to get everyone here to do. He says, we must acknowledge that notwithstanding the cruelty and moral wrong of slavery, the 10 million

Negroes inhabiting this country who themselves or whose ancestors went through the school of American slavery are in a stronger and more hopeful condition, materially, intellectually, morally, and religiously than is true of an equal number of black people in any other portion of the globe.

This is so to such an extent that Negroes in this country, who themselves or whose forefathers went through the school of slavery are constantly returning to Africa as missionaries to enlighten those who remain in the fatherland.

This I say not to justify slavery. On the other hand, I condemn it as an institution. As we all know that in America, it was established for selfish and financial reasons and not from a missionary motive, but to call attention to a fact and to show how providence so often uses men and institutions to accomplish a purpose.

When persons ask me in these days now, in the midst of what sometimes seems hopelessly discouraging conditions,

I can have such faith in the future of my race in this country, I remind them of the wilderness through which and out of which a good providence has already led us.

Amen. Guys, this is the quote you need to remember. Take a screenshot of it. Here it is again.

Screenshot this and read the book. Read what's around this before it, after it.

I mean, he talks, I mean, he says from things that I've said, don't get the impression that I'm justifying slavery because he was talking about some of the good things that he remembered.

He was even talking about how when they were freed, they went to the porch with the master and they wept together.

They were sad in a way. They wanted freedom, but they were also sad that, hey, this is the guy that we took care of his kids.

We loved him. He took care of us when we were sick, that kind of thing. And so he says, I'm not saying any of this to justify slavery, but he took the providential view.

This is, I believe the Christian position on it. This has to be, this is what the Joseph position on it.

Yeah, it wasn't good. There was evil attached to this, but you know what? Look what God did. It doesn't mean everyone that was participating and being a master in this was even an evil person or that what they were doing was evil because of that participation.

In fact, they could have been like Stonewall Jackson teaching them the gospel. And that's what he says, that many of them have gone back to Africa to teach the gospel to the people that they came from.

So that's the providential view. And that's the view that I'm probably gonna get tarred and feathered for.

But I have no apologies for it, guys. I have no apologies for this view. This is, I believe the Christian view of it.

And does this flow into somewhat my view of the civil war?

A sliver of it, maybe. Just because I fashion, I think of myself more as someone who had been in favor of a more progressive emancipation.

I think it would have been good to be aggressive to stop this in its infancy. But because there was no mechanism, there wasn't a possibility.

There was no centralized authority to do that. By the time there was a centralized authority, they said, all right, by 1808, no more slave trade.

And there were efforts to try to curb that back. Could those have been more aggressive? Hindsight's 20 -20.

I wish they would have been. But in 1850, 1860, I would have thought of myself more as someone who would want to get rid of the institution in a more progressive manner.

Because of, I think, the damage that it did to slaves to free them immediately without any compensation for the masters, so economic collapse, and without any integration into society, especially in the

North and the West. Those two things needed to be there. And there wasn't any plan for that.

And so I'm gonna talk about that a little later. But amen to this view. This is the view that I hold. Now, some other things that I think you need to understand, too, because where were

Christians in this? Weren't there Christians in the South? Yeah, there were. And I have access. I have many quotes from Methodists and Baptists and Presbyterian church pamphlets, et cetera, basically stating that instructing masters to treat their slaves in a right fashion, according to biblical justice.

And in fact, there's even some stats. I didn't put them here, showing that they did preach, basically, slaves to submit, but that was not the majority of what they emphasized in some of these pamphlets for masters.

I'm gonna read for you here, though. These are just some general, this is a general observation from John Blassingame, a historian who wrote the slave community.

He said this, White ministers emphasized oral instruction, memorization in interrogatories, and singing in their efforts to Christianize the slaves.

Slaves memorized the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and many aspects of the denomination's liturgy. Ministers, bishops, and masters often questioned the slaves to make sure they understood what had been taught.

And when it came time to join a church, slaves exercised their own choice, demonstrating their autonomy.

Slaves catechized by Episcopalians or Roman Catholics persisted in joining Baptists and Methodists.

That's his observation of this. In 1863, during the war, 96 ministers in the

South signed an address to Christians throughout the world. And they said this, Most of us have grown up from childhood among the slaves.

All of us have preached to and taught them the word of life, have administered to them the ordinances of the Christian church, sincerely loved them as souls for whom

Christ died, and go among them freely and know them in health and sickness, in labor and rest from infancy to old age.

We are familiar with their physical and moral condition and alive to all their interests. We testify in the sight of God that the relation of master and slave among us, however we may deplore abuses in this, as in other relations of mankind, is not incompatible with our holy

Christianity. And that the presence of the Africans in our land is an occasion of gratitude on their behalf before God seeing that their divine providence has brought them where missionaries of the cross may freely proclaim to them the word of salvation.

And the work is not interrupted by agitating fanaticism. Talking about the postal crisis and these kinds of things.

The South has done more than any people on the earth for the Christianization of the African race. The condition of slaves here is not wretched as Northern fictions would have men believe, but prosperous and happy.

How can they say that? Isn't that so horrible? Well, you looked at the facts that are available to us that I showed you earlier.

And this is during the war and they're saying, look, we deplore the abuses in this. We don't like that, but we also recognize that we've been given an opportunity to evangelize.

And I have to believe that this opinion did exist. I mean, we have 96 ministers.

I mean, this is kind of a big deal during the war. And they're appealing to Christians throughout the world, basically to say, don't believe what's being said about us.

Support us, please. We're not these evil, horrible people that you're hearing about.

Many of them were progressive emancipationists. So let's keep going here.

Question, here's a question that I want every... This is the big one I want to challenge everyone in. Is slavery gone?

Because we're led to believe in a way that slavery was this absolutely horrible thing.

And yes, it was attached to many evils, horrible. Many of the things that happened within it, the circumstances of it.

But is it gone? Is it completely gone? And I want to bring to your attention a few things. Sweatshop labor. I put some pictures here.

When you go to Target and you shop for clothes, are those clothes coming from sweatshop labor? That's really not a whole lot different than slavery.

I mean, they're economically depressed people. A lot of times in these foreign countries, and this is their only option.

Now, the conditions are often terrible that they work under. But this exists, guys. In this country, we're benefiting from this kind of stuff in some ways.

Sex slavery is another one. More slaves today than there ever have been in the United States.

In world history by some estimates because of sex slavery. And you want to talk about an abusive slave system.

I mean, there's nothing. You can't, I mean, there's... The whole thing is predicated on abusing people.

Welfare system. The welfare system basically entraps people in generational dependency on the government.

It's very hard to get out of it. And there's no dignity in it either. The prison system.

The people that are in prison and there for a long time, sometimes their labor is used to make things like license plates, et cetera.

This isn't biblical justice, guys, where you repay what you owe. You serve the penalty for the crime that you committed.

This is using the labor of people for businesses and for, you know, it's not a good system in many ways for the state.

It really is what it comes down to. They're slaves of the state. You got debt slavery.

Proverbs calls debt slavery. How much debt is your country? And how much debt are you in? How much debt is your organizations that you're doing business for?

How much debt are they in? And then you have civil slavery, which is socialism, guys. Socialism and statism. And that's what people from the

Huffington Post believe in. That's what's crazy to me is that they're able to bludgeon someone like, or they can try at least, to bludgeon someone like myself.

And here's the slide for you. Yet at the same time, you support civil slavery.

I mean, on some level you think socialism might be a good idea. I mean, you're not raking Bernie Sanders over coals.

I mean, what's the legacy of that? Here's some pictures for you. The killing fields.

I mean, what are we to think of the legacy of 20th century totalitarian governments and the civil slavery they imposed?

Far worse than anything that you can think of in American history has taken place, guys. Far worse, not even worthy of comparison.

Except for maybe abortion, which the Huffington Post also would support. This is where we need to go on, be aggressive and go on the attack here, guys.

Do you support socialism? Why have you not raked someone like Bernie Sanders over the coals for this kind of thing?

Do you think it's the government's job to own what we ourselves create? This impersonal,

I mean, you're not even a person. There's no, you can't even look the person in the eye. It's some bureaucrat in some office somewhere that's controlling your destiny.

Our healthcare is gonna be in the hands of those people. So that's where we are now. Give a free pass to this kind of stuff.

Don't rake Bernie Sanders over the coals. But don't be concerned about what's happening with the

Great Reset. But things that happened hundreds of years ago, remind people of that continually.

So as to put a wedge between people groups. That's where we are right now. And it serves a political purpose.

There's no doubt about that. So here's the second question. This is the more important question. Is it possible to live within a system with evil attached to it?

And I put a few different examples here. How about Christian social workers? If you're in the welfare system, somehow you're a social worker.

Hey, not a good system. A lot of bad things attached to that from a Christian standpoint, at least. If you believe the Bible and what it says about if a man doesn't work, he shouldn't eat.

Well, you're in a whole system dedicated to being against that. People that aren't working are eating.

And you're enabling that. It's having all sorts of bad detrimental effects. And yet you can be a Christian if you so enlighten that.

I believe you can. And there's many Christian social workers that I respect. How about a prison guard? Yeah, I mean, look,

I know people who are prison guards, have been prison guards, and they try to be salt and light in a situation which isn't good.

How about shopping at Target? Buying clothes, maybe from sweatshop labor and that kind of stuff.

Is there anything in the Bible you can show me that says that is a sin? No, you can't really show me that.

How about paying tax? Now, look, I respect people who don't wanna do that. I like, I get it. But you can't then condemn someone for, you know, think about a situation where someone doesn't even have the money to pay for basic clothing, and they need to pay for cheaper clothing.

And that's what you're gonna get. Paying taxes. We all pay taxes, hopefully, right?

And what do some of those taxes go to? Some evil things, including Planned Parenthood. So what are we to say about that?

Is that participation all, does that make the person participating evil?

I don't think it does. And I don't think that's what Paul taught either. And that's the main reason that I believe what

I believe. Here's what he said in Ephesians 6, 5 -9. Slaves, be obedient to those who are your masters, according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, and the sincerity of your heart is to Christ, not by way of eye service as men pleasers, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart.

With good will render service, as to the Lord and not to men, knowing that whatever good each one does, this he will receive back from the

Lord, whether slave or free. And masters, do the same thing to them and give up threatening, knowing that both their master and yours is in heaven, and there is no partiality with him.

Now this kind of thinking did lay the groundwork in some ways in the Western world for ending the practice in a way, because, hey, we're both under the

Lord and we're gonna be judged by him. And I think in some ways that logic is what led to the end of some of the abuses within slavery, or at least slavery itself in some instances.

But this is what Paul taught in the New Testament. If you're a Christian, you believe these are the inspired words of God.

So what do you do with that? If you're a true Christian, you have to make sense of it somehow. And this is my best way of making sense of it within the context that we live in now.

Now here's where I wanna get to, here's the problems that existed, the real problems with American slavery and why it was wrong as a labor system, why it was bad from a bird's eye view, looking overall at the effect it had, et cetera.

Anti -literacy laws to me are one of the chief problems with this. This does not match up to the responsibility

Christians have to bring people to Christ. I mean, it undermines, it does not help,

I should say, the promotion of the Great Commission, because people can't actually read the

Bible for themselves. This was wrong for that reason. Now, I'm gonna read for you, here's some laws.

South Carolina, 1740. Now, in most of these, I have to say, if not all of them, they're all in the wake of some kind of a slave insurrection somewhere, usually outside the

South, but there was some threat. And they feared that if slaves were too educated and they got too smart, that they could lead a slave revolt, because generally the people who led slave revolts were educated people.

Or in the case of, I think the one I'm about to read from Virginia, it was the concern that they would probably read abolitionist literature, which called for slave insurrections.

And there was a lot of it, guys, more than a lot of us have probably actually realized. So it was kind of a, the motivation was protection, but it was evil to do this.

No matter what the motivation, it's evil. I don't have a problem saying that to limit someone from understanding

God's word, because that's what it is. I'll read for you. South Carolina, 1740. Whereas the having slaves taught to write or suffering them to be employed in writing may be attended with great inconveniences, be it enacted that all and every person and persons whatsoever who shall hereafter teach or cause any slave or slaves to be taught to write or shall use or employ any such slave as a scribe in any manner of writing whatsoever, hereafter taught to write, every such person or person shall for every such offense forfeit the sum of 100 pounds current money.

So there's a fine. Here's Virginia, 1819. That all meetings or assemblages of slaves or free

Negroes or mulattoes mixing and associating with such slaves at any meeting house or houses, et cetera, in the night or in any schools or schools for the teaching them reading or writing either in the day or night under whatsoever pretext shall be deemed and considered an unlawful assembly in any justice of a county wherein such assemblage shall be either from his own knowledge or the information of others of such unlawful assemblage may issue his warrant directed to any sworn officer or officers authorizing him or them to enter the house or houses, basically go in and stop the assembly.

They can inflict corporal punishment on the offender or offenders at the discretion of any justice of the peace not exceeding 20 lashes.

It's pretty harsh guys. And there's more. I mean, I could read you from a number of other states that had these laws.

And again, the law was they were very scared of someone who had education and who could read these abolitionists pamphlets that were calling for slave insurrections, et cetera from starting an insurrection.

And they had some experience with it. It was a terrifying thing for them. That's one of the big rifts between the North and South is that's why the

John Brown situation and the secret six who funded him was so significant because they say, hey, you're trying to kill us.

And in some places there was more slaves than there were, the amount of slaves outnumbered the amount of free white people in the area.

So they thought, hey, if there's a charismatic leader who comes and does this, we're gonna be in trouble. And so that's the kind of thing that led to these but it's wrong guys, really wrong in my opinion.

And it's not just my opinion. I think objectively you can say, based on what the word of God says about the importance of training up your children they were precluding slaves from being able to train up their own children from being able to educate them, being able to teach them about the

Lord. So yeah, it's wrong. And that was part of, in I think many of the

States if not most of them that has I don't think it was all of them. It wasn't all of them. I know that. But in many of the

States where slavery existed there were anti -literacy laws. And you had that it was partially justified and this sort of organically grew over time but it was justified based on race in many instances and most instances that was kind of the common thought was that there was an inferiority in that civilization and that civilization would have to make at the very least strides in order to be considered to be on equal footing with the descendants of Europeans.

Now there was a lot of Europeans that the same thing was thought about namely in the North, the Irish coming in and the

Italians. But there was definitely a harsh delineation between Europeans and Africans and Native Americans in some way of thinking like their civilizations were because of the inferiority in technology or other aspects that they were fit more suited for slavery.

That this was a better condition for them because of that, that kind of thing. And I have to say that's wrong.

So that's another, and that was just a common assumption. It wasn't like that was, I mean, there are laws in which you start to see this kind of thing, these barriers existing.

And in the North, even in places where they got rid of slavery they would set up these early Jim Crow laws. That's where they came from.

They came from the North traveled South. And then you have that incentivized man capture in a way.

Now I have to preface this with saying that the slave trade officially ended in 1808 it was outlawed in the constitution, the slave trade itself.

And then the Confederate constitution outlawed it again because there were smugglers who were still profiting from it.

And the Confederate constitution said that basically you can't do that. So we're not bringing any more slaves.

We're not incentivizing this anymore. But initially that it incentivized that kind of thing.

And so that was wrong, obviously. And then of course I put an asterisk by it but it enabled abuse, enabled abuse.

And I put an asterisk by it just because I want to convey the fact that there's this range to this really range, depending on where someone lived who their master was, where he kind of, you know, how close his neighbors were was he belonging to a church or was he out in some rural area where he could kind of do whatever he wants.

There are examples of slaves suing their masters in court for abuse. Those kinds of things do exist.

But there are a lot of instances where that just was not even possible. And you were kind of at the mercy of whoever your master was.

And if he was a cruel master then you would be treated cruelly. And so that kind of a thing did enable abuse.

So these are the reasons I think American slavery was wrong. We can look back and we can say we're very glad that that doesn't exist anymore.

Where we, you know, I would have, I think been a more of a progressive emancipationist by the time 1850 and 1860 rolled around.

And that would have been a very progressive thing. It wouldn't have been all at once but it would have been, there would have been some conditions attached to freeing.

So as to help the slaves as much as possible be freed into a situation where they could be self -sufficient.

And so I'm gonna talk about that a little bit because I think this is something that I could get raked over coals for and people don't really understand what the debate really was over.

And so, oh, just to acknowledge this, a good book Eugene Genovese's, A Consuming Fire, The Fall of the

Confederacy and the Mind of the White Christian South. It talks about how many of the Christian pastors who were the leading spiritual leaders in the

South at the time, recognized a lot of the abuses that I just talked about. They recognized that these were wrong and they thought that God might judge them for some of these things.

Not slavery in and of itself but the abuses attached to it. There's an egalitarian assumption though today and it's exemplified by people like Russell Moore.

I'm gonna play this short little clip for you. And as you're doing this, you will speak to some issues with prophetic authority, with an authority that is rooted in scripture.

You shall not kill. You shall not enslave.

So he makes thou shall not kill and thou shall not slave like the same thing. They're on the same level.

There is no Bible verse that says that though. If that's true, then what were the Hebrews doing with all the laws that regulated slavery in ancient

Israel? I mean, you could even have perpetual slavery with someone who was a foreigner. Jews had to be freed in Jubilee.

But you have a lot of regulations of the practice and then you have a pagan slave system in Roman times and then you just heard what

Paul said about that. And Jesus even in some of his parables uses slavery as an example. So what are you gonna do with all that?

This does not comport with scripture. And this is one of the concerns that I have is that there's a bunch of people running around today who are saying that the

Bible is against slavery. And here's the thing. If you wanna say that the Bible is against American slavery for the things that I just mentioned, then absolutely.

The Bible is against those things that don't match its standard. But if you wanna say that the Bible says it's a sin for there to be a slave master relationship, that's just not true.

If you wanna say that it is in all circumstances, slavery is a sin, that's not true either.

What do you do with spiritual slavery? The fact that in Romans, it talks about, we're either a slave to God or a slave to the devil.

What do you do with debt slavery and mechanisms for even buying a house, getting into debt?

That's a form of slavery. I'm slave to the lender that I borrowed from to buy a house, that kind of thing.

So there are different forms of slavery. And what we have to do as Christians is compare them to the word of God.

And I think the image most people have when they think about this is they just immediately get the image of, it's just a white guy beating a black guy senseless or raping someone who is a slave, who's a minority and just abusing them.

Did that stuff take place? Yeah, it took place. It was actually in some ways more common in the Roman system where it was kind of like understood, like in Corinth that there were these sex slaves.

Well, you have to pick out what the Bible actually says is evil and then make that what is evil.

If you don't do that, if you extend the definition of sin to this sort of more egalitarian line that we're hearing now, slavery is wrong because it's always wrong to exhibit any kind of authority or ownership over the labor of another person.

Then what you're doing is you're actually adopting a different moral standard. That's outside of the

Bible. And as a Christian, we just can't do that. Once you open that box up, then that's where all the other things come in.

That's where you get the egalitarianism when it comes to gender roles. That's when you get the soft peddling of LGBTQIA stuff.

It all kind of comes in under that kind of like, hey, there's a general principle here of equality in scripture, which there's really not.

There's equality before the law. There's equality that we have because of the fact that we all need Christ equally.

We're all sinners. But there's not this egalitarian equality. And when you start assuming that, then you start to run roughshod over these other passages that talk about these specific topics and you make egalitarianism the new standard.

And it's just not. And if you start to do that, then you are paving the way for the socialism stuff. That's how it gets in.

It gets a little foot in the door. And so I wanna prevent that because I don't want people being abused.

I don't wanna see civil slavery because it is wrong. If a man doesn't work, he shouldn't eat. That's what scripture says.

Charity belongs to the church, to private organizations. And again, when it comes to that, when it comes to welfare and charity,

I would be a progressive about trying, not progressive in the political sense, but gradual in wanting to end those things because people are dependent on them.

So my gradualism on some of these issues is informed by what

I think the word of God says about them. And then the real world effect of ending them. Now, abortion, I'll use as an example, that needs to be done with now, today.

Stop murdering babies. Stop killing people. That is absolutely wrong. There's no scaling back of that.

That is a direct violation of God's command. Thou shalt not murder. But the areas in which

I see principles or I see ways in which to privatize something so that it's not in the hands of the government anymore and we can gradually get rid of it.

And it's gonna hurt people less to do it that way. That's kind of where I'm coming from, just so people know this. I'm giving you general principles here.

I'm not getting into the specifics, but that's kind of how I'm thinking about these issues. So I'm gonna give you my thoughts on why

I think I would have been a progressive emancipationist given the political situation and what I understand from the word of God at that time.

And most of it has to do with the political situation. But Thomas Jefferson had said that basically, we have the dog by the ears and we don't know what to do.

If we let him go, he's gonna bite us. And that really was the situation as it pertained to slavery.

If you wanted to get rid of the institution, there was no good way, at least at the time, politically to do it.

You had the colonization movement, but one of the problems with it, and you could look at this country of Libya to see kind of how that went, is they really didn't have anywhere to go.

Like the tribes that they came from, those didn't exist anymore. Or oftentimes those people were dead or they were captured and the tribes had disbanded or they didn't know who they were.

They considered themselves to be now Americans or at least living in America. So that wasn't a great solution.

It's similar in some ways to people now, think of like illegal migrants who have children and then the children grow up and they have children.

What do you do at that point? They're living here, right? So no political party proposed a plan to emancipate and compensate and integrate.

This is the main thing I wanna kind of emphasize here. Emancipation, the Republican Party wanted that, but they wanted to contain slaves in the

South. They didn't want compensation for slave masters who had purchased these slaves from Northern businessmen,

Northern shipping, people in commercial shipping, because they're the ones profiting from this.

And there was no way to integrate them into society. There were all kinds of laws regulating Black people and what they could do in society, et cetera, in the

North and in the West, that was the logical place. Okay, if slaves are gonna be granted independence, the best place for them to go is the

West. There's land out there. They can have, they can make something of themselves. But the problem is basically the

Republican Party and their position on that. And I'll show you a few, just a few quotes on that. But the

Western territories were the logical place in my mind for gaining self -sufficiency. Economically, slavery was also already going to phase out,

I think. The United States was the only place where it was forced out in the context of war. But I think in general, it was already being phased.

It just would not have been able to compete with the kinds of technological advances that were accompanying the

Industrial Revolution, which the North was adopting. And so I think this could have been done without killing 600 ,000 people, and then another million in starvation after the war, and many of them slaves.

You killed a whole bunch of slaves to get this. If you think about it from the standpoint of the object of that war was to free slaves, which it really wasn't.

But if that was the case, and that was one of the effects of it, that's a huge sacrifice.

And you wanna compare that, that sacrifice of invasion and the deaths of all those people.

I mean, would you do that for even abortion today? Would you wanna have, let's have a big war over abortion and kill all these people.

You're gonna start wanting to weigh those costs and saying, what are our options? Are we able to do this politically? And I have been long in saying that I think the way to do this is on the local level and the state level to either secede, and I'm serious about that, or to nullify, nullify the law.

We're not, yeah, the federal government says this. We're not following it because we believe in protecting human life here. So that's kind of, that's my stance on that.

But when it comes to slavery, what would your solution have been for this?

It's a complicated topic and that's what I'm trying to get at. So if you said, okay, the

Western territories are the place to go. And that's where we can end slavery and send the slaves out there.

This was what people who advocated that view were up against. Here's a Republican Lyman Trumbull of Illinois in 1858.

This is the eve of the Civil War. He says, I want to have nothing to do. And these are his words, not mine.

I want to have nothing to do with the free Negro or the slave Negro. We wish to settle the territories with free white men.

You also have a campaign slogan for Republican Edward Bates in 1860,

Missouri for white men and white men for Missouri. This is the Republican Party, guys. This is why you gotta be careful of like, oh, the

Democrats were the, they were the horrible plea. They were the racist. The history of the Republican Party isn't the best history when it comes to race relations.

Abraham Lincoln, 1862. This is during the war. He says, our Republican system was meant for a homogenous people.

As long as blacks continue to live with the whites, they constitute a threat to the national life. Family life may also collapse.

And the increase of mixed breed, and then he uses a word that I probably shouldn't use, may someday challenge the supremacy of the white man.

This is Abraham Lincoln, guys, in 1862. This is the great emancipator, right? So this is what, this is why a big reason why the, that solution was impossible.

And so the solution that the Republican Party wanted was free all the slaves and contain them in the

Western territories. I'm sorry, contain them in the South rather. And no compensation, no integration.

That's economic collapse is what that is. And that's a social mess. I think it would have been better to progressively do this.

And if there was a plan to come up with a plan for integration and compensation, but you can see how difficult that was.

And so it ended up, what happened was slaves were freed in a context of absolute famine in a war -torn region where many of them starved to death.

And it is, we are still in some ways dealing with the consequences of that. And no one really seems to want to talk about that.

That the actual impact of that, that kind of poverty, how that poisoned race relations when you had people from other regions coming in and then using, basically offering handouts, trying to use former slaves to use racial wedges to gain control and to gain votes and these kinds of things.

We're still dealing with some of that in some ways. And these are the things that people don't want to talk about, but they're real, they're true.

History is very messy guys. And that's why when I look at something, a historical event or a person or situation,

I always want to look at it from the standpoint of not a simplistic cartoon, but this is a real person.

And real people are going to have a lot of complicated things that they believe. And there's going to be a lot of messy situations that they're in and we're in them today.

You know that because we live in some of them. So to kind of bring everything to a close here, slavery,

American slavery was wrong for the reasons that I cited earlier. It did not meet a biblical standard of what

Hebrew slavery was. We still have slavery in this country by different names.

And there's multiple examples of that, but they're just not vilified like American shadow slavery was.

And I think for those who want to say that anyone who believes that the master -slave relationship is always evil, it is always sinful, they're going to have to posit a moral standard for that.

And that's the moral issue here. And that's really what I think I end up, people disagree with me for and say,

I'm a defender of slavery. No, it's not defender of slavery. I'm just a defender of what the Bible teaches about the relationship between a master and slave.

And that there have been examples and there are examples and there's heroes even in our biblical faith of people who were slave masters, who actually were also followers of the

Lord and followed the law of God when it came to that issue. So you have to grapple with that.

I don't know what else, how else to say it really, but that's all for today.

I hope that that helps some of you think through some of these issues at the very least gave you food for thought. And again,

I don't mind taking, I mean, I don't like it all the time, but look, I'll take the hits from people who want to condemn me for these beliefs.

I really want to make my standard the word of God on everything. And so that's where I want to have,

I want to understand what happened historically and I want to understand what the Bible teaches ethically.

And I want those two things to influence the positions that I have. And that's what I'm striving for.

And I hope you're striving for the same thing, no matter what it is. So, hey, God bless you. Hope this was helpful.