Why slavery is not America’s original sin (2024)

Topics Identity Politics Long-reads USA

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Modern histories tend to rely heavily on the new ideological pieties of left-wing activists. First among these is the belief that we live in a totally corrupt and oppressive society – in fact, in the world’s most oppressive and corrupt society. Feeding this belief is the widely accepted claim – at least, within the modern Western world – that slavery is the United States’ ‘original sin’, and alleged to be uniquely evil as practised within the US.

One major American textbook, Traditions and Encounters, appears to describe the Western-dominated slave trade as the largest and most brutal in history, calling even the full sweep of Arab / Islamic slavery ‘smaller than the Atlantic slave trade of modern times’. Elsewhere, the 1619 Project’s Nikole Hannah-Jones argues bluntly: ‘America’s brutal system of slavery [was] unlike anything that had existed in the world before. Enslaved people were… property that could be mortgaged, traded, bought, sold, used as collateral, given as a gift and disposed of violently.’

This take has become increasingly prominent within the modern American educational environment. The 1619 Project – which insists that 1619, the year that 20 Africans arrived in the English colonies, and not 1776, was ‘the true founding’ of America – has a formal curriculum. Underpinning this view that slavery in America and the West was uniquely brutal are several unexamined assumptions. Modern Americans tend to project our positive values back into the past while thinking that our sins are uniquely bad. What we don’t understand is that contemporary Western beliefs about human dignity, inalienable rights, a right to freedom, etc, are the exception, not the norm. If they seem like the norm today, that is largely because we have remade much of the world in our image. In reality, as conservative éminence grise Thomas Sowell writes in Black Rednecks and White Liberals (2005), it is probably fair to say that most Westerners think of historical slavery almost entirely in the context of Western white oppression of blacks during what is technically known as the Atlantic Slave Trade. Almost nothing could be further from empirical truth: American slavery was not unprecedented, it was not uniquely brutal and it did not invent any new oppressive systems. It was terrible, but talking about it as if it came out of nowhere means we understand less about history and about global norms. Slavery was ubiquitous throughout the ancient and historical world – often the step of human ‘development’ after simply killing and eating one’s defeated foemen.

Slavery in historical perspective

Leaving aside Rome, Greece and Babylon as examples of the horrors of historical slavery, we find that the more familiar African slave trade also stretched back over millennia, involving conflicts and emancipations that have often been forgotten for centuries in the West. Roughly 1,200 years ago, for example, the Zanj wars were fought (largely) between Arabs and slaves from civilised regions of West Africa and devastated much of modern-day Iraq. Broadly speaking, the Zanj rebels were members of Black African tribes who had been captured in Africa following military defeats or raids by Arab slave traders and who were subsequently forced to labour for Arab masters in blistering southern Iraq.

Even by Mississippi standards, a plantation in the Iraqi south was a miserable place to work shirtless in the summer. Zanj workers were frequently given Sisyphean tasks like removing and replacing all the over-salinated topsoil on large farms; others worked in 110-to-120-degree conditions to drain the salt marshes near the modern city of Basra. Contemporary sources, along with historical Arab ones, state the obvious: ‘Their conditions were extremely bad. Their labour was hard and exacting, and they received only a bare and inadequate keep consisting – according to the Arabic sources – of flour, semolina and dates.’ (1) Under a variety of charismatic and soon-dead leaders, the captured African warriors tried to rebel against these ‘appalling conditions’ at least twice (via organised raids from AD 688 to 690, and a more organised rebellion under ‘the Lion of the Zanj’ in 694) before the conflict generally called the Zanj War, but were broken and shoved back into the salt marshes on both occasions.

The Zanj War caused destruction on a truly epic, modern scale. Contemporary estimates of the death toll during the 14-year conflict generally range between 500,000 and 2.5million. There seems general agreement that the war devastated much of the countryside through which it was fought: ‘Its consequences must long have continued to be felt, and it can hardly be doubted that the cities and regions of the lower Tigris never entirely recovered from the injuries which they at that time suffered’, reads one summary (2).

Remarkably, the story of this massive and bloody war, which lasted more than 14 years and killed perhaps a million human beings, is little more than a footnote to the full tale of the millennium-long Arab slave trade. As one academic puts it, the Arab trade in enslaved Africans ‘can be traced back to antiquity’. The trade became widespread in the 7th century as Islamic power grew in the Middle East and North Africa, ‘seven centuries before Europeans explored [Africa] and 10 centuries before West Africans were sold across the Atlantic to America’, and it endured until the modern era.

By almost every metric, the Arab slave trade was larger in scale than the white-dominated Atlantic slave trade. The well-regarded Senegalese scholar, Tidiane N’Diaye, has argued that at least 17million Africans were sold into Arab slavery, with eight million or so shipped from Eastern Africa to the Islamic world ‘via the Trans-Saharan route to Morocco or Egypt’, and nine million more ‘deported to regions on the Red Sea or the Indian Ocean’ – then both largely Arab lakes.

While it is difficult and a bit tasteless to compare these things, the Arab trade was by all accounts as brutal or more so than its Western counterpart. Academics have concluded that ‘about three out of four slaves died’ before ever reaching their destination and being sold into bondage, from causes including starvation, sickness and plain ‘exhaustion after long journeys’. It was also longer-lasting than Western slavery, with slavery not being (formally) banned in the fairly typical Arab port of Zanzibar until 1873 and not abolished across Muslim East Africa until 1909.

Some Arab and Afro-Asiatic slave traders achieved legendary status during their eras and are remembered today. Probably most notable among these merchants of life was Hamad ibn Muhammad ibn Jum‘ah ibn Rajab ibn Muhammad ibn Sa‘īd al Murjabī – better known as Tippu Tip. A black man himself, in any normal sense of that term, Tip was also the most powerful and widely known slave trader in Africa for most of the period between his birth in 1832 and death in 1905, supplying much of the world with black slaves.

Tip had no particular problem doing business with, fighting, or indeed selling Europeans as well as blacks: no bigot, he. Following an agreement between his own Sultan – Barghash bin Said of Zanzibar – and the mad European king Leopold of Belgium, he served briefly as governor of the Stanley Falls sub-district in Belgium’s Congo Free State. He was also involved in the bloody Congo-Arab War, where Europeans and Arabs fought primarily by means of African proxy forces. When he finally retired, he wrote a darkly hilarious autobiography: one of the first prominent African examples of that genre and apparently the first ever written in Swahili. By 1895, Tip had already come to control seven large plantation farms and thousands of slaves, in addition to his force of fighting men. He died in 1905 in the ‘Stone Town’ core of Zanzibar – old, famous, very rich, evil and beloved.

The ‘Tippu Tip’ story of powerful whites and blacks working together to sell less powerful people of all shades would have struck almost no one as unusual for the large majority of the history of the slave trade. There was in fact – for centuries – a regional slave trade focussed entirely on the sale of white battle captives to Arab and black Muslim masters: the Barbary slave trade. Ohio State’s Robert Davis estimates that Muslim ‘Barbary’ raiders from the North African coast enslaved ‘about 850,000 captives over the century from 1580 to 1680’, and ‘easily’ as many as 1.25million between 1530 and 1780 (3).

Interestingly, these figures probably represent significant underestimates of the white slave population in the Near East. Davis analyses primarily the impact of slave raiding from modern Algeria, Libya and Tunisia, and his numbers apparently do not include Europeans seized in the Mediterranean or Black Seas by other Muslim naval powers. Using imperial Turkish customs records, The Cambridge World History of Slavery estimates that between two and three million mostly European slaves were shipped into the Ottoman Empire from the Black Sea region alone between the mid-1400s and the start of the 18th century. In this context, it is hard to avoid agreeing with Davis that – for whatever reason – many historians today ‘minimise the impact of Barbary slaving… [and] the scope of corsair piracy’.

Barbary slavers were famously ruthless and daring – launching military-scale raids on European cities on more than one occasion. In 1544, legendary Caucasian Muslim Hayreddin Barbarossa (‘the Red Beard’) captured both the sizable island town of Ischia and the city of Lipari, enslaving approximately 1,500 Christian Europeans in the first strike and between 2,000 and 3,000 in the second. Just seven years later, in 1551, another Muslim raider – Dragut or ‘Turgut Reis’ – conquered the island of Gozo and sold the entire population as slaves: shipping 5,000 to 6,000 Europeans into the Ottoman Empire as chattels.

During just the years 1609 to 1616, ‘no fewer than 466’ British merchant vessels were boarded and taken over by Barbary pirates during maritime battles or slashing longshore raids, with almost all captured sailormen and passengers sold as slaves. Even the US, half a world away, suffered at the hands of these slavers: the phrase ‘to the shores of Tripoli’ in the Marine Corps Hymn refers to a punitive mission launched by President Jefferson following repeated and brutal North African attacks on Yankee shipping.

The totals from the Barbary era represent only a small percentage of those white Europeans enslaved by Muslim or African oppressors throughout history. Even leaving racially diverse Rome and her hordes of unfree people and the million-plus western European victims of Barbary raiders aside, the very word ‘slave’ derives from ‘Slav’ – the ethnic demonym for proud but historically ‘backward’ whites occupying eastern Europe, millions of whom were sold into bondage over the centuries by Muslims and others. Across the sweep of time, from Athens to Istanbul, it is far from impossible that more whites than blacks have been enslaved.

Slavery in America

Even inside the future US in, say, the year 1619, the picture of human bondage was more complex than is generally recognised. Importantly, slave ownership was not a vice confined to Old World peoples (of whatever colour). Native North American and Mesoamerican tribes also all enslaved captured Native opponents – and later came to extend the same courtesy to white battle captives and purchased African Americans. While some of these individuals were treated almost as replacement members of the tribe, others were tortured to death after a few months or years of brutal captivity. Further, plain chattel slavery of a variety more recognisable to Westerners existed across today’s Alaska, most of Canada and the Pacific Northwest states, practised by powerful tribes like the warlike Haida.

When captured Africans began to arrive in North America, many tribes – notably the ‘Five Civilised Tribes’ of the American Southeast – transitioned rapidly from intra-Indigenous to black slavery. The US’s preeminent Native slaveholders were probably the members of the powerful Cherokee (Keetoowah) Nation, which increased its slave population from 600 in 1809 to 1,600 in 1835 and roughly 4,000 by 1860-61. While these numbers might strike a casual observer as low, it is worth recalling that the population of the US was below 5.5million people in the census year of 1800, and that the same-year figures for the entire Cherokee population were respectively 12,400 (1809), 16,400 (1835) and 21,000 (1860). It seems fair to describe the Cherokee Nation as having been at least as much of a slave state as the white-led Confederacy: 19 per cent of all persons living in Cherokee territory by 1860 were enslaved blacks, and approximately 10 per cent of all families there ‘held others in slavery’.

Even the official Constitution of the Cherokee Nation, ratified in 1827, mentions black slavery several times and imposed harsh restrictions on enslaved people. According to scholar Tony Seybert, ‘the 1827 Cherokee Constitution disallowed [among other things] the ownership of property by the enslaved’ or their multiracial children, ‘the buying of goods from enslaved people’, and allowing slaves to consume alcohol (masters were fined heavily when this happened). It also forbade all marriages between black slaves and whites or Natives, and barred even free black residents of Cherokee lands from voting in any local or national election. It seems that these Native North Americans understood human bondage quite well.

The Cherokee were hardly alone. The other mighty Civilised Tribes exploited the slave system to nearly the same extent, with the Choctaw and their Chickasaw allies alone ‘hold[ing] over 5,000 blacks in slavery by 1860’. This plain historical fact of common, brutal Native American slaveholding is so undisputed that some writers have argued it ‘complicates’ the standard narratives around anti-Native atrocities like the Trail of Tears. ‘When you think of the Trail’, says Smithsonian magazine’s Ryan P Smith, in a piece on a symposium at the National Museum of the American Indian, you probably envision ‘a long procession of suffering Cherokee Indians forced westward by a villainous Andrew Jackson’. The symposium, which focussed on ‘intersectional African-American and Native American history’, posited that this imagined vision was too simplistic. A historically literate observer of the same imaginary tableau might guess that the Indian removal policy ‘was not simply the vindictive scheme of [then president] Andrew Jackson, but rather a popularly endorsed, congressionally sanctioned campaign spanning the administrations of nine separate presidents’.

What you most likely do not imagine, the Smithsonian summarised, ‘are Cherokee slaveholders… [and] the numerous African-American slaves, Cherokee-owned, who made the brutal march themselves, or else were shipped en masse to what is now Oklahoma… by their wealthy Indian masters’. However, that ugly latter image would have depicted one of the most obvious and striking realities of the Trail of Tears: Civilised Tribes Natives owned tens of thousands of slaves, and most of them were frog-marched to the Middle West by their owners. Comanche author and museum curator Paul Chaat Smith, quoted in the Smithsonian piece, points out that the ‘tribes were deeply committed to slavery, established their own racialised black codes, immediately reestablished slavery when they arrived in Indian territory, rebuilt their nations with slave labour and enthusiastically sided with the Confederacy in the Civil War’.

That last line is worth repeating, for the 1619-educated innocents of today: at least part of the reason the US government was so ruthless with the great Southeastern Native nations during the 1850s and 1860s was that many of them spoke openly in support of the Southern cause – and fought with the Confederacy when the Civil War began. Given the earlier removal campaigns, the Natives of the Five Civilised Tribes somewhat understandably hated the US government, so any revolt against it would have struck many of them as good. But they also probably aligned with the Confederacy’s pro-slavery goals. And while the highly intelligent chiefs of these tribes had few illusions about the Confederacy, all sources so far indicate that they saw this much smaller and less cohesive potential nation as easier to manipulate and work within.

Human behaviour of this kind is often driven by complex amoral motives, a point that the experts cited in the Smithsonian piece make over and over again. They note that Native slaveholding was not generally accompanied by complex rationalisations or agonies of guilt. Native masters owned slaves for the same reasons white ones did: because they could, and they thought they would gain a practical advantage from doing so. Cherokee slave buyers were not somehow confused or misled: ‘They were willful and determined oppressors of blacks they owned, enthusiastic participants in a global economy driven by cotton.’

Following this point, the Smithsonian piece goes on to make an absolutely essential observation about history and historical analysis: ‘American history is explained poorly by modern morality but effectively by simple economics and power dynamics.’ This thesis, while true, often seems nearly taboo to express in public. However, as Paul Chaat Smith points out, it is indisputable that human beings have been imperfect and incentive-driven in every era of history and that the generally accepted ‘moral’ rules in the past were very different from those today. This makes it not merely silly but bizarre to judge rationally behaving historical figures by the standards of today.

‘Andrew Jackson had a terrible Indian policy and radically expanded American democracy’, Smith points out. Similarly, the great Cherokee chief John Ross ‘was a skillful leader… but also a man who deeply believed in and practised the enslavement of black people’. For almost all of history, an understanding of rather brutal rules of engagement governed the behaviour of virtually all human beings alive on Earth – and Arabs, West Africans, East Africans, Asians and Native Americans were no more an exception to this than were white Europeans.

So what made the modern Western world unique when it came to slavery? The simple if unpopular answer is: ending the practice of slavery. It was not keeping captured enemies or plantation serfs in bondage that made the West stand out historically – those practices were universal – but rather letting them go.

With all due respect to the brave slave rebels of Haiti or the occasional philosopher within the long Chinese and Indian intellectual traditions, ’emancipation’ – the widespread belief that people who are not themselves enslaved should vigorously oppose the entire institution of slavery – seems to have been a distinctively and almost uniquely Western idea. Whether it reflected relatively early European industrialisation or a rare but genuine escape from human amorality, the freeing of most of the slave population of the Earth was a Western (and Christian) triumph. As historian Philip D Morgan puts it:

‘Unlike other previous forms of slavery, the New World version did not decline over a long period but came to a rather abrupt end. The age of emancipation lasted a little over one hundred years: beginning in 1776 with the first anti-slavery society in Philadelphia, through the monumental Haitian Revolution of 1792, and ending with Brazilian emancipation in 1888. An institution that had been accepted for thousands of years disappeared in about a century.‘

While US history is today often described as an essentially unending sequence of white abuses of blacks, an American abolitionist movement dates back literally to the nation’s founding. By the late 1770s, black American veterans of the Revolutionary War – and more than a few of their white former bunkmates – began a petition-writing campaign that targeted Northern state legislatures and demanded an end to slavery. This and similar techniques were essentially successful: by 1795, 10 US states and soon-to-be-state territories, including Connecticut, the Indiana Territory, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, all of the Northwest Territory, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont, were free land by law. Combined, these contained well over 50 per cent of the free population of the US. And what I and others have called the anti-slavery upswell continued from there. In 1794, Congress formally barred all American ships from participating in the Atlantic slave trade.

Just 14 years later, in 1808, the same body passed the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, which made it illegal for any ship from any country to bring enslaved people into the US for sale. Finally, following some fascinating incremental steps and a big war, slavery was formally declared illegal throughout the US in 1865.

It is well worth remembering the price we paid to reach that point: the shockingly bloody American Civil War – where men and boys not infrequently charged dug-in cannon manned by their brothers – killed 360,222 lads in Union blue, and another 258,000 or so in Confederate Feldgrau. Roughly one in every 10 American men of fighting age died during the war: 23 per cent of Southern white men in their twenties were killed. In some Southern states, the majority of buildings over two stories high were burned; one Union soldier died for every nine to 10 slaves who were set free. The war also boosted the national debt of the US from less than $70million to $2.77 billion – an increase of many tens of billions in 2022 dollars. As I have noted elsewhere: ‘If the US owed a bill for slavery, we have quite arguably already paid it in blood.’

While a bit less drastic, the history of the abolitionist movement across the early modern Western world reads similarly. Following the 1787 establishment of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, Britain moved along with the US to outlaw international slave trading in 1807 to 1808 and then deployed the British Navy around the world to sink slave ships and blockade notorious trading hubs. Not long after, slavery was eliminated across the British Empire (notably excepting India) by the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.

On the continent, France abolished the practice of slavery throughout the French Empire in 1794, briefly brought it back under Napoleon in 1802, but then permanently re-abolished it throughout the colonial system in 1848 – and sent slaver-hunting French warships to patrol the oceans alongside England’s. Between France’s abolition of the practice in 1794 (or Haiti’s in 1804, if you prefer) and Brazil’s in 1888, every major Western nation legally barred slavery.

Many other nations did not. While it is considered wildly politically incorrect to point this out, in powerful Muslim and black African countries where the writ of the West never ran, chattel slavery quite often still exists today. A 2017 report from the International Labour Organisation recently found that, ‘as of 2016’, more than 40million people currently ‘perform involuntary servitude of some kind’ in situations that they cannot leave. In other words, they are slaves. Per one widely read commentary on the report: ‘Today, there could be more people enslaved than at any time in human history. Chattel bondage still happens today – particularly in Africa.’

The details provided by the ILO and the scholars analysing its data are striking. According to one standard estimate, ‘between 529,000 and 869,000’ human beings – most of them black Africans – are currently ‘bought, owned, sold and traded by Arab and black [masters]’ within just five countries in Africa. Global sources estimate that there are currently 700,000 to one million desperate black African migrants living in Libya alone, and that roughly 50,000 of them have been forced into physical or sexual slavery by Arab Libyans.

Even a few open slave societies continue to exist today. In the Islamic republic of Mauritania, ‘the very structure of society reinforces slavery’. A racialised caste system still exists, where – in roughly this order – Berbers, lighter-skinned Arabs known as ‘beydanes’, and Islamised free blacks called ‘haratin’ completely dominate a group of black chattel slaves referred to as ‘abid’ or ‘abeed’. This, like ‘Slav’, is an old Arabic word used to denote a slave – in this case, generally a black one.

Mauritania’s slave population is sizable: the US State Department has estimated it at ‘just’ 30,000 to 90,000 people, but deep-cover research by CNN in 2011 placed the real number at between four and seven times the highest estimate. CNN reporters and analysts claimed that between ’10 per cent to 20 per cent of the [Mauritanian] population lives in slavery’.

Mauritanian slaves live very much as slaves always have: their yoke is not a light one. Perhaps because of the backlash to this practice in Libya or Algeria, few if any open markets exist, but all slaves are held as chattels and most are born out of forced intercourse. Slaves are often used as a crude form of currency, serving as substitutes for money to settle gambling debts, being privately traded between masters in exchange for other people or goods like rice, and often being available for short-term rental for whatever purpose. Like unfree people everywhere, they have no say in any of this, and can be (and often are) beaten or killed for attempting to escape their state of bondage.

Interestingly, sources almost invariably describe Mauritania as one of the countries in the world furthest from the West, an ‘endless sea of sand dunes’ where the cuisine, dominant religion and daily patterns of life show little if any European influence. And that may be the problem. When analysed by serious people, across the sweep of history, slavery is revealed to have been not a ‘Western’ practice but rather a universal one largely ended by Western arms. Where those arms reached never, or only briefly, it often continues to this day.

Wilfred Reilly is a spiked columnist.

The above essay is an edited extract from his new book, Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me: Debunking the False Narratives Defining America’s School Curricula, published by Broadside Books.

(1) The Arabs in History, by Bernard Lewis, (Hutchinson, 1968), p104

(2) Sketches from Eastern History, by Theodor Noldeke, (Adam and Charles Black, 1892)

(3) ‘Origins of American Slavery’, by Philip Morgan, in America on the World Stage: A Global Approach to US History, Gary W Reichard, Ted Dickson, and Organisation of American Historians (eds) (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), p44

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