Inconvenient Facts about Slavery

Historical sources show that after gaining freedom, many ex-slaves were quite willing to own human chattel themselves.

Written by Lipton Matthews.

Selling books that preach the brutality of black enslavement is a lucrative venture for those wishing to profit from identity politics. Although such books do topple the image of slave masters as “benevolent”, they exclude an important fact: slave ownership was ubiquitous. Of course, the existence of non-white slave-owners does not absolve the sins of whites. But concealing their story gives an unrealistic image of slave societies. Many groups were involved in the business of slavery, including those that were oppressed at the time.

Long before the introduction of slavery in the American South and the Caribbean, the institution was recognized as a legitimate business. And despite dreading the thought of enslavement, some blacks embraced slave ownership as a vehicle for social advancement. Historical sources show that after gaining freedom, many ex-slaves were quite happy to own human chattel themselves. Descent from slaves did not prevent the Bourne family, for example, from acquiring slaves for commercial purposes.

William Bourne, along with his son London and other members of the family, owned slaves in Barbados. Like their white counterparts, black slaveholders in Barbados viewed slave ownership as essential to their identity and were keen to remind the political establishment that abolishing the institution would not redound to their benefit. In the neighboring island of Jamaica, one of the most esteemed black citizens was John Williams, a former slave who graduated into the slave-owning class and used his status to lobby for a law that prevented slaves from bringing evidence against him and his family. He was the father of the scholar, headmaster, and poet Francis Williams. The latter followed in his father’s footsteps and was listed as owning fifteen slaves when he died in 1762.

Moreover, quantitative research has demolished the argument that the acquisition of slaves by American blacks was motivated by solely benevolence. Southern whites were only three times more likely than blacks to own slaves, suggesting that black slave-owners were not as rare as assumed. And around 27 percent of black slave-owners, accounting for the majority of slaves in the black slave-owning population, held them for commercial reasons.

It’s true that benevolence prompted slave-ownership in some cases. Yet even when purchases (of relatives, say) were inspired by compassion, black slave-owners rarely hesitated to dispose of those who offended them. In one peculiar case, a son sold his father after he experienced the wrath of his tongue, and in other cases spouses were sold for showing disrespect. It is difficult to estimate how many acquisitions were motivated by benevolence. However, the consensus in historical research of primary sources is that black slave-owners were held in a negative light.

From the writings of Ulrich B. Phillips, we learn that some thought that black slave masters were actually worse than whites. After digesting the literature on mixed-race slave-owners in the West Indies, who were often considered black, the distinguished anthropologist M.G. Smith noted, “The harshness of free coloured owners towards their slaves is remarked upon by all our sources.” The real history of black slave-owners is quite different from the sanitised versions you find in politically correct scholarship.

Another inconvenient fact that’s often overlooked by historians of slavery is the ownership of slaves by enslaved people. Examples abound of slaves performing as both chattel and slave-owners. Several gradations of slavery existed, meaning that some enslaved people could actually acquire wealth, status, and slaves.

In Africa, it was typical for elite slaves to obtain other slaves who became their property – although their holdings were usually transferred to their masters when they died. Similarly, enslaved overseers in Brazil could accumulate enough wealth to purchase slaves and eventually their own freedom. The policy of permitting enslaved people to own slaves was not limited to Africa and the Americas. Legal arrangements in the Crimean Khanate allowed enslaved people to possess human property as a tool to underwrite manumission.

Slavery was a multifaceted institution with multiple layers of dependency and brutality. Yet despite the explosion of relevant books, comparatively few scholars have investigated the white victims of slavery. While the effects of the transatlantic slave trade on Africa are addressed in numerous articles, the consequences of raids conducted by the Vikings have gone largely ignored.

The Vikings were a menace to the British Isles during the medieval period, killing many of their captives or eagerly selling them to Arab traders. They were indiscriminate in their hunt for slaves and even targeted aristocrats and bishops. No group was spared from their abductions. Places like Cork, Dublin and Wexford were major embarkation points for slave shipments to Rouen and Muslim Iberia. In the ninth century alone, the Vikings sold tens of thousands of whites to the Arabs of Spain. This trade was so successful that a 10^th century Arab chronicler observed several Europeans in the militias and harems of Arab leaders.

On top of slave raids, the Vikings destroyed the wealth of the communities they preyed upon by stripping them of provisions and human resources. They also rendered the political structures of those communities vulnerable to collapse. However, due to gaps in the historical literature, one scholar of the Viking Age argues that contemporary academics severely underestimate how destabilising Viking raids were in terms of their effects on population growth and political systems.

White slavery is an understudied topic, though thanks to the burgeoning research of a new generation of scholars we are gaining a better understanding of it. Christina Sears fills a lacuna in historical scholarship by recounting the experiences of white Americans who were captured by corsairs and enslaved in Algeria. For those who occupied elite positions, enslavement was not unbearable, but most were relegated to subpar living conditions and beatings for falling out of line. Even elite status did not completely insulate slaves from abuse, since their proximity to slave masters made them susceptible to exploitation and harassment.

Perhaps most remarkable of all is that white Americans were captured and enslaved by other white Americans. The United States had a thriving illegal slave trade that trafficked poor whites into slavery during the nineteenth century. The scandal was covered by Carol Wilson and Calvin D. Wilson in a 1998 article published in Slavery & Abolition – the premier journal for scholarship on slavery. These researchers identified several cases of white slavery documented by primary sources. And they specifically highlighted an editorial by William Lloyd Garrison arguing that the kidnapping of whites for enslavement was not an uncommon event.

Interestingly, free African Americans also participated in this lucrative trade, seeking to capitalise on the unfortunate status of working-class whites. White slavery became so widespread that activists used it as justification for the abolition of slavery. In Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, Keri Leigh Merritt writes the following:

Lines separating the supposedly dialectic categories of black and white, slave and free, were gradually becoming blurred ... From the advertisement for white slaves to court cases where poor whites were sold into slavery, the racial dynamic of the Deep South was growing ever more complicated.

The politically correct narrative would have us believe that blacks were the only victims of slavery, and were never slavers themselves, despite the historical record showing otherwise. Reality is complex, and if groups are entitled to privileges just because their ancestors were enslaved, then the descendants of poor white southerners and coastal-dwelling Europeans who were victimised by slavery are surely entitled to such privileges.

Lipton Matthews is a research professional and YouTuber. His work has been featured by the Mises Institute, The Epoch Times, Chronicles, Intellectual Takeout, American Thinker and other publications. His email address is: lo_matthews@yahoo.com

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