Indigenous Slavers: American Indians Who Whipped and Owned Blacks | Frontpage Mag

We know this...some religious groups did not own others but virtually everyone else did

1.) How Antebellum Christians Justified Slavery

After Emancipation, some Southern Protestants refused to revise their proslavery views. In their minds, slavery had been divinely sanctioned.

“Southern ministers had written the majority of all published defenses of slavery,” Jemison reminds us. For these ministers, slavery not only had divine sanction, it was a necessary part of Christianity. This was because slavery was defined as akin to a marriage: the “power of slave owners over slaves paralleled the power of husbands over wives and of parents over children.”

As abolitionism gathered strength, white Southerners repositioned themselves from an acceptance of slavery as a necessary evil to defending it as a positive good.

SOURCE : https://daily.jstor.org/how-antebellum-christians-justified-slavery/



2.) BIBLE & THEOLOGY
How and Why Did Some Christians Defend Slavery?
FEBRUARY 24, 2017

Of course, some Americans did more than assume slavery. They argued for it. Baptist pastor Richard Fuller, for example, used the Bible to defend the institution of slavery.

Fuller’s parents raised him Episcopalian before sending him to Harvard. He graduated in 1824, earned a law degree, got married, and became a Baptist.

After practicing law, he led churches in Beaufort, South Carolina, and in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1847, Fuller and Brown University president Francis Wayland published Domestic Slavery Considered as a Scriptural Institution. 

The heart of the matter boiled down to a simple question: Is slavery, in principle, a sin?

Wayland argued it is. Fuller disagreed.

Fuller raised concerns about slavery’s abuses, but he defended it nonetheless. How did he, and others like him, use Scripture to advocate for slavery?[2]

Having established the supremacy of Scripture, Fuller proceeded to interpret its view of slavery. The gist of his argument went like this:

1. The Old Testament tolerates slavery. Fuller pointed to Leviticus 25:44: “You may buy male and female slaves from among the nations that are around you.” God would never permit what he considered sinful.

2. The New Testament tolerates and regulates slavery. Jesus used the institution of slavery in his teaching, drawing a contrast between those in bondage and those free (John 8:35). Jesus didn’t repudiate slavery. Paul told slaves to obey their masters, and he told masters how to manage slaves (Eph. 6:5–11; Col. 3:22–4:1). From Jesus and Paul we find, according Fuller, implicit approval of slavery.

3. If Jesus or Paul had wanted to outlaw the institution of slavery, they would’ve done so immediately. Neither the Savior nor his apostle, Fuller insisted, would have caved to the pro-slavery culture if they counted it a sin.

4. The morality of slavery is no defense for its abuses. Fuller owned slaves himself, and he prided himself on the way he cared for them, counting himself among “the sincerest friends of the African race.”

For Fuller the matter was simple: If Old Testament saints owned slaves, and if the apostle Paul preached “the whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27) without explicitly prohibiting slavery, then no man can rightly call slavery, in principle, a sin. In short:

Slavery was everywhere a part of the social organization of the earth; and slaves and their masters were members together of the churches; and minute instructions are given to each as to their duties, without even an insinuation that it was the duty of masters to emancipate.

Now I ask, could this possibly be so, if slavery were “a heinous sin”? No!

Before America entered a a Civil War to contest this interpretation, Wayland sought to change Fuller’s mind. The university president was a widely regarded Christian ethicist.

Despite being close friends, Wayland rejected Fuller’s slavery hermeneutic. 

SOURCE : https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/how-and-why-did-some-christians-defend-slavery/



3.) CHRISTIANITY AND EMPIRE
Slaveholder Christianity

Richard offers a critique of how Christianity aligned with empire and colonialism manifested specifically in the United States:
The form of Christianity that has grown in the United States and spread throughout much of the world is what we have to fairly call “slaveholder Christianity.” The founders of our nation drew on a Christian tradition that had been aligned with empire for more than a millennium. It must be said that this form of Christianity is far, far removed from the Gospel and the example of Jesus as it has failed to respect the divine image in all beings. [1]

SOURCE : https://cac.org/daily-meditations/slaveholder-christianity-2021-10-21/

V1 : https://youtu.be/GTCgx0fzvHg?si=XfrDj8dm9mKEmP0p


V2 : https://youtu.be/Z9_3pAAKWZg?si=gz1PtH46MWUHVNxS


V3 : https://youtu.be/RDP5Rn19c8A?si=GULNiisv_UhAViGK


1.) The master whished to reproduce”: The (Forced) Reproduction of Enslaved Life in the Antebellum South, 1808-1865′, by Aisha Djelid

Posted on
April 19, 2021
by

“When my babe was born, they said it was premature. It weighed only four pounds; but God let it live. I heard the doctor say I could not survive till morning. I had often prayed for death; but now I did not want to die, unless my child could die too. Many weeks passed before I was able to leave my bed. I was a mere wreck of my former self. For a year there was scarcely a day when I was free from chills and fever. My babe also was sickly. His little limbs were often racked with pain. Dr. Flint continued his visits, to look after my health; and he did not fail to remind me that my child was an addition to his stock of slaves.”

– Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (1861)

Forced reproduction manifested itself in the emphasis on what enslavers deemed ‘healthy’ and ‘strong’ infants absorbed into slavery. A 1662 law originating in Virginia, known as partus sequitur ventrem, meant that children followed the status of the mother. So, if the mother was free, so too were her children. But if the mother was enslaved, her children inherited the same status. By reproducing, enslaved men and women increased the enslaved workforce, which was especially important after 1808 when the international slave trade ban came into force. Enslavers could no longer traffic people from West Africa, and so had to concentrate on the internal market and ‘natural growth’. Thus, enslavers coerced enslaved men and women to procreate, supervised their children’s exercise and diet in an attempt to control their growth, and raised them as laborers and commodities to be sold on the market.

SOURCE : https://blogs.reading.ac.uk/gender-history-cluster/2021/04/19/forced-reproduction/



2.) A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry in the United States

Feb 02, 2016

The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry by Ned & Constance Sublette is a book which offers an alternate view of slavery in the United States. Instead of treating slavery as a source of unpaid labor, as it is typically understood, they focus on the ownership aspect: people as property, merchandise, collateral, and capital. From a review of the book at Pacific Standard:

In fact, most American slaves were not kidnapped on another continent. Though over 12.7 million Africans were forced onto ships to the Western hemisphere, estimates only have 400,000-500,000 landing in present-day America. How then to account for the four million black slaves who were tilling fields in 1860? "The South," the Sublettes write, "did not only produce tobacco, rice, sugar, and cotton as commodities for sale; it produced people." Slavers called slave-breeding "natural increase," but there was nothing natural about producing slaves; it took scientific management. Thomas Jefferson bragged to George Washington that the birth of black children was increasing Virginia's capital stock by four percent annually.

* Here is how the American slave-breeding industry worked, according to the Sublettes: Some states (most importantly Virginia) produced slaves as their main domestic crop. The price of slaves was anchored by industry in other states that consumed slaves in the production of rice and sugar, and constant territorial expansion. As long as the slave power continued to grow, breeders could literally bank on future demand and increasing prices. That made slaves not just a commodity, but the closest thing to money that white breeders had. It's hard to quantify just how valuable people were as commodities, but the Sublettes try to convey it: By a conservative estimate, in 1860 the total value of American slaves was $4 billion, far more than the gold and silver then circulating nationally ($228.3 million, "most of it in the North," the authors add), total currency ($435.4 million), and even the value of the South's total farmland ($1.92 billion). Slaves were, to slavers, worth more than everything else they could imagine combined.

* Virginia slaveowners won a major victory when Thomas Jefferson's 1808 prohibition of the African slave trade protected the domestic slave markets for slave-breeding

* Because slaves were property, Southern slave owners could mortgage them to banks and then the banks could package the mortgages into bonds and sell the bonds to anyone anywhere in the world, even where slavery was illegal.

* n the 1830s, powerful Southern slaveowners wanted to import capital into their states so they could buy more slaves. They came up with a new, two-part idea: mortgaging slaves; and then turning the mortgages into bonds that could be marketed all over the world.

* First, American planters organized new banks, usually in new states like Mississippi and Louisiana. Drawing up lists of slaves for collateral, the planters then mortgaged them to the banks they had created, enabling themselves to buy additional slaves to expand cotton production. To provide capital for those loans, the banks sold bonds to investors from around the globe — London, New York, Amsterdam, Paris. The bond buyers, many of whom lived in countries where slavery was illegal, didn't own individual slaves — just bonds backed by their value. Planters' mortgage payments paid the interest and the principle on these bond payments. Enslaved human beings had been, in modern financial lingo, "securitized."

SOURCE : https://kottke.org/16/02/a-history-of-the-slave-breeding-industry-in-the-united-states


*** Disclaimer : This a repost from myself, because people are tooooo comfortable with the status quo. ***

“I will not apologize for telling the FACTS, in a world that worship the lies”.