Slavery Wasn't Black and White, Historian Says

DALLAS, Feb. 9, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- We see American slavery in black and white today. But the primary documents — census records, tax records and court cases — show that there really wasn't any racial divide at all, says Kevin Orlin Johnson, Ph.D., author of The Lincolns in the White House: Slanders, Scandals, and Lincoln's Slave Trading Revealed, which documents Lincoln's ownership of slaves, published this month by Pangaeus Press.  

"We all know that slavery is absolutely wrong," he says, "but we forget that thousands of Czech, French, German and Irish people were shipped here from Europe and sold into slavery, too." 

By 1784 the English tourist John Ferdinand Smyth remarked on the number of white slaves in America.  And for half a century after President Thomas Jefferson outlawed the African slave trade in 1808, Yankee slavers turned their attention to Europe. 

By 1817 the abolitionist Jesse Torrey was surprised that a white man, "decently dressed", was a slave.  Just before the War the Scots poet Charles Mackay was shocked when a man in a slave market in New Orleans, who "seemed as white as myself" "asked me to buy him." 

Slavers offered passage to America in exchange for indenture, a contract to serve for a certain number of years.  Once in America, they auctioned the indentures to slaveholders who just kept the people for life.  "Parents and children, each sold separately, had no legal recourse," Johnson says. 

Sally Miller of New Orleans, born Salomé Müller in Alsace, resisted emancipation when her identity was rediscovered, but the oddest part is that her owner argued in court that the German girl was African, which nobody disputed by her appearance.  Because white slaves intermarried with Black, and because the law dictated that Blacks couldn't testify in court, archives are full of inquests to determine race.  "It was impossible to connect race and servitude then, just as it's impossible now to determine whose ancestors were subjected to slavery on the basis of apparent race alone," he says. 

"Slavery is unquestionably an atrocity that can never be made right," Johnson says.  "But if we get the facts straight, we see that neither guilt nor victimization was restricted to any particular race.  Slavery was never segregated.  It was a lot worse than most of us know."

SOURCE Pangaeus Companies