About 450,000 African slaves were taken from Africa to North America.

Meanwhile, about 1.25 million Europeans (English, French, Icelandic, Danes, Dutch, Welsh, etc) were taken from Europe to Africa as slaves.

Yes, 1.25 million!!!

See this drawing from 1675 showing the slave journey.

The women were mainly used as sex slaves or domestic servants.

The men as labourers or soldiers, with some undergoing castration and becoming eunuchs.

It was considered a sign of prosperity for an Algerian or Turkish leader to have white skinned eunuchs and female sex slaves.

The punishments for these slaves were horrific. Their noses and ears cut off for misbehaving, shackled in chains.

In many cases they were forced to convert to Islam. Their children were taken from them and often faced a difficult fate as sex slaves.

So, if you want to talk about reparations, let’s start here. //

Simon O'Neill
@simonathletepr
·
Sep 20
Some people refuse to believe that Europeans were taken as slaves. They think slavery only began 400 years ago with Europeans taking blacks to the USA. Most black slaves were out in chains by fellow blacks. That is never taught by those seeking reparations. //

Miss Jo
@therealmissjo
I never said that this was the trans Atlantic number.

I said that this was the number that went to North America. About 388,000 went directly and 50,000-70,000 went by way of the Caribbean.

The vast majority ended up in South America and the Caribbean. An incredible number in Brazil. //

₿lockChain ₿ob Charles @BlockChainBobC
·
23h
Where are you getting your numbers. The trade in Africans globally went on from the early 1500's and lasted until at least 1870. Over that 300 years there are some estimates as high as 15 million people brought to North America alone. The scale of the slavery does not make… Show more
Miss Jo
@therealmissjo
Sorry that is not true.

The slave trade was from about 1500-1900. 400 years. And in that time about 12 million (some estimates are 10.6 million) were sent across the Atlantic but only a small portion of them went to North America: 388,000 to be precise.

Most were sent to the Caribbean and South America. About another 50k - 70k were sent from the Caribbean on to North America. Hence the 450,000.

About 450,000 African slaves were taken from Africa to North America.

Meanwhile, about 1.25 million Europeans (English, French, Icelandic, Danes, Dutch, Welsh, etc) were taken from Europe to Africa as slaves.

Yes, 1.25 million!!!

See this drawing from 1675 showing the slave journey.

The women were mainly used as sex slaves or domestic servants.

The men as labourers or soldiers, with some undergoing castration and becoming eunuchs.

It was considered a sign of prosperity for an Algerian or Turkish leader to have white skinned eunuchs and female sex slaves.

The punishments for these slaves were horrific. Their noses and ears cut off for misbehaving, shackled in chains.

In many cases they were forced to convert to Islam. Their children were taken from them and often faced a difficult fate as sex slaves.

So, if you want to talk about reparations, let’s start here. //

Simon O'Neill
@simonathletepr
·
Sep 20
Some people refuse to believe that Europeans were taken as slaves. They think slavery only began 400 years ago with Europeans taking blacks to the USA. Most black slaves were out in chains by fellow blacks. That is never taught by those seeking reparations.

Rather, this takes wokeness in children’s programming not just to another planet, but well into another universe. Jarring cuts with various questionable claims are interspersed with black children raising their fists and shouting “Slaves built this country!” over and over. That is then parlayed into a demand for financial reparations.

And we the descendants of slaves in America have earned reparations for their suffering and continue to earn reparations every moment we spend submerged in a systemic predjudice, racism, and white supremacy that America was founded with and still has not atoned for.

Slaves built this country.

In another section, it is asserted that Abraham Lincoln did not free the slaves and that “Emancipation is not freedom.” Other generalized claims include the idea that slavery made “your families” rich, a statement pointed at all white Americans, and that slavery built the banking and shipping industries.

There are several problems here, beginning with the fact that it’s just incredibly divisive and harmful to teach children eight generations removed from slavery that they are oppressed victims due to the suffering of their ancestors. Anyone who watches that clip and is impressionable is going to walk away thinking they have a right to be angry at and punish those that don’t look like them. //

It is a grossly inaccurate simplification of American history to teach kids that “Slaves built this country.” Slavery contributed to parts of the early economy in the United States, but it did not build the country into what it is today (or even what it was a hundred years ago).

Why? Because slavery is an evil, atrophying institution that stunts the growth of a nation instead of accelerating it. In the case of the United States, it locked generations of slaves and non-slaves alike in abject poverty. Slaves were obviously not paid while their forced labor then crushed the market for the labor of non-slaves. Compounding the situation, because most slaves weren’t allowed to be educated and the vast majority of non-slaves at the time were so poor they couldn’t afford to be, generations of advancement were lost across the board.

Slavery was not good. It had no redeeming qualities. It did not “build this country.” Instead, those who perpetrated it mired the country in place for decades for the benefit of a very select few. It wasn’t until after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery that the United States actually began its march to global dominance beginning with the industrial revolution.

Lastly, even if one wants to ignore everything I’ve just written, the “Slaves built this country” line also suffers from a math problem. There were a little over three million slaves in the United States in 1850 (the last pre-war census taken). In comparison. there were 23 million Americans in total. Non-slave-owning adults made up the vast majority of that number and almost all of them worked hard labor jobs in relative squalor, with the largest populations of people residing in non-slave states. In other words, they also “built this country,” and it does not downplay slavery to admit that context. //

Brytek
an hour ago
slavery didn’t build this country, but it most certainly nearly destroyed it. Slaves were mostly used on plantations in the south, but slaves also existed in scattered areas of the north. The building and construction of this country was mostly done by paid laborers not slaves. The CRT notion of reparations is an appeal to the weak minds of carefully groomed people who have been raised up for such nonsense. Every single group of humans deserves reparations given past sins against their ancestors by someone - some more egregious than slavery. Take the American Indians, or native peoples anywhere where they were “colonized”. I think the Jews deserve reparations from the entire world over their treatment for 1000’s of years. What about the people in Spain and Southern France who had to live through the attack and enslavement by the Moors - do they not deserve reparations? Can any amount of payment wash clean anyone’s ancestors ‘sins” - of course not and their offspring are not guilty of their distant ancestors behaviors. This grab for reparations is simple a money grab based on the gene pool lottery, got some of them slave genes in ya - collect a payment. //

ConservativeInMinnesota
2 hours ago
This bit of revisionist history completely ignores millions of indentured servants who were effectively slaves except for having a time when they would gain their freedom.

Slavery was evil and our countries greatest sin. Our country was among the first to end it and helped end piracy worldwide to end slavery worldwide.

It was also practiced by every culture in human history except the Intuit in the arctic. Nobody has clean hands and her propaganda is nothing more than hate speech.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Roe was as shameful as its decision in Dred Scott — and for the same reason. //

The end of Roe v. Wade is perhaps the greatest political and cultural event in a generation. It will change American politics forever, and — what’s more important — it will save the lives of countless unborn children. The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs is a great victory for the U.S. Constitution, for the American people, and for justice and truth and the common good.

It is also a turning point. We should now expect Democrats and the left to call more explicitly for violence, initially against places like crisis pregnancy centers and Catholic churches, as we have already seen, and eventually against ordinary people who disagree with them. We should expect not just calls for physical attacks against the justices in the Dobbs majority, but, as we have also already seen, attempts to carry out such attacks.

This violence will likely be accompanied by rhetoric that more explicitly posits abortion not just as a positive good — “shout your abortion” — but a necessary one for women to enjoy their full rights as citizens under the Constitution. The argument, already gaining steam in public discourse, is that without a constitutional right to kill the unborn, women are relegated to a kind of second-class status, stripped of their full humanity. This rhetoric will be used in part as a justification for violence, but it also reflects the actual views of Democrats and the left on abortion. //

Southern Democrats believed the denial of all rights to black people — and indeed the denial of their personhood — was integral to what they understood to be their constitutionally protected rights, without which they would cease to be citizens with equal rights as their northern counterparts.

The exact same thing can be said of today’s pro-abortion Democrats. They believe that the denial of all rights to the unborn is integral to what they understand to be women’s constitutionally protected rights, without which they will cease to be citizens with equal rights as their male counterparts. If women are not allowed to kill their unborn babies, they will be stripped of their full humanity, just as stripping slavery from southern whites meant, to them, stripping full humanity from white people.

The Dobbs decision and the end of Roe have exposed the Democrat view of the Constitution for what it is: not, as Frederick Douglass called it, “a glorious liberty document,” but a slave Constitution that relies for its operation on the total subjugation, indeed the extermination, of an entire class of people whose very humanity must be denied for the rights of women to be vindicated.

We should rejoice in the end of Roe, but we should also be realistic about what lies ahead. It took a civil war and three constitutional amendments to correct the Supreme Court’s error in Dred Scott. This time it took 60 million unborn dead before the Supreme Court corrected the error of Roe.

In the coming days and weeks, expect Democrats to sound the same notes of secession their forebears sounded. A constitutional order that vindicates the rights of the unborn is not a constitutional order they want to be a part of. We will hear the same arguments we heard in the 1850s and 60s, but instead of objecting to the emancipation of black Americans they will object to the emancipation of the unborn. Understand what this means. The last time Democrats openly made these kind of arguments, war soon followed.

Holy Night” has to be one of the most-sung Christmas songs out there and why not? It’s a pretty song with theologically rich verses and a high note that feels like a tightrope walk for even the most gifted vocalists. But what a lot of people don’t know is that the Christmas Carol has a long legacy of being an anthem of abolitionism.

In 1843, a French poet and wine merchant named Placide Cappeau was commissioned to write a Christmas piece to celebrate the renovation of a church organ in his hometown. Cappeau was keen on the idea, even though he himself was an atheist, and wrote “Minuit, chrétiens,” or “Midnight, Christians.” The music was supplied by a Jewish composer named Adolphe Adams and the song became a holiday hit in France in spite of — or maybe because of — its author’s socialist leanings.

While scouring the bowels of the Internet, I came across some videos by a personality named Hotep God Drelly. A new face for me among individuals I follow, who identify with the Conscious Black Conservative movement. //

All you ngg@s who hate the Republican Party so much, the Republican Party, without bloodshed, is gone be the only way you get out of this sht my n*gg@s! It’s the only way! Conservatives, Libertarians, these are the only people that’s gone save yo’ Black ass!

“You keep on voting Democrat if you want to! I’m telling you—either yo’ ass need to f#ckin’ move, or get that Democrat government out yo’ damn state. Because soon you will not be able to do anything without getting vaccinated.” //

Vaccine passports are a modern-day version of the “freedom papers” that Blacks had to carry around with them pre-civil war in order to have the freedom to travel from the North to the South unmolested. If you saw the movie 12 Years A Slave, you see how well that worked.

What is the difference between “freedom papers” and carrying around proof to prove you have been vaccinated and are not going to infect anyone? Especially since the public and private sector are attempting to attach who is and is not allowed freedoms based on that fact. We already have a black market for fake vaccine passports. Where else will this lead?

This is beyond Orwellian; it’s positively Stalinesque. //

To a greater degree, if you know the history of Black Americans and the government via the medical establishment, from the Tuskegee Experiment to Henrietta Lacks to the CDC study on MMR Vaccines, you would think that if this vaccine is truly in our self-interest, they would be more measured and serious in their approach, as well as acknowledge what has been done wrong in the past, and give us evidence on how this time it will be different.

The vaccine lottery, music ditty, fatty food perks and giveaways tomfoolery is what you do with something that is not that urgent or serious. So, that leads me, and probably other Blacks to believe, that if this vaccine and COVID-19 was as serious as they claim it is, the dissemination of information and access to the vaccines would also be done in a more consequential manner.

No matter what your race, we all know that the COVID-19 response and the vaccine distribution have not been handled seriously, consequentially, or even competently. From the shifting standards, the lies, and the gaslighting done by the Biden administration and the CDC, to the well-paid state health officials and their sleight of hand with testing, actual cases, and actual deaths, they have killed all credibility and all trust. Then there is the fact that the so-called Black leaders in the Democrat Party, from 44th President Barack Obama and his 60th birthday bash with 700 of his closest friends to D.C. Mayor Marxist Muriel Bowser attending a maskless wedding after instituting the mask mandates back into that city, have shown that they are not taking it seriously.

So, why should we?

These selected writings are provided here specifically to support the teaching materials provided elsewhere and to meet the needs of a University of Rochester course, "Lincoln, Douglass and Black Freedom." A companion page is available on the Lincoln and his Circle website examining the issues below using speeches and writings of Abraham Lincoln.

ORATION, DELIVERED IN CORINTHIAN HALL, ROCHESTER, BY FREDERICK DOUGLASS, JULY 5TH, 1852.

Published by Request
ROCHESTER: PRINTED BY LEE, MANN & CO., AMERICAN BUILDING.
1852.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS ESQ.:

I am amazed the Levine and his ilk can so cavalierly skip over the over 4,900 words Douglass wrote which precede the paragraph that they love to use as a cudgel. Douglass spoke about the country’s founding as an arbiter and source for good. That the foundation of America is a blueprint for liberty, and this is why that foundation must be made true by ending slavery in the United States. Douglass rightly expounded that slavery is antithesis to the heart and soul of a great nation, and if America was to continue to be that, it must change its ways.

Douglass debunks the 1619 Project blather that America’s founding is rooted in systemic racism and slavery with this insightful phrasing:

Fellow-citizens! there is no matter in respect to which, the people of the North have allowed themselves to be so ruinously imposed upon, as that of the pro-slavery character of the Constitution. In that instrument I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing; but, interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway? or is it in the temple? It is neither. While I do not intend to argue this question on the present occasion, let me ask, if it be not somewhat singular that, if the Constitution were intended to be, by its framers and adopters, a slave-holding instrument, why neither slavery, slaveholding, nor slave can anywhere be found in it.

[…]

Now, take the Constitution according to its plain reading, and I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it. On the other hand it will be found to contain principles and purposes, entirely hostile to the existence of slavery.

Colin Kaepernick
@Kaepernick7
“What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? This Fourth of July is yours, not mine…There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.”

• Frederick Douglass

12:03 PM · Jul 4, 2019

Ted Cruz
@tedcruz
You quote a mighty and historic speech by the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass, but, without context, many modern readers will misunderstand. Two critical points:

(1) This speech was given in 1852, before the Civil War, when the abomination of slavery still existed. Thanks to Douglass and so many other heroes, we ended that grotesque evil and have made enormous strides to protecting the civil rights of everybody.

(2) Douglass was not anti-American; he was, rightly and passionately, anti-slavery. Indeed, he concluded the speech as follows:

“Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented, of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country.

“There are forces in operation, which must inevitably, work the downfall of slavery. ‘The arm of the Lord is not shortened,’ and the doom of slavery is certain.

“I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from ‘the Declaration of Independence,’ the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age.”

Let me encourage everyone, READ THE ENTIRE SPEECH; it is powerful, inspirational, and historically important in bending the arc of history towards justice: https://rbscp.lib.rochester.edu/2945

Justus Angel and Mistress L. Horry were wealthy landowners in South Carolina’s Colleton District in the 1830s, in what is now Charleston County. The couple owned 84 slaves each for a total of 168, at a time when most of their peers owned a handful. Their slaves worked their plantation and made them rich. Angel and Horry also traded slaves for profit, showing no regard for dissolving slave families. They were no kinder or crueler to their slaves than anyone else. They were considered “slave magnates” because of the number of slaves they owned. They were referred to as the “economic elite.” They were also black.

Black people owned black people in all 13 original colonies and in every state that allowed slavery. Frequently, freed black people would go on to own more slaves than their white neighbors. In 1830, nearly a fourth of the free black slave masters in South Carolina owned 10 or more slaves, and several owned more than 30, far surpassing their white slave-owning neighbors.

Yes, black people, frequently former slaves themselves, owned slaves. While it can be said that many black people owned family members to protect them and keep them close, black slave owners also bought and sold slaves for profit. Renowned African-American historian and Duke University Professor, John Hope Franklin, wrote “The majority of Negro owners of slaves had some personal interest in their property. There were instances, however, in which free Negroes had a real economic interest in the institution of slavery and held slaves in order to improve their economic status.” Franklin also wrote that roughly 3,000 free black people in New Orleans alone owned slaves. //

Why don’t history teachers include this in their curriculum? You know why! How can they demonize white people and divide us racially and if they taught the truth? What reason would they have for teaching the commie Critical Race Theory? How can black people demand reparations if you know thousands of black people owned slaves as well? How can they propagate the myth of “systemic racism” if we were all just allowed to get along?

Remember, it’s no longer about equality in our country, it’s now about equity. YOU need to pay for what other white, and black, people stopped doing over 155 years ago.

The New York Times has finally admitted a key error in the 1619 Project. It disqualifies it from use in our schools. //

A central essay in the project, written by Nikole Hannah-Jones, underwent a major correction this week. Only two words were changed, but they were big words. And given how much they change the underlying argument, the correction shows this project should not be used as a teaching tool in our schools. //

In the original she said that maintaining slavery was a primary motivation of colonists in revolting against England. That was one of the most bashed claims in the whole project. Now it reads, that it was a primary motivation for “some of” the colonists. //

It is hard to overstate just how massively this correction undermines the entire project. The purpose of this historian-free history of America was to refocus the American story by centering it on slavery. The idea was that 1619, the year the first chattel slaves arrived is the date of America’s founding, not the traditional 1776 with the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

This re-dating of the founding of the United States only makes sense if we accept an ahistorical claim that slavery was a major reason colonists split with England. That is exactly why Hannah-Jones made the claim. It is also why the Times has dragged its feet while a deluge of virtual failed peer reviews poured in from actual historians. //

The New York Times shot for the moon on the 1619 Project. Its goal was nothing short of fundamentally changing the way Americans view the history of their country from a slow painful pursuit of freedom, to a deadly attempt to continue slavery and the oppression of minorities.

Of all the tragic facts about the history of slavery, the most astonishing to an American today is that, although slavery was a worldwide institution for thousands of years, nowhere in the world was slavery a controversial issue prior to the 18th century. People of every race and color were enslaved – and enslaved others. White people were still being bought and sold as slaves in the Ottoman Empire, decades after American blacks were freed.

Everyone hated the idea of being a slave but few had any qualms about enslaving others. Slavery was just not an issue, not even among intellectuals, much less among political leaders, until the 18th century – and then it was an issue only in Western civilization. Among those who turned against slavery in the 18th century were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry and other American leaders. You could research all of the 18th century Africa or Asia or the Middle East without finding any comparable rejection of slavery there. But who is singled out for scathing criticism today? American leaders of the 18th century.

Deciding that slavery was wrong was much easier than deciding what to do with millions of people from another continent, of another race, and without any historical preparation for living as free citizens in a society like that of the United States, where they were 20 percent of the population.

It is clear from the private correspondence of Washington, Jefferson, and many others that their moral rejection of slavery was unambiguous, but the practical question of what to do now had them baffled. That would remain so for more than half a century.

In 1862, a ship carrying slaves from Africa to Cuba, in violation of a ban on the international slave trade, was captured on the high seas by the U.S. Navy. The crew were imprisoned and the captain was hanged in the United States – despite the fact that slavery itself was still legal at the time in Africa, Cuba, and in the United States. What does this tell us? That enslaving people was considered an abomination. But what to do with millions of people who were already enslaved was not equally clear.

That question was finally answered by a war in which one life was lost [620,000 Civil War casualties] for every six people freed [3.9 million]. Maybe that was the only answer. But don’t pretend today that it was an easy answer – or that those who grappled with the dilemma in the 18th century were some special villains when most leaders and most people around the world saw nothing wrong with slavery. //

Ronna McDaniel
@GOPChairwoman
We are the Party of Lincoln & the Party of Kay Coles James, Condoleezza Rice, Herman Cain, Dr. Ben Carson, Ida B. Wells, Thomas Sowell, & the list goes on.

Black Republican candidates are running all around the country, and I am proud to support them.
"Tell the whole story during Black History Month | Afro" //

She wrote in the linked piece, ” that:

Black History Month is not just about Black Liberal history.

The two men came from extremely modest means, one even more than the other. Primarily because each understood the rare power of self-education and the gift of books, both went on to have lives of remarkable celebrity, accomplishing extraordinary things for our nation.

One was born in a humble one-room cabin in Kentucky. The other was born into slavery in Maryland. In time, they became two of America’s greatest, most consequential leaders during our nation’s most trying time. //

As Douglass recounts in his final autobiography, “The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, From 1817 to 1882,” the pair met again at the White House a year later:

What he said on this day showed a deeper moral conviction against slavery than I had even seen before in anything spoken or written by him. I listened with the deepest interest and profoundest satisfaction, and at his suggestion, agreed to undertake the organizing a band of scouts, composed of coloured men, whose business should be somewhat after the original plan of John Brown, to go into the rebel States, beyond the lines of our armies, and carry the news of emancipation, and urge the slaves to come within our boundaries.

This plan, Douglass explained, was finally unnecessary because of the ultimate emancipation of the slaves. But, he adds, “I refer to this conversation because I think it is evidence conclusive on Mr. Lincoln’s part that the proclamation, so far as least as he was concerned, was not effected merely as a ‘necessity’” but as a moral duty. //

In 1865, Douglass traveled to Washington D.C. to hear the president give his second inaugural address. He also accepted President Lincoln’s kind invitation to visit him and his family at the White House, //

Recognising me, even before I reached him, he exclaimed, so that all around could hear him, ‘Here comes my friend Douglass.’ Taking me by the hand, he said, ‘I am glad to see you. I saw you in the crowd to-day, listening to my inaugural address; how did you like it?’

I said, ‘Mr. Lincoln, I must not detain you with my poor opinion, when there are thousands waiting to shake hands with you.’

‘No, no,’ he said, ‘you must stop a little, Douglass; there is no man in the country whose opinion I value more than yours. I want to know what you think of it?’

I replied, ‘Mr. Lincoln, that was a sacred effort.’

‘I am glad you liked it!’ he said, and I passed on, feeling that any man, however distinguished, might well regard himself honoured by such expressions, from such a man. //

Douglass wanted the Ages to know and remember that the Freedman’s Monument — funded primarily by the sweat of emancipated slaves — was a humble and essential gift to the memory of his friend lost to an assassin’s bullet. That “pure act of malice” had “done good after all.”

For that dark murder “filled the country with a deeper abhorrence of slavery and a deeper love for the great liberator.” As he closed, the ex-slave said, “No man who knew Abraham Lincoln could hate him.”

As economist Thomas Sowell points out, in 1860, just one year before the Civil War began, the South had only one-sixth as many factories as the North. Almost 90% of the country’s skilled, well-paid laborers and professionals were based in the North. Banking, railroads, manufacturing—all were concentrated in the North. The South was an economic backwater.

And the cost of abolishing slavery was enormous—not merely in terms of dollars (Lincoln borrowed billions to pay for it), but also in terms of human life: 360,000 Union soldiers died in order to free 4 million slaves. That works out to about one soldier in blue for every ten slaves freed. It’s hard to look at that butcher’s bill and conclude that the nation turned a profit from slavery.

The Times’ supposition that America was racist at its core follows radical abolitionists rather than thinkers like Frederick Douglass who claimed the Constitution is an anti-slavery document. //

Since The New York Times published The 1619 Project a year ago, an army of scholars, historians, economists, and concerned citizens have criticized its bad history, bad journalism, and bad-faith effort to re-found the country on its original sin of slavery instead of its virtues. Unable to respond with intellectual honesty, the creators of the project have avoided discussion. //

The project’s flagship essay, written by project architect Nikole Hannah-Jones, argues that America’s true founding should be 1619, the year slaves were first brought to Virginia, instead of 1776, the year the 13 colonies declared independence from Great Britain. The reason 1776 is no longer worthy of being our founding date, Hannah-Jones says, is that the writer of the words “all men are created equal” did not mean them for black men and women. She thus claims the words were a lie until black Americans made them true. //

The below responses are strong rebuttals to all of these contentions.

Corporations should feel the burn for relying on slavery to make their products.

Transcription of Thomas Jefferson's 'original Rough draught' of the Declaration of Independence. //

he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

In this speech Abraham Lincoln explained his objections to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and resurrected his political career. In the speech Lincoln criticized popular sovereignty. Questioned how popular sovereignty could supersede the Northwest Ordinance and the Missouri Compromise. Lincoln dismissed arguments that climate and geography would keep slavery out of Kansas and Nebraska. Most importantly, Lincoln attacked the morality of slavery itself. Lincoln argued that the slaves were people, not animals, and consequently possessed certain natural rights. "If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that `all men are created equal;' and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man's making a slave of another."

Source: Neely, Mark E. Jr. 1982. The Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia. New York: Da Capo Press, Inc. //

The argument of “Necessity” was the only argument they ever admitted in favor of slavery; and so far, and so far only as it carried them, did they ever go. They found the institution existing among us, which they could not help; and they cast blame upon the British King for having permitted its introduction. BEFORE the constitution, they prohibited its introduction into the north-western Territory—the only country we owned, then free from it. AT the framing and adoption of the constitution, they forbore to so much as mention the word “slave” or “slavery” in the whole instrument.

In the provision for the recovery of fugitives, the slave is spoken of as a “PERSON HELD TO SERVICE OR LABOR.” In that prohibiting the abolition of the African slave trade for twenty years, that trade is spoken of as “The migration or importation of such persons as any of the States NOW EXISTING, shall think proper to admit,” &c.

These are the only provisions alluding to slavery. Thus, the thing is hid away, in the constitution, just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or a cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death; with the promise, nevertheless, that the cutting may begin at the end of a given time. Less than this our fathers COULD not do; and NOW [MORE?] they WOULD not do.

Necessity drove them so far, and farther, they would not go. But this is not all. The earliest Congress, under the constitution, took the same view of slavery. They hedged and hemmed it in to the narrowest limits of necessity.

In 1794, they prohibited an out-going slave-trade—that is, the taking of slaves FROM the United States to sell.

In 1798, they prohibited the bringing of slaves from Africa, INTO the Mississippi Territory—this territory then comprising what are now the States of Mississippi and Alabama. This was TEN YEARS before they had the authority to do the same thing as to the States existing at the adoption of the constitution.

In 1800 they prohibited AMERICAN CITIZENS from trading in slaves between foreign countries—as, for instance, from Africa to Brazil. In 1803 they passed a law in aid of one or two State laws, in restraint of the internal slave trade. In 1807, in apparent hot haste, they passed the law, nearly a year in advance to take effect the first day of 1808—the very first day the constitution would permit—prohibiting the African slave trade by heavy pecuniary and corporal penalties.

In 1820, finding these provisions ineffectual, they declared the trade piracy, and annexed to it, the extreme penalty of death. While all this was passing in the general government, five or six of the original slave States had adopted systems of gradual emancipation; and by which the institution was rapidly becoming extinct within these limits.

Thus we see, the plain unmistakable spirit of that age, towards slavery, was hostility to the PRINCIPLE, and toleration, ONLY BY NECESSITY.

Abraham Lincoln recalls some facts that the left would rather not hear. //

Like any good person trying to change the world, Lincoln had to put forth many arguments in favor of his position and debunk many other ideas to boot.

Lincoln is still debunking arguments to this day, believe it or not. Today, Lincoln’s old adversaries, the Democrats, have crafted a narrative proclaiming that our nation was founded on white supremacy. They often cite the fact that our founders owned slaves themselves.

Like many leftist arguments, this is only partly true. It’s true that our founders did own slaves, but to say that our nation was founded on “white supremacy” and the idea that men aren’t really created equal despite their most famous document saying so is fully off the mark.

I could explain it myself, but I’m just going to step aside for a moment and let Lincoln himself explain and defend our founding fathers and the government they created during his 1854 Peoria speech.

https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/peoriaspeech.htm

Thus we see, the plain unmistakable spirit of that age, towards slavery, was hostility to the PRINCIPLE, and toleration, ONLY BY NECESSITY.

It should be understood that the founding fathers were exceedingly brilliant men who knew they were also limited by the power and culture of their time. Nevertheless, they planted seeds that would soon grow into what Lincoln would reap.

So the purpose of America was not the equality of white men, but the equality of all peoples. That’s what America was built on. To say otherwise is factually incorrect.