Ramblings of an Old fart. -
Who Started the Slave Trade in North America? The United States did not exist when the transatlantic slave trade came to North America. * The Timeline: The first recorded enslaved Africans were brought to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619 aboard a Dutch pirate ship, though Spanish and Portuguese empires had been trafficking enslaved people to the Americas and the Caribbean since the early 1500s. * The Imperial Engine: For over 150 years before the Declaration of Independence, the American colonies operated under British imperial law, which aggressively expanded and legally institutionalized chattel slavery to maximize colonial output. The economic system of the colonies is called mercantilism. Under this system, the colonies were strictly designed to be a giant resource-extraction farm for the British Crown. Thomas Jefferson Jefferson is the ultimate embodiment of the American paradox. He authored the words "all men are created equal" while owning more than 600 enslaved people over his lifetime. * What he wrote: In his Notes on the State of Virginia (1781), he expressed terror over the eventual consequences of slavery: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever." * The deleted clause: In his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson explicitly blamed King George III for the slave trade, calling it a "cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty." The Continental Congress struck this section out to appease South Carolina and Georgia. The founders didn't ignore slavery because Black people were invisible to them; they protected them because the Union was fragile. The Northern delegates detested the compromises, but they believed a flawed union was better than no union at all. They made a wager with history, hoping that if they locked the system down for the moment, slavery would naturally die out on its own. Instead, it took a civil war 74 years later to untangle it.
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