A Lesson on Slavery for CNN
Paul Craig Roberts

The saga of American slavery has more holes in it than the Zionist saga of the Holocaust.  

Recently President Trump wondered about the woke Smithsonian Institute’s fixation on slavery as if it was the principal problem the world faces today.  The liberal media had a hissy fit.  CNN rushed to do a program on slavery, the woke rectification for which is multiculturalism and the replacement of the white racist population by people of color. This is the political agenda of the Democrat Party. To watch white people so determined to achieve their own destruction by voting Democrat is amazing.

The response made by those critical of CNN’s attack on white Americans was that slavery was a matter of the distant past, and we made amends for our responsibility in a civil war.

What nonsense.  No American ever had any responsibility for slavery.  The black King of Dahomey did.

Here are the undeniable, indisputable, basic facts:

Over the course of history far more white people have been slaves than blacks.  Some of these white slaves were held by Romans and other conquerors in ancient times.  Most were held by people of color who raided Europe’s Mediterranean coast for slaves.  Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the US (1801-1809) had to send the US Navy and Marines to “the shores of Tripoli” to stop the North Africans from capturing American ships and enslaving their passengers and crews.

In the New World (Caribbean Islands, North and South America) European colonists found abundant resources but no labor force. British and European sea captains saw a business opportunity in purchasing slaves from the black King of Dahomey and selling them to the colonists as a labor force.  The black King of Dahomey conducted annual slave wars against other blacks and sold the surplus to Arabs and to European sea captains. 

No white colonist in what later became the United States ever enslaved a black person.  They purchased blacks already enslaved by the black King of Dahomey.

When the United States came into existence in the late 18th century, slavery was an inherited institution.  Slavery existed as the labor force for large agricultural plantations, the agri-businesses of  the time.  The plantations using slave labor did not enslave the slaves. They purchased already enslaved labor as no work force was available.

In the United States slavery was doomed as the frontier closed.  Slavery had a long life because white immigrants who entered America could avoid becoming agricultural labor by moving west and occupying land to which the native Americans had use rights but not ownership rights as understood in Western law. Thus the native inhabitants could be dispossessed. 

As the constant stream of immigrant-invaders, such as the US and Europe are experiencing today, continued, the Indian lands were settled by the immigrant-invaders and the frontier closed by 1890.  Slavery could not have existed beyond that date and, in fact, could not have lasted that long. Slavery was costly compared to the wages of free labor.

Slavery was an expensive labor force.  In 19th century America a male field hand cost $1,500.  If a slave had blacksmith or carpenter skills, he cost $2,000.  The price of a slave was three to four times the annual income of a skilled white man such as a blacksmith. Moreover, a slave, if he was to be productive, needed sufficient food, housing, and medical care.  Moreover, he required respect and appreciation,

Many of the slaves were warriors captured in the black King of  Dahomey’s slave wars. They were experienced fighters and had to be treated with respect.  For a white plantation owner to be surrounded by a large number of black men and for him to expect them to work required his respect and proper treatment of his labor force in which he had a large investment.   Propaganda such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin was northern war propaganda against the South. A few issues back, the City Journal posed the question of who was in charge of a rice or sugar plantation in the Caribbean when the one white owner, the only white on the premises, had a work force of 50 black men. The idea that it was customary to whip black warriors and to rape their wives is farfetched.

We certainly know that Uncle Tom’s Cabin is nothing but propaganda.  How do we know?  Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had zero response.  Falsely portrayed by dishonest and corrupt historians as “the freeing of the slaves,” Lincoln’s “Emancipation Proclamation” was a war measure that Lincoln hoped would produce a slave rebellion, thus draining Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia of troops who would rush home to defend their women and children left at the mercy of the slaves.  No such threat materialized to the women and children, and no Southern troops left the lines.  The enslaved blacks were protective of the otherwise unprotected white women and children and did not revolt.  There was no racist hate on a Southern plantation. Many of the plantation overseers were black slaves.

 There is no such thing as the American Civil War.  A civil war is when two groups fight for control of the government.  The Southern states had no interest in the government in Washington.  The Southern states withdrew from the US and formed the Confederate States of America.  The war resulted from Lincoln invading an independent country with the intention of exploiting it economically with the Morrill Tariff.

Why did Lincoln start a war by invading an independent country?  The answer is that Lincoln was determined that the Southern states, an agricultural society, would pay for northern industrialization by paying the Morrill Tariff that would keep out British goods and leave the protected market to Northern manufactures at the expense of the South’s pocketbook.

Both sides understood that the issue was the tariff, not slavery. The Southern states wanted to secede on Constitutional grounds so that Lincoln would not have a Constitutional case for declaring the Southern states to be in rebellion and use force.  Under the US Constitution slavery was a states rights issue, not a federal issue. Lincoln himself said that he had no intention of abolishing slavery and no power to do so.  It was the opposite for tariffs.  The Constitution gave the federal government the power to enact tariffs.  Tariffs were not a right reserved for states. To have Constitutional grounds for secession, the Southern states emphasized slavery in their secession documents. Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3, known as the Fugitive Slave Clause, required the return of runaway slaves.  Some Northern states did not comply.  Their non-compliance gave the Southern states the argument that the North had broken the Constitutional agreement.

President Lincoln said repeatedly that the war against “the rebels” was to collect the tariff, not to abolish slavery. The Morrill Tariff was passed two days before Lincoln’ inauguration. (The Morrill Tariff passed in March 1961, imposed a tariff of 47%, and established a policy of high protectionism in American industry that would last for decades.)  The same Congress, without the South, also passed a guarantee to the South that if they stayed in the Union and paid the tariff, the US government would guarantee the existence of slavery in perpetuity.  They would put it in the Constitution that slavery could not be abolished even by Constitutional amendment. Lincoln endorsed the promise. 

For the Southern states the tariff was the issue, so they did not take up Lincoln’s offer that they pay the tariff in exchange for the protection of slavery.

The slavery explanation of the war was invented by dishonest northern historians who wanted to cover up Union war crimes by giving the war a moral justification.

On the sea coast of the country once known as Dahomey, there is a memorial to the black slaves sold into the New World by the black King of Dahomey.  It consists of an arch symbolizing the passage of hundreds of thousands of captives from Dahomey’s slave wars into slavery abroad. Do you suppose anyone with a degree in black studies knows this?  Or any Western journalist? Or any white liberal?  Certainly the indoctrinated at CNN do not know it.

Western history is so falsified against the white ethnic peoples of the West that they face dangers of which they are unaware.  The people in the West are a people deserted  by their own white intellectuals.

The purpose of all the propaganda about slavery and white racism is to put the majority population over a barrel so that they cannot defend themselves from demonization, exploitation, and a diminution of their rights.  It reaches ridiculous heights.  People who have never owned a slave are said to owe reparations to people who have never been a slave.  Indeed, white people, especially heterosexual white males, have been paying reparations for 60 years in the form of “affirmative action.”  “Affirmative action” is the policy of restricting access of qualified whites to university admission, employment, and promotion in order that lesser qualified blacks could be advanced. Many qualified white men were prevented from obtaining the benefit of an Ivy League network so that it could be handed to less qualified blacks.  They were denied jobs and promotions so that less qualified blacks could be advanced.

The official discrimination against merit reached a new high in the Biden regime’s DEI policy.  Corporations joined in.  Gillette, Bud Light, and other companies ran national advertisements demonizing white American men. Starbucks announced that its policy was not to hire or promote white males, and the stupid white males still flock to Starbucks to pay $6 for a coffee.  White males in America have grown so accustomed to discrimination that they don’t even complain.

In America, discrimination that is unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment and illegal under the 1964 Civil Rights Act has been the policy of the US government and US corporations for 60 years,

And the blacks want more reparations. How can a people who have accepted their own demonization resist?

Hon. Paul Craig Roberts is the John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. A former editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service, he is a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles and a columnist for Investor's Business Daily. In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists.

He was Distinguished Fellow at the Cato Institute from 1993 to 1996. From 1982 through 1993, he held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. During 1981-82 he served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. President Reagan and Treasury Secretary Regan credited him with a major role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, and he was awarded the Treasury Department's Meritorious Service Award for "his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy." From 1975 to 1978, Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy.

In 1987 the French government recognized him as "the artisan of a renewal in economic science and policy after half a century of state interventionism" and inducted him into the Legion of Honor.

Dr. Roberts' latest books are The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with IPE Fellow Lawrence Stratton, and published by Prima Publishing in May 2000, and Chile: Two Visions - The Allende-Pinochet Era, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen Araujo, and published in Spanish by Universidad Nacional Andres Bello in Santiago, Chile, in November 2000. The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen LaFollette Araujo, was published by Oxford University Press in 1997. A Spanish language edition was published by Oxford in 1999. The New Colorline: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, was published by Regnery in 1995. A paperback edition was published in 1997. Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, co-authored with Karen LaFollette, was published by the Cato Institute in 1990. Harvard University Press published his book, The Supply-Side Revolution, in 1984. Widely reviewed and favorably received, the book was praised by Forbes as "a timely masterpiece that will have real impact on economic thinking in the years ahead." Dr. Roberts is the author of Alienation and the Soviet Economy, published in 1971 and republished in 1990. He is the author of Marx's Theory of Exchange, Alienation and Crisis, published in 1973 and republished in 1983. A Spanish language edition was published in 1974.

Dr. Roberts has held numerous academic appointments. He has contributed chapters to numerous books and has published many articles in journals of scholarship, including the Journal of Political Economy, Oxford Economic Papers, Journal of Law and Economics, Studies in Banking and Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, Public Finance Quarterly, Public Choice, Classica et Mediaevalia, Ethics, Slavic Review, Soviet Studies, Rivista de Political Economica, and Zeitschrift fur Wirtschafspolitik. He has entries in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Economics and the New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance. He has contributed to Commentary, The Public Interest, The National Interest, Harper's, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, London Times, The Financial Times, TLS, The Spectator, Il Sole 24 Ore, Le Figaro, Liberation, and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions.

Dr. Roberts was educated at the Georgia Institute of Technology (B.S.), the University of Virginia (Ph.D.), the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.

He is listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, The Dictionary of International Biography, Outstanding People of the Twentieth Century, and 1000 Leaders of World Influence. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: [email protected]

 

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