White and black slavery in North Africa and America

... The New York Times wins a Pulitzer Prize for its “1619 Project,” which depicts slavery as a distinctly American phenomenon and as the very foundation of American civilization... Meanwhile, the cities of America become battlegrounds in a race war waged by young people, many of whom think that America invented the institution of slavery....

The truth is that fewer than 4 percent of the slaves who were transported across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa ended up in the territory of what is now the United States. More slaves were shipped to the small island of Barbados than to the vast areas that started out as British North America and then became the United States.

The same applies to Trinidad and the Windward Islands (Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Grenada, Dominica, and Martinique). Ditto the Guianas (now Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana). Ditto the Spanish-speaking mainland of Latin American. Over 8 percent of transatlantic African slaves—twice the number sold between Maine and Georgia—were sold in St. Domingue, a French colony in what is now Haiti. Over 8 percent of slaves also ended up in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. The largest numbers of all are for Jamaica (over 11 percent) and Brazil (over 30 percent)....

In fact, the white slave trade was a terrifying reality for generations of Westerners from the 1400s to the 1800s. Several sovereign North African entities—the Sultanate of Morocco, and the independent Ottoman provinces of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli—were all active in the capture and sale of European and American slaves. Some whites were taken from ships on the high seas in acts of piracy; others were captured during coastal raids on the European mainland and Newfoundland.

The slaves were sold at auctions in ports located along the shores of North Africa, known at the time as the Barbary coast because the inhabitants were predominantly Berbers. The largest of these markets were in Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli; Algiers, the biggest of them all, contained at least 25,000 white slaves at any given time between 1550 and 1730....

Much of this information is drawn from Giles Milton’s invaluable White Gold (2004), which also chronicles the mostly half-hearted efforts by various European monarchs to redeem white slaves....

During the later phase of the white slave trade, European powers paid large sums to the North African powers to protect their citizens from enslavement. After the United States declared its independence, it refused to make such payments, which resulted in the taking of American seamen by Arab pirates. In 1786, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams met in London with the ambassador from Tripoli to discuss the matter. When they asked why Tripolitanians would “make war upon nations who had done them no injury,” the ambassador replied “that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners...”

In 1803, having since become president, Jefferson resolved to fight white slavery with military power. He sent the Marines to North Africa, where, under the command of William Eaton, U.S. Consul in Tripoli, they blockaded ports, attacked fleets, and won the decisive 1805 Battle of Derna....

In reality, about 600,000 slaves were shipped to the 13 colonies and the United States, whereas the number of whites sold into slavery in Africa was somewhere between 1 million and 1.5 million....

Today, in other words, very few whites own slaves, while an extraordinary number of black people do. But that’s a politically incorrect story for another day....

... A reading of the 1860 census reveals some fascinating details into the realities of slavery. While it’s universally known is that whites owned slaves in the early United States; almost universally unknown is that free blacks owned a fair number themselves.

In the lead-up to the Civil War, the free population of the entire United States, which also counted approximately 10% the black population (the other 90% of blacks were enslaved in 15 southern states), stood at just over 27 million. The slave population was just under 4 million.

Of the 25-27 million whites, 1.6% of them individually owned slaves. That number has been cited frequently as being misleading, given that most whites belonged to a greater family unit. And indeed, that is the case; when accounting for families as opposed to individuals, an argument can be made that about 7.4% of all white families in the United States owned slaves....

Importantly, it needs to be observed that more than just 7.4% of white families were involved in the slave-based economy of the south....

Referring to an 1830 census, of the 320,000 or so free blacks, almost 4,000 of them owned a total of 12,760 slaves....

When accounting for the regularity of black ownership of slaves, one historian observed that “free black slave owners as the total number of free black heads of families was quite high in several states, namely 43 percent in South Carolina, 40 percent in Louisiana, 26 percent in Mississippi, 25 percent in Alabama and 20 percent in Georgia.” How can we pillory whites today when, nearly identical percentages of southern white and black families owned slaves?...

At the peak of black ownership of black slaves, it is estimated that 7.5% of all free blacks engaged in the practice, reaching a high of 12% of the free black population in Virginia....