Another Lesson on False History taught by liars determined to destroy America
Paul Craig Roberts
This is a is factually based history lesson. The lesson is about black slaveowners. Larry Koger’s book, Black Slaveowners, is well documented. Koger provides 34 pages of documentation listing the names of black slave owners and the number of slaves they owned in South Carolina and 38 pages of historical notes. Most free blacks only owned a few slaves, but some blacks themselves had plantations and had as many as 30 or 40 slaves. One owned 123 slaves. Another owned 156 slaves. One owned 68. Another 71. Many owned 10 to 20. In South Carolina alone in 1830 there were 450 black slaveowners who owned between them 2,412 black slaves. The majority were in the city of Charleston, which suggests that these were free black businesses such as bricklayers, cabinet makers, carpenters, coopers, cotton gin makers, millwrights, shoemakers, and tailors. Being artisans meant that the slave employees, some owned and some rented from owners, were likely with the percentage of what they earned they were allowed to keep able to buy themselves out of slavery, and the records show that as time passed the numbers of free blacks increased as did the number of black owned black slaves.
The free blacks, just like the plantation owners, needed labor, and the only labor was black slaves. Slaves constituted the only labor force, because newly arrived immigrants had no need to hire out as laborers when they could simply move a little farther to the West and occupy unoccupied lands taken from Indians or Native Americans. Until the Western frontier closed, it was possible to move westward and take possession of one’s own homestead, so why work for another person? Slavery was a labor institution, not a racist one, with slaves purchased from the black Kingdom of Dahomey on the West Coast of Africa brought to the new world by ship captains many financed by Jews. Neither free blacks nor white plantation owners need to apologize for the slaves they owned. Slavery was the labor institution that they were born into. It was the only source of labor, without which land is worthless.
Slavery’s origin resided in African slave wars between black Africans. The black Kingdom of Dahomey became the main supplier of labor to the new world, because the king had the wits to trade black slaves to Arabs for firearms and thus prevailed in the slave wars. Do not expect any professor in any university black studies program or any white liberal to be receptive to the facts about slavery. They have constructed their own narratives that serve their own agendas.
Koger’s book is pertinent now that black demand for slavery restitution is heating up. It seems that blacks themselves will have to pay reparations. There were always some free blacks, and others were freed by their owners. It was possible for a black to purchase himself out of slavery and to purchase slaves as a work force for his business, and to purchase his relatives and friends, and many did so. Many free blacks actually owned their wives and children, having purchased them with their earnings as artisans, skilled craftsmen, and business owners. This no doubt comes as a surprise to those brought up on the white liberal version of Southern history whose foundation is the extraordinary lies told by Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a work of hatred against Southern Americans.
During the colonial era under the Georgian Kings, it was possible for slave owners to free their slaves, and many did so. This resulted in a growing population of free blacks whose labor and its monetary earnings belonged to them, unlike “free Americans” today whose labor, depending on their income, belongs to the IRS in the range of 30% to 50%. Today many Americans are as enslaved with the Income Tax as black slaves were in the 19th century.
With their earnings free blacks not only purchased a labor force, but also bought wives and children, relatives and friends, out of bondage. But after the first 24 years of American independence regulation stepped in. The US Constitution left the slavery issue to the states, as President Lincoln acknowledged. In 1800 South Carolina became concerned that slaves were being freed on the death of their owners who had no means of support. South Carolina did not object to the freeing of slaves, only to freeing slaves who had no visible means of support. Being a Christian state, this meant freed slaves would become a support burden on the state and thereby on taxpayers for which no provision existed in law. A law was passed that required that before slaves could be freed, evidence of their self-support had to be demonstrated. Koger makes clear that not all freed slaves were magnanimous acts as some slaveowners freed aged and unproductive slaves in order to rid themselves of the burden. Nevertheless, the provision that “the racist state of South Carolina” made to protect blacks from starvation was not made by Lincoln who “freed the slaves.” Many of Lincoln’s “freed slaves” starved to death as their homes and livelihood was destroyed by the Union Army. Lincoln’s war against the South was also a war against the black population which refused to rebel. The Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 was a war measure that failed as the black slaves, occupied only by white females and children, refused to rebel.
The 1800 South Carolina law that a slave could be freed on evidence of self-support made it difficult for free blacks to free slaves they purchased.
There were ways around this. Blacks who had purchased their wives and children simply reported them to the federal census as free blacks and paid the capitation tax on free blacks. In effect this allowed wives and children who were in bondage to their husband and father to bridge the gap between bondage and a free person.
Koger’s book is intriguing. Although it is not a theme that Koger develops, it shows that blacks were being assimilated into white Southern life. The racism about which we hear so much today from liars such as Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times 1619 Project and from the 19th century liar Harriet Beecher Stowe, are concocted narratives for the purpose of creating hate between blacks and whites when such hate simply was not present. There are always bad actors, but Southern society was not one. Koger reports and documents that a black elite was rising and that this rising class had the protection of white South Carolinians. Black membership in white churches was common. Today after generations of white liberal liberation of blacks the church memberships are separate.
Lincoln’s war of conquest of the Confederate States of America destroyed the wealth and property of free blacks just as it destroyed the wealth and property of the white plantation owners. In effect Lincoln’s war stopped the economic and social advancement of black Americans and the assimilation of blacks into white society. Lincoln did not believe in assimilation. Lincoln made it clear that he did not believe that whites and blacks could live together freely in society. His plan was to deport the blacks to Africa or to Central America. The deportation of blacks from the US was prevented by Lincoln’s assassination.
Oregon, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Ohio, and Massachusetts all passed laws making it impossible or difficult for black Americans to live in those states. No Southern state had such laws. For example, Illinois, which sent soldiers against the “racist” Confederacy, enacted strict Black Codes and an 1853 exclusion law (Article 13 of its constitution) that barred all free African Americans and mulattoes from coming into or settling in the state. Indiana, which sent soldiers against the “racist” Confederacy, passed severe “black laws” beginning in 1851 (Article 13 of its state constitution) that banned incoming free Black and mulatto individuals from entering or settling in Indiana. Oregon–the great white liberal state–admitted to the Union in 1859 as a free state, included a clause in its state constitution that prohibited free Black people from living, owning property, or making contracts in the state. It also passed territorial exclusion acts in 1844 and 1849.
And the despicable liberal historians tell us that Lincoln’s invasion of the Confederacy was motivated by the moral cause of freeing the blacks, blacks whom the Union states prohibited having anywhere to go.
We will return to this history later in this article. I want to make clear that Koger is most certainly not an apologist for slavery. He describes slavery as “intolerable” and “inhumane.” He simply shows that blacks were an accepted part of white Southern society. White planters married slave women and on occasion white women married blacks, but the marriages were generally common law marriages. They reported their mulatto children to federal censors as “free blacks.” Blacks were sufficiently trusted and equal that there were white-owned plantations on which no white people were present. Some plantations were run by trusted slaves or by hired black overseers without any white presence.
Long-time readers have thanked me for my corrections of the falsified histories of WW I and WW II, the so-called “Civil War” which was not a civil war but a war of conquest of a new nation that had nothing whatsoever to do with slavery.
The narrative that the Great Moral North went to war for the purpose of freeing oppressed black slaves in the South is a total hoax. The North was desperate to retain the agricultural South to pay the Morrill Tariff designed to protect Northern industry which could not compete with the British and needed protection. The South being agricultural understood that it was to be a reduction in the South’s living standards that was intended by the Northern states to pay for a rise in Northern living standards. The South also understood that the British retaliation against the Morrill Tariff would apply to the South’s exports of cotton and tobacco and further reduce the South’s income. For the South the Merrill Tariff passed by the Northern dominated Congress was a kiss of death.
Equally as important, and perhaps more so, the South had a culture, and the North did not. The North’s culture was money. Southerners regarded Northerners as people who would take advantage of you if you gave them a chance. Northerners were perceived as preoccupied with money and having no concept of honor or integrity. The important founding fathers of the United States were Southerners, not Northerners.
Having achieved a legislative majority via the expansion of new states into territory stolen from Native Americans, the North voted the Morrill Tariff the day before Abe Lincoln, a representative of the railroads, was inaugurated as president. In his inaugural speech, Lincoln promised the South that there would be no violence against the South and that they could have slavery forever if they would stay in the Union and pay the tariff. Otherwise, the Union Army would pay the South a visit. Lincoln’s message is clear and devoid of ambiguity.
Lincoln’s offer of a bribe was seen by the South as evidence that the South was dealing with people of low moral turpitude with whom the South wanted no further association.
Dishonest historians have pointed to Southern states’ resolutions against the North’s interference with slavery as evidence that the Northern invasion of the Confederate States of America was about liberating the slaves who were the imported agricultural workforce since the colonial days in the previous two centuries prior to the formation of the United States. But what the Southerners were protesting is the North’s violation of the US Constitution in which slavery is a state issue, not a federal issue, by refusing to return runaway slaves as the US Constitution required. The South was protesting the North’s violation of the US Constitution and asking themselves how the South can be in a union with people who have no respect for the US Constitution, no integrity, and no honesty. The dishonest liberal historians have hidden every relevant fact. Indeed, today it is completely obvious that the judicial system of the state of New York has no respect whatsoever for the 1st Amendment or the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. The US Constitution has always been in the way of the liberals’ ideological agendas.
It was the incompatibility of two cultures–the culture of the North based on money greed and self-serving lies to achieve more money–and the culture of the South based on honor and integrity that separated the states and caused the South to form a new nation.
The Northern liberal historians in order to cover up the horrendous Union war crimes against white and black Southern citizens, crimes rivaling those of the Israelis against the Palestinians, falsely claim that the Northern invasion of the Confederacy was a great moral crusade to liberate black people. White liberal historians have turned American history into a history of lies written by liars. American history has never had any other kind of historian than liars other than the few who are intentionally marginalized and forgotten such as Harry Elmer Barnes.
Of course, American history is no good anywhere else it is explicated. It is no good in explaining the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy, in explaining the Vietnam War, in explaining 9/11 and the “war on terror,” a complete hoax, in explaining the conflict with Russia, with Iran. Despite abundant “historians” and “experts” Americans have no valid information.
The victors write the histories, and the histories are nothing but the victor’s war propaganda. This is true for all wars and conflicts. Those who go against the victorious self-righteous narrative are excluded from the ranks of historians. Harry Elmer Barnes is a good example. David Irving is another.
Recently I reported on Walter Brian Cisco’s history, War Crimes Against Southern Civilians. The purpose of Union General Sherman’s march through the Southern interior was to destroy all food production and manufacturing so that there would be no provisions for Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, and Lee could finally be defeated by the overwhelming numbers of Union soldiers. When Lee surrendered at Appomattox, his soldiers were barefoot and starving. The Union had achieved a war crime victory, not a military victory.
The worst victims of Sherman’s “march to the sea” were the free blacks and the black slaves. The free blacks’ businesses were destroyed along with their customers. The black women were repeatedly raped by the self-righteous Northern soldiers, the entirety of the “liberated blacks” had their homes, shelter, and livelihoods destroyed, and many starved and died from disease. The Great White Union Liberating Force gave no thought to the provision for the “liberated blacks.” To be liberated by Lincoln’s Union meant to be raped and to die of starvation. Read it for yourself: War Crimes Against Southern Civilians, and ask yourselves why there is a memorial to Lincoln in Washington D.C., possibly the worst war criminal in human history.
To return to today’s history lesson, Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790-1860 by Larry Koger.
The Union’s conquest of the Confederate States of America was a disaster for black Americans and for the integration of blacks into white society. As Larry Koger shows, in the British colonial period and early decades of the United States American blacks were accepted as Americans. There was intermarriage, not often in a church ceremony, between white male slaveowners and black female slaves and between white female slaveowners and black male slaves. Their offspring, mulattos, were often characterized as white.
In one chapter Kroger deals with the question who was white and who was black. In a way it is like the question the German National Socialists faced over who was Jewish and who was Aryan. Some high-ranking Nazis, as I reported, had full-blooded Jews declared Aryans because they valued them as assistants. There were even Jews serving as officers in the SS.
In the British colonial era in America, whether a mulatto was white or black was decided was by the mulatto’s acceptance by society. If he or she was of good character, and especially if they were financially successful, they were incorporated into white Southern society.
The assimilation of blacks into white Southern society that began under the “tyranny of King George” continued until the victorious Northern Union destroyed relations between black and white Southerners with the anti-white policy of Reconstruction. The white Northern liberals, including the Kennedy brothers, were too indoctrinated by their university professors to understand that the South’s resistance to integration in the 1960s was not racist. It was opposition to a second Reconstruction in which the federal government used force to destroy states’ rights. In Atlanta, Georgia, in which I grew up, schools were neighborhood schools. Segregation was by economic class not by race.
Black extremists, victims of their education by white liberals, have been taught the rewards of victimhood. The Jews have been bleeding the Germans and Swiss for decades for Jewish dispossession by the alleged Holocaust. Moreover, the rewards to victimhood have expanded to the extent that it is now in some western countries including the US a severe penalty to refer to the Israeli genocide of Palestine. You are required to refer to the mass murder as “clearing out terrorists dangerous to Israelis.”
The problem with holding ethnic whites whether in the US or Europe responsible for slavery is that the slaves in the new world were captured and provided by the Black King of Dahomey and not by any whites who were merely the purchasers of already enslaved blacks by blacks. Other purchasers were Arabs. Most backs captured in slave wars between tribes remained the property of the winners. The surplus was sold and found its way to the new world.
The black extremists’ demand for compensation for slavery falls on blacks themselves as there were many free blacks who owned slaves and used them in their businesses. So we will have blacks paying restitution to blacks. And we will also have native Americans–the Cherokee for example–paying restitution to blacks because Cherokees owned black slaves and took them with them on the Trail of Tears when the US federal government, not the South, evicted the Cherokees from their homes in Georgia, Florida, and North Carolina and forced their relocation into Oklahoma.
In Black Slaveowners, Koger tells how it was common practice for Southern slaveowners to free their slaves on their deaths. If slaveowners had heirs, they would only free the slaves who had been the most faithful. If they did not have heirs or debts that had to be paid by liquidating assets, they would leave the plantation to their black common law wives and mulatto children. Over time there were many black owners of slaves, and South Carolina law provided ways of liberating them.
Koger tells how free blacks skilled in providing services would save their earnings to purchase the freedom of enslaved, wives, children, and relatives. There was a free black community that was incorporated into Southern society based on the character of the black.
It was easier to free blacks under British colonial rule and for the first decade or two of the United States. But freeing slaves presented the problem of how the freed slaves were to sustain themselves. South Carolina, caring for its black residents, addressed this problem, unlike Lincoln’s Union Army.
South Carolina decided that to free a slave required evidence that the former slave would be self-supporting, unlike those “liberated by Lincoln and his war criminals” for whom “liberation” meant often meant death. The freedom of black slaves now depended on the state and not on the decision of the slave owner. To meet the requirement some slave owners conducted training for slaves as artisans such as carpenters, shoemakers, seamstress, and cooks, skills that would prove their ability to support themselves in freedom.
Many black fathers who earned or purchased their freedom worked hard and diligently to earn the money with which to purchase their wife and children out of slavery. The commitment of black fathers to wife and children in the old South stands in extraordinary contrast to the absence of commitment of so many black fathers today. Once again, we have the evidence that the white liberals have harmed the blacks and blamed the Southern whites.
For decades white liberals, and their hanger-ons in the left, have taught blacks to hate whites and to blame whites for all of their problems. We see expression of the rising hate in black violence against white persons.
We see it also in the Western World’s feeble resistance to being overrun by immigrant-invaders who have no intention of assimilation. In the US for example, we now have in Minneapolis Muslim calls for prayer over public loudspeakers six times a day. A Michigan city has legalized Muslim animal sacrifice. We see it in Texas where the legislature is struggling with Muslim demands for Shari law.
White nations are erasing themselves, which is the intent of the false history they have been taught for decades. Such a large percentage of white people have been successfully indoctrinated into their “racial guilt” that it is doubtful any white country will avoid becoming a Tower of Babel.