Dave Stein, age 15, of Carleton, Michigan, for his question:
Who introduced slavery to the U.S.?
In modern America, slavery is a hot tempered, fighting word. It triggers an assortment of righteous and riotous emotions and cool headed reason departs out the window. This, of course, makes sensible conversation impossible and distorts the true facts. It is time now to calm down. For one thing, the past slavery in America must be viewed in proper perspective as part of the world wide, age old history of human slavery.
Slavery is human bondage. It takes many forms because all human beings, sad to say, enjoy exerting power over each other. And, strange to say, many people seem reluctant to enjoy the rewards and responsibilities of freedom. Some are slaves to habit forming drugs. And the various forms of slavery go back before the dawn of recorded history. Our earliest ancestors were brutish, warlike barbarians who killed their captives. Much later they thought of saving their prisoners of war and forcing them to work. This "improvement" was slavery and it continued on a very large scale throughout most of human history.
The early Bible characters had slaves. So did the civilized citizens of ancient Athens. The Romans kept slaves to row their ships, to fight as gladiators and to do most of their labor. There were slaves in Egypt and India and throughout the Middle East. Opium was used to subdue the population of China into slavery. Even the Vikings had slaves. Later, this outright slavery gave way to the feudal system. The barons who owned the land also owned the serfs and their children who lived on it. This too was slavery. If we want to look back with honesty, almost all of us will find slaves among our ancestors. History, it seems, refused to grant mankind freedom until he had invented machines to do his dirty work.
The past slavery in the United States is but one small sentence in the big history book of world slavery. Naturally we don't like this dark page of our history. Nobody in his right mind would blame those unfortunate children whose parents have been slaves to drugs, any more than you can blame the children of people who have been slaves to people. Neither can any sensible person blame white Americans of today for what some of their ancestors may have done. If this makes sense, you must agree that guilty feelings about past slavery have no place in this century.
To most Americans, slavery is limited to the captives brought here from Africa.
In 1562, Sir John Hawkins brought a cargo ship to Jamestown. On board he had several African slaves and some of them were sold to the settlers. The slave trade began in Colonial America and increased through the years. The captive Africans were brought here by Portuguese and Danish ships, French and British ships, Dutch and American ships. Historians estimate that altogether about four million African slaves were brought to America. Meantime, humane people here, in England and other civilized countries were protesting. At last the cruel slave ships were outlawed. After the civil war, the United States freed its slaves and their children.
It is natural to feel indignant about our dark period of slavery. But surely we must wonder how those African slaves were captured. This dirty work was master minded by Arab slavers. For 12 brutal centuries they plundered central Africa and drove their helpless captives thousands of miles across jungle and desert to be sold at various seaports. Historians are still assembling this monstrous chapter of human history. But sensible people know that the time has come to turn the pages of the past in order to write a brighter chapter of human history.