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1 Africans Sold Africans Into Slavery

Africans sold other Africans into slavery. The slave ships traveling to Africa had to get their slaves from somewhere. Most traveled to the coasts of Africa where they purchased slaves from native tribes living in the area. The slaves were often prisoners of war captured after raids on rival tribes.

The African kings on the coast traded slaves for European weapons, which allowed the kings to move further inland. There, they captured new territories and slaves, which they also exchanged for weapons. And the deadly cycle continued. The slave trade was the reason why many West African tribes engaged in a series of deadly wars a few centuries ago.

When African trade with the Europeans started in the 16th century, it didn’t involve slaves. At first, African rulers only traded ivory and gold for European goods. However, they soon started trading in slaves.^[10]

2 Freed Blacks Were Kidnapped And Resold Into Slavery

The Underground Railroad appeared several years before the Civil War. It was a network of homes and hideouts run by free blacks and white anti-slavers to help runaway slaves escape from the proslavery South to the antislavery North.

The Underground Railroad was soon countered by the Reverse Underground Railroad, which worked the other way around. Runaway slaves and free blacks were kidnapped in the North and sold in the South as slaves. Kidnapped free blacks often had difficulty proving they were free because the courts often rejected their papers over forgery concerns.^[9]

Other free blacks could not testify that a fellow black was a free man because the law forbade blacks to testify against whites in courts. Only a white could prove that a black was a free man. However, many whites would not participate because they would be hated for helping a black man and sending a white man to prison.

3 Convict Leasing Replaced Slavery After The Civil War

Slavery was completely illegal at the end of the US Civil War. This became a problem for the South, which quickly became unstable because its economy depended on slavery. Former slavers found solace in the Thirteenth Amendment—the same one that abolished slavery. The law permitted slavery and involuntary servitude as “a punishment for crime.”

Southern states started to arrest blacks indiscriminately. Many were even arrested for the unbelievable crime of being unemployed. The “crime” was punishable with a huge fine, which the blacks could not pay because they were unemployed. So they were imprisoned and leased to private businesses, which used them for manual labor. This was the convict-lease system.

Over 200,000 blacks became victims of the convict-lease system. Conditions were terrible, just as they were at the time of slavery. The leased convicts did dangerous jobs under inhumane conditions. They were also whipped, chained, and stabbed. Blacks quickly became so infamous as convicts that the words “convicts” and “negroes” were considered synonyms at the time.^[8]

4 The First Slave Owner Was A Black Man

We were taught that slavery began in the US when the first 20 slaves arrived in Virginia in 1620. That is only partly true because these individuals were not really slaves. They were indentured servants—that is, people required to serve a master for a few years before regaining their freedom.

Indentured servitude was common at the time. Many people, including poor whites, often sold a few years of their own lives to a master. However, blacks were often sold into indentured servitude but regained their freedom after fulfilling their agreements.

Anthony and Mary Johnson were two of the early indentured servants who arrived in the US in the 1620s. They later got married and held their own indentured servants.

One of their servants was a man called John Casor. In 1654 or 1655, Casor and Anthony Johnson ended up in a Virginia court due to a disagreement over Casor’s indentured servitude. Casor claimed that his term was over because he had completed the agreed-upon seven or eight years plus another seven years. Anthony insisted that Casor was still his indentured servant.

The court determined that Anthony could hold Casor in lifelong servitude, which effectively made him a slave. White owners of indentured servants soon approached the courts with similar claims and were able to convert their indentured servants into lifetime slaves. In 1661, several years after the judgment in Casor and Anthony’s case, Virginia officially legalized slavery.

To be clear, the Virginia courts had condemned one John Punch into lifetime servitude a few years before Casor was declared a slave. Punch and some white servants were charged with escaping from their masters without completing their contracts. Only Punch (a black) was punished with lifetime servitude.^[3]

5 Slavers Used A Different Bible That Justified Slavery

Photo credit: history.com

Some masters educated their slaves and converted them to Christianity. However, they could not allow them to read the Bible because it contained several passages that countered slavery. Slavers found a way around this by removing most chapters of the Old Testament and a huge chunk of the New Testament.

The result was a stripped-down Bible that they called “Parts of the Holy Bible, selected for the use of the Negro Slaves, in the British West-India Islands,” or as we say nowadays, the Slave Bible. The masters cleverly left portions of the Biblethat made slavery seem normal—like the part where Joseph was kept as a slave in Egypt.

However, they removed other portions, such as where the Israelites fled from their oppressors in Egypt, which the white slavers feared could encourage the slaves to rebel. In fact, slaves in Haiti had rebelled against their white masters and chased them out of Haiti three years before the first Slave Bible was issued.^[1]

The creator of the Slave Bible remains unknown. Some sources indicate that the book could be the handiwork of the white plantation owners who used it to discourage their slaves from revolting. Others think it was the white missionaries who wanted to teach the slaves only the chapters that supported slavery, just so they could think that their situation was normal.

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