its like why all the old armor in museums is high status stuff. nobody saves the poor people stuff, and whatever metal parts they had probably got recycled into shovels or something
Or the aftermath of the Battle of Visby. The armor worn by the losing side was of such outdated quality that the bodies were just thrown into a mass grave without removing their equipment.
The stuff used by poor people tends to be cheaper, lower quality or more disposable in nature. The OP mentioned that slave stuff wasn't preserved. Slave huts in the caribbean were often made of very biodegradable material - often wood and palm thatch, whereas plantation owners houses woul ld have been stone buildings. The planters' houses are still standing - there are almost no preserved slave huts.
Very few people have much interest in saving shoddy hammers and cheap shovels because such things are ubiquitous, but high quality masterpieces of craftsmanship are another story. It has less to do with poor "people" and more with poor "quality."
Actually, the most common thing you find are garbage dumps. They are full of the everyday stuff (from both the rich and the poor) and it's invaluable info for archeologists and historians, but they are usually not pretty too look at for an ordinary viewer.
If they felt guilty of slavery, they wouldn't have held slaves in the first place. The fact they were forced to emancipate their slaves indicates that their moral position hadn't changed.
Some people thought that slavery was theoretically bad but still have slaves (Jefferson). So it wouldn't have shocked me that some people hide the fact they had slaves once it wasn't profitable. I wonder what records we'd have had if there wasn't compensation.
In Brazil we did destroy slavery records. For the precise reason you said on this video. Once slavery was abolished, in Brazil by the year 1888, the First Republic fearing they would have to compensate former slave owners allowed the destruction of the records of slave trade. It was also one way of also avoiding compesate enslaved people since they could by First Republic law demand reparation. A true shame in our history I might say, since we lost how big the slave trade was in Brazil during XIX century. Also former enslaved and their family got no reparation. We know the peculiar institution was huge in Brazil and the US because those two markets were the biggest consumers of enslaved people. We also know how big this was because the wealthiest plantation owner was, bigger the number of enslaved people since cotton, sugar cane and coffee required a huge number of hands tending the field.
Thanks for the info! I was reading recently about how Confederates day is still celebrated in Brazil as US Southern slave owners moved there after the war. I was curious if that’s just a localized Anamoly or exaggerated or really is that bad.
@@Emelia39 As far as I am aware the Confederate Party is only celebrated in Americana, a small town in São Paulo. I don't think most Brazilians are even aware of Confederate immigration to Brazil, as there were only a thousand immigrants.
@@georgeomalley5638thanks- it can be hard to figure out how widely known things are in a country based off articles. People often forget that confederates didn’t just want to expand slavery to rest of the US but all of South America as well.
@@Emelia39Even if you don't count the slaves owned by the Mayan and Aztec, slavery was already in South America before Jamestown. A hundred years before Jamestown. The African slave traders were selling to the Spanish and Portuguese since the 1400s. Around 5% of African slaves went to North America, the remainder went to South America. The Confederates didn't go through to expand slavery, they went there because it was already there.
If you want a shocking realisation, take a look at when the final residues of the slave owner compensation payments were finally fulky paid off. Since parts of the payments were made as government backed annuities the repaymebt scheme was still costing the British taxpayer money in 2015!
@@PumpkinHoard Indeed. Crazy to think that we had been paying back the descendants (or at least the financial descendants, the folks who bought up those annuities) for that long! It would be interesting to trace those annuities and see who actually profited from them over the years.
It was compensation to slaveowners that allowed the UK to end slavery sooner, and peacefully; the alternative would have taken decades longer. Here in the US, we did it later, spent more money per slave, killed hundreds of thousands, and even now face resentment from those who identify with the losing side.
@@TheFranchiseCA For sure, but the UK spent so much stopping slavery GLOBALLY that we only finished paying off the debts incurred by this in about 2014-2015. Most of the general public never knew about this, and those that do know mostly only know after the fact. Had people known, I imagine there would have been widespread demands to stop paying taxpayer money to fabulously wealthy people as "compensation" for freeing their ancestors slaves. I mean, 2014 was a time of widespread austerity following the 2008 financial crisis, public services were getting cut left and right but we were apparently still throwing money at the ultra rich to compensate them for not being allowed to have slaves anymore..... It may have been necessary in the first place, but after a certain point some of those debts should have just been written off. There was simply no practical or ethical justification for the money going to these people centuries later. It sure as hell isn't like they NEEDED the money.
@@TheFranchiseCA Slavery was such a huge and profitable industry in the US that this kind of compensation would have bankrupted the US. It's a large part of the reason Haiti is a failed state today--they were paying reparations to France for taking slaveowners' "property" for over a century.
Learned in accounting class- People aren't assets on your spread sheet (even if youre investing in training etc) but historically that's what slave owners did. Also sinking a ship full of slaves on purpose to claim a loss on their taxes... yeesh
Of course not. There are parallels to the owners of animal livestock today who are irritated about all the 'irrational do-goodies' who demand animals might be kept with room to move in. They just diminish their profits.
@@charis6311 yeah but their livestock were human. Curiosity. When the Transatlantic Slave trade was taking heavy blow from UK slave owners decided to force uppon women on slavery to have more babies. That was because any person born from a enslaved woman was also a slave. So like livestock human were produced to gain more money for those in the upper crust.
I found a big metal box in an abandoned warehouse cellar marked 'Cavendish Files'. Sadly there were no files in it but, as you say, it was surprising how quick and easy it was to find out that they had been the files used to claim compensation for all the slaves Lord Cavendish had been forced to 'free'. The scale of the whole thing quickly became horrifically clear.
All slave owners were compensated by the government and the records still exist showing exactly what was paid and to whom. it would not be hard to find out. Probably held in the British Library or Public Records Office.
Another proof for the alleged Vlaams that they are Slavs. Once upon a time in Germany there were (still are) Slavic Polabanians Slovenste (Slovaks) also called Vendi. The Vendi also founded Venice (Venice) and operated in the North Sea in the same way as the Vikings. Well, their speech sounds much more like Dutch than Slovak. ruclips.net/video/gRYERyUlW2s/видео.html Then also Dutch(deutsch) is the same as Toth. Slovaks Germans Czechs Slovenes is one company. 😁
Thanks for exposing this. The aristocracy in the UK rarely speak of it, but many ultra rich got that way because of the slave trade. I was horrified to hear a middle-aged British woman being asked recently what she would buy if given money, and she said, 'Slaves. Things were better in the old days.' People actually think like this? Apparently so.
Anyone vastly wealthy and especially the aristocracy built their wealth - directly or indirectly - through terrible oppression and atrocities. It's depressing but predictable. So we should not be surprised when again and again throughout history the wealthy side with oppressors - funding coups, dictatorships, genocides and benefiting from slavery, apartheid, all kinds of crimes agains humanity.
As a Dutch person i've seen the fecking records of the ships, because the records were saved. Those ships were always fragile & lasted only a couple of voyages, same for the fishing ships, it's wood, it's only going to last so long... Basically the only wooden ships we have right now are the ones that sank quickly enough to be buried by the sediment. Here we have the newest province of Flevoland, made out of polders, land that used to be sea & they keep finding former ships. But that's the "poor people" ships, they only found one British ocean sailing vessel, the rest is inland travel, small ships that carried things like bricks, grain, peat & excrement. I've seen the excavation of such a ship. I've also seen replicas of larger ocean going vessels that they've found. Been on the Batavia many times, but that was a ship bound for what is now Indonesia. Defragged History, a channel here on youtube has really good videos on that & other stories. Anyway, here is a website where they use the records from loads of countries to let people see what happened: slavevoyages.org
@@LeafHuntress the evidence is there but some people don't want to look for it or believe it when they see it. I guess the truth isn't to everyone's taste.
@@pennybright6386 They’re both stupid. Companies that traded in slaves like the Royal African Company owned the ships, plus the government/the crown. The Portuguese crown and the British government, alongside private companies like the East India Company, exported the most slaves to the Americas according to records.
The basement level of the African American History Museum in Washington D.C. has a reconstructed slave cabin and other artifacts, such as the sorts of chains and cuffs they used to transport the slaves from Africa to Europe and the Americas. It's--quite eye-opening.
I just visited the Museum of London Docklands today in Canary Wharf, which has most of the 2nd floor dedicated to the history of slavery in the British Empire. I learnt a lot from it and highly recommend a visit to anyone who has the chance.
In one of my sociology classes, I learned something that still haunts me about slavery. It was so obvious yet I would have never thought of it myself. Slave owners raped their female slaves not just because they're perverts, but also to MAKE MORE SLAVES. The childern born to slave women would be their slaves too so that was a way for them to have free labour for the future basically.
@whatever96 Perfectly obvious when you look at skin colour in present day African Americans. You don't lose skin pigmentation over just a few hundred years.
Plantation owners also forced certain male slaves to "breed" with certain female slaves to increase certain good traits and genetics in the babies, to strengthen the "herd", so to speak, just like cattle.
This is why, when working in Genealogy, it is a team effort. The descendants of Slave Owners have the potential to assist the descendants of slaves track their family through these records to at least discover the fragments of their past that were swallowed by history.
@@HANNEKEHartkoorn-c1x completely! And the one has more resources available than the other. In our world we believe EVERYONE is entitled to a history. It may not be everything we would like it to be, but it is ours.
We would think "the gaul of the slave owners to do that," that's not the case.a really good thing to cover. In the US, we hear more about our own issues with slavery than other countries. Although some here in America would love to cover the wound of slavery and racism up.
Gall = Bile, as in the Gall Bladder, used to express confident arrogance Gaul = ancient French person, possibly confidently arrogant but not part of this saying
Americans in 1900: Slavery was good. The Civil War was a tragic conflict of brother vs. brother. Americans in 1980: Lincoln and the Republicans freed the slaves and ended the moral abomination of the slave power. Americans in 2020: The 1619 Project demonstrates that the British were actually the good guys. The Somerset decision declared slavery illegal in 1770. King George was just about to free the slaves in North America when a band of slaveowners organized a "revolution" and broke away from the mother country. British aristocrats in 1850: Here's a family portrait with all 172 of our slaves. We were a little short-handed that year.
Maybe it's just a U.S. thing but we 🇨🇦 hear about our slavery history, and Britain's, Spain, and Portugal...even the slavery that still exists worldwide. The part that galls me is that compensation was given to the slave owners and not the enslaved (in U.K and U.S). Shameful. Reparations need to be made.
We've preserved receipts for slaves in my family history archive. They stay there in the pages as a profound marker of remembrance and as a prompt for that sort of shame all humble people should embrace from time-to-time.
@@valeforedark Please explain, because I like how She teaches that history is not a definite account, she quotes from historical documents be they newspapers, church documents etc. I think she tries hard to paint a picture of what it was really like for people to live in times she portrays.
You have to keep the receipts if you want compo. Ironically, there may have been fewer slaves than thought, since exaggerating the numbers got you more money.
I once attended a book unveiling of the impact of the transatlantic slave trade upon European cities. This happened at William & Mary University which is next to Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. The author’s expressed mild surprise at the amount & availability of the records and the sheer amount of wealth generated, over considerable time, by the Slave Trade. The authors were surprised at the number of nations who took part in the Slave trade.
It explains all the "developed" countries with ports to the ocean. Most of the ones that didn't have a direct route to it are considered second class by others today, like Eastern Europe, and now we know why.
@@SteveInTokyo-b8n Whataboutery. Modern slavery is no where near the same scale as the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the volume of people trafficked doesn’t compare. The European powers and their colonies did so on an industrial scale like never before, because they treated chattel slavery like a capitalist enterprise. No other slave economy had the organisation or technology to do so prior to this. Also, the number of people enslaved by West African states increased exponentially after contact with Europeans due to the sheer demand. The European powers turned those states into slave economies so of course the wealthy leaders of those states weren’t going to take kindly to losing their income. Kinda like the Western slaveholders who received compensation.
@@zarinaromanets7290 Eastern Europe had no problems sending “Slavs” to the big markets like Constantinople. Port cities are more efficient for shipping anything, whether bulk grains like Russia and Ukraine did until the war, or spices once the route was opened up by the Portuguese.
@@TrueEnglishMan01 Modern slavery is about as big now as it was in the 1700s or early 1800s, mainly because we have been ignoring it, having ended it in Europe and the USA and Brazil. And because the population has increased.
What many do not realise is that up until very recently we were still paying taxes to pay off the loans taken out to end slavery. When you add in the expenses of over a hundred years suppressing slavery you are looking at costs that only come second to waging a world war. So generations of Britains have payed to ensure the rich did not loose out.
The compensation may fee icky today, but it brought abolition quicker and that is good. If the slaves freedom wasnt purchased via the government being forced by common British people to set them free, the slave owners would have done what they did in USA and Brazil and just started a civil war. They were shameless sure, but its better the slaves were paid for their freedom sooner rather than spend longer in slavery so in 200 years time we could pretend to take a high horse about it
Prime Minister Gladstone paid off his father for the loss of his slaves, then inherited the money when the old man died. Gladstone wasn't the most fanatical imperialist but how much of that money the British aristocracy was given for the loss of their slaves just got channeled in late 19th Century imperialism and new forms of oppression?
@@brklynusa yeah and? Would you rather they have been enslaved for longer as happened in places that didnt buy their freedom? As i said it feels icky to us today, but the alternate option was longer slavery as bared out in other countries. Youre not arguing the slaves should have been enslaved right up until the public managed to directly debit the slaves with money are you?
@@brklynusa that would have been nice, but freedom is always the priority whenever freeing people who are kidnapped and/or enslaved in general. Im not well read enough to know what the Abolitionists of the time thought about compensation, it probably would have been a novel idea. Welfare didnt exist in any form. Public compensation in courts virtually didnt exist. Im not trying to be rude, but it feels like taking the high horse when in reality even this basic Abolition was remarkable and almost unique (though thankfully most slave states eventually stopped)
Modern workforce management, the practice of maximizing the productivity of a workforce, has deep roots in the management of enslaved people. People relying on enslaved labour often kept excellent records of the productivity of their labour, and worked hard to try to see what worked to maximize profits.
@@Squiglypig It’s one of the ways and reasons for which slavers wrote down a lot of information about their slaves, and the video was about the records that slavers left behind of what they did.
I really need to see Rhode Island. There's a great book - Travels With George, that does a terrific treatment on Washington's relationship with slave ownership, and it has a section on how RI, especially Providence, grew rich on the slave trade.
They did keep records for themselves, which I think is how so much information got lost. Since they kept records for themselves, the records called the enslaved people what the plantation owners wanted to call them, not the indigenous African names they had for themselves so there are massive amounts of people alive now who can only find the enslaved names of their family ancestors if they’re lucky and no one is able to trace their actual family name. It’s heartbreaking.
Don't forget that they were slaves because their people lost a war in Africa against other Africans. The ones who wanted their names erased were other black people, since what better victory than to eliminate your opponent from history altogether?
@@Squiglypig Your claim: "the ones who wanted their names erased were other black people", presupposes that every African alive must have really cared about something as specific as "[Eliminating their] opponents from history altogether". This could be charitably referred to as 'population-level armchair psychology'. It's also provably false: there are records from ships where the slaves' original African names are recorded, before they were transported and sold to their eventual owners in Europe.
I was under the impression that this is part of what informs African American culture, the fact that their family names and cultural heritage were destroyed by slave owners, sometimes intentionally, is the reason why they actively do a lot of the defining for themselves. I can't even begin to imagine what it must've been like, being removed from one's roots like that. Slavery is one of humanity's greatest shames.
@@DeinosDinos it is, you were correct to assume that. That's why "Black" is a racial & cultural identity on its own in the US, separate from that of free Africans who immigrated to the country in recent years.
Once arrived at destination people where just numbered and written where the boat came from . No names were recorded. I know that because I am a 5th generation and I cannot find anything
It's not surprising people felt this way when slavery was the norm, not only in the anglo-american world, but other cultures as well. Among the US Marines first deployments were to dissaude Barbary coast slavers from taking Americans as slaves. When the British Empire outlawed slavery in the 1830s it was a progressive anomoly, not a long overdue acceptance of a taken for granted norm. Only 30 years later, the Americans came to terms with slavery at the cost of a devastating civil war. Whether it be child labour on cocao plantations, forced labour on fishing boats, or human trafficking, slavery still exists today.
> When the British Empire outlawed slavery in the 1830s it was a progressive anomoly, not a long overdue acceptance of a taken for granted norm. Except that, say, Russian Empire abolished slavery (serfdom was another matter!) in 1723, Qing Empire abolished slavery in 1730, England as a part of British Empire forbade slavery in 1772, Scotland (as a part of British Empire) forbade slavery in 1778 (both of them were court decisions that slavery just don't exist in this jurisdictions, as no law _allows_ it), France abolished slavery in 1794 (and then reinstituted by Napoleon, though), most colonial rebellions included ban on slavery as part of their platform (like Haiti in 1804, Chile in 1812 or Mexico in 1813). Heck, _Hawaii_, as independent kingdom, abolished slavery before UK and USA. It absolutely was a long overdue legal acceptance of a taken for granted norm that "slavery is actually immoral and harmful to a person taken as a slave".
@@khaerinaenno That still excludes whole continents and large parts of others where slavery was the norm. No often mentioned is the internal african slave trade nor the white slave trade of the middle east.
@@larryclemens1850 > No often mentioned is the internal african slave trade nor the white slave trade of the middle east. First of all, are we in good faith assuming that Morocco, Ashanti, Dagomey or even Ottomans were norm definers for London, New York, St. Petersburg or Vienna? Secondly, it's mentioned all the time; like, in this comment section only I saw it mentioned at least couple of times. What IS not mentioned often that UK _and US_ pressured this governments to stop slavery and slave trade claiming that it's abhorrent and amoral practice that is against all the natural laws of the people which leads to horrible suffering (which is true). Which, again, British (and American) abolitionists of the era pointed at and claimed that no one would assume that this calls are done in a good faith when UK and US profits immensly from slavery. Because it's kinda goes against the general narrative "well, everyone believed that it's ok, and just magically decided to abolish slavery in 1834, it was just sudden unexplained anomaly". To quote an influential and wildly circulated pamphlet on the topic: "By making it felony for British subjects to be concerned in that inhuman traffic, England has only transferred her share of it to other countries. She has, indeed, by negotiation and remonstrance, endeavoured to persuade them to follow her example. But has she succeeded? How should she while there is so little consistency in her conduct? Who will listen to her pathetic declamations on the injustice and cruelty of the Slave Trade -whilst she rivets the chains upon her own slaves, and subjects them to all the injustice and cruelty which she so eloquently deplores, when her own interest is no longer at stake? Before we can have any rational hope of prevailing on our guilty neighbours to abandon this atrocious commerce - to relinquish the gain of oppression, - the wealth obtained by rapine and violence, - by the deep groans, the bitter anguish of our unoffending fellow creatures; - we must purge ourselves from these pollutions; - we must break the iron yoke from off the neck of our own slaves,-and let the wretched captives in our own islands go free." That was published in 1824, eleven years before abolishing the slavery in British colonies.
@@khaerinaenno As much as a historical debate is informative, it serves to distract from our own responcibility for contemporary enslavement whether that be child enslavement on cocao plantations, child "artisnal" lithium miners, kidnapped labouers on fishing trawlers, forced labour in reeducation camps, Indian citizens tricked into fighting for the russians on the front lines, or uniquely modern, prisoners - mostly falun gong practioners - being executed to supply organ transplants on demand in communist china. Cheap chocolate bars, fish, clothes, batteries and other products means we all probably benefit from slavery in its modern forms.
@@larryclemens1850 No, it's not. You totally can discuss both. Especially when people using historical arguements to actually deflect the problems of slavery to "well, it's not like slavery is universally bad, it's more or less depends on what people thought of the time; now we believe that it's bad, but back then people believed that it's ok". No, they didn't. People kinda believed that slavery, in general, isn't exactly a good thing - philosophically speaking, of course, they always believed it's bad when applied to them - for a long, long, long time.
it still amazes me that slavery was once fairly commonplace... i wonder if there are any practices we currently do that will go the way of slavery in future.
It amazes me that you think it is no more. Check in modern African slavery (yes the same people who originally sold their own people to Europeans, lest we forget)...
Besides the slavery still going on today? I'm betting industrial animal farming. The only reason people widely accept that is because they don't have to see the horrors of it personally. If we're being hopeful, I'd also say the marketisation of the essentials of life. Stuff like food, water, housing, healthcare, education...We're already pretty close to abolition on the last two in some places.
Slavery is still going on, even where you live. As the world has more people than ever, there's assumed to be more slave than ever. In the west these are mainly people pressed to do domestic work or in brothels, but in the rest of the world agricultural slavery is the most common.(hence Tony Chocolony's, fair trade logo etc.) Anyway, besides that fact, there's Peter Singer, an Australian philosopher that has pondered on that question. His book "The life that you can save" is free to read, either as an e-book or you can listen to a podcast with the audio version.
Q: what do you call wealthy, well respected people who made their family fortunes years earlier doing extremely evil things? A : wealthy, well respected people .
During the American Revolution, the majority of British troops were stationed on the island colonies (Jamaica) to protect their slaveholdings. There’s been an unfortunate myth (due to the British army promising freedom to American slaves who served in their army-though its seldom mentioned how badly they were treated or that their “owners” were compensated) that Britain was more moderate on slavery, when it was not the case.
When the French entered the fray in 1778, their main focus was annexation of British-held possessions in the Caribbean. Given that the economy of Jamaica alone was larger than all 13 American colonies put together, this caused a huge distortion in the distribution of British forces. The main contribution by the French to American independence was distraction rather than direct action: from the British perspective, from that point onwards, the Americans became a side-show in the war they had started.
In America, some places slaves were kept have been "found" and turned into museums. Or, if you were a wealthy slave owner, "preserved" (like Thomas Jefferson's place) as part of th owners history. And, if you wait long enough, historians rewrite your history to make it look like you weren't slaves (Look at Egypt)
@jonathanwessner3456 Yes, you SHOULD look at Egypt. The notion that slaves built the pyramids is a Hollywood concept with no basis in fact. It was Hollywood that rewrote the history. Proper archaeologists and historians are putting it right.
Not quite. Egypt had slaves, tons of them, its just that they had weird ideas about religious purity and figured that temples and pyramids were too important to be built by slaves, who they veiwed as unclean. But "not as bad as you could have been" has never been acceptable moral standards.
@@TheAussieBluethe true issue is that Egypt treated slaves differently than "Modern" slavery. They were valued, and treated similar to employees. In many cases. I mean, Joseph of the many colored coat was basically an official in Egypt, and a slave
@@jonathanwessner3456 try "Trans Atlantic." Slavery existed further east as well, and it was pretty much the same situation. A real life case for example would be Malik Ambar, an enslaved soldier from Africa who eventually ended up becoming a king in India.
@@jonathanwessner3456There's no evidence of the Jews being enslaved in Egypt to any degree as it's currently discussed. Maybe a smaller group whose story grew over time, but they were not kept by the thousands for multiple generations. There are no records in Egypt of this and they'd have written it down for keeps. PS: This means Moses didn't exist. Sorry not sorry.
The costs for reimbursing the slave owners was so high, that it was only paid off in 2015. Every single British taxpayer from abolition, till 9 years ago helped pay. But... It was a necessary (if very sour tasting) evil. Without reimbursement the abolition of slavery within the Empire (which started a domino effect first in Europe then around the world) would have taken years or maybe decades longer to achieve, and that's If it happened at all!
@@Poliss95 Haiti was a society of former slaves who rebelled, so their early laws to make it illegal were to be expected, yet had zero effect beyond their borders. Denmark banned the Import of further slaves to it's colonies, but didn't make slavery itself illegal. The slaves already in their colonies remained slaves. Aside from those earlier pieces of legislation... which other nations (that practiced slavery) prior to Britain banning slavery (even if the effect was solely within their own borders) and operating directly against the Trans Atlantic slave trade, were you thinking of?
@@SteveInTokyo-b8n it Is limited, but a broader overview would be an essay. The rich and powerful had in many cases become such as a result of plantations that used slaves, or directly from the transport and sale of slaves. Wealth (and influence) growing generation by generation. The opposition these folk Could have applied (to retain such profitable revenue streams indefinitely) would have mired parliament in deadlock... had they felt they would financially lose out, and for some, it would have crippled them. The decision to go down the route of compensation, removed The huge barrier to abolition. The endless debates and lobbying from each side, silenced by something So huge, so staggeringly costly, that few had considered such a thing could be done, and is an absolute testament to those abolitionists who fought so hard.
None of this surprises me. I know full well that at the time slavery was abolished, people had a lot of morals that are just rotten by today's standards. It never would have occurred to me that any of the slave owners would have been ashamed, but rather that they would have been angry that the slaves had been emancipated. I think Britain's solution to compensate the slave owners was a very good one for the time. Certainly better than what happened in the USA, where in order for slaves to be freed, first unilateral secession had to be equated with treason, then the bloodiest war in American history had to be fought, a war that divides American society to this day.
> Certainly better than what happened in the USA, where in order for slaves to be freed, first unilateral secession had to be equated with treason Fair is fair; unilateral secession wasn't equated with treason. Waging war against United States, though, was (and still is) a Constitutional definition of it. Still, it's not like no one offered Southern slaveowners this solution, even during Civil War itself. They refused.
@@khaerinaennoIt was equated with treason. Lincoln told the newly-independent South that they wouldn't be attacked but that they had to give over "US government property", I.E. ex-US Army (now Confederate Army) forts to the US. Of course the South would not do such a thing, because that would have been tantamount to negating the validity of their own secession and independence. Davis offered to negotiate. Lincoln's answer was "I don't negotiate with traitors". So of course the war came. It started when US troops wouldn't leave Fort Sumter. Of course the South wasn't going to let what they now considered a foreign army occupy their territory. Had the US troops vacated Fort Sumter, the South wouldn't have fired. As for your comment about the North offering to pay the South for freeing slaves, this is the first time I hear this. I'll have to look into that one. But even if that was so, there was more at stake during the American Civil War than just slavery. The South wanted a different approach to government than the North did. So I'm not surprised if they refused such offers - they were fighting for more than just the right to keep slaves.
@@erracht > Had the US troops vacated Fort Sumter, the South wouldn't have fired. Well, South started to attack federal installations - arsenals, mostly, which didn't belong to states, even if they were surrounded by state territory (in case you don't know, federal bases and arsenals, including Fort Sumter, exist more or less on the same grounds that DC). I mean, naturally, if South is unilaterally seceded, everything they gave away to federal government is belonging to federal government. Essentially, Fort Sumter wasn't "their territory", if they didn't believe they're US anymore. If they believed that secession was in effect, shooting at Fort Sumter was an act of war against United States. And, again, that's the definition of treason, given in US Constitution. > As for your comment about the North offering to pay the South for freeing slaves, this is the first time I hear this. To start with, look into Delaware buyout plan. > The South wanted a different approach to government than the North did. The principal differences between approaches to government, considering Constitutions of US and Confederation, were that, first, Confederation forbade central government to use revenue from one state to improve the infrastructure of another state, second, the ban of promoting any industry by central government (the fervent desire of slaveowners, but generally, a question of taxation policy in US; like, for years US had tariff policy like this before Civil War), and third, that the right to hold African slaves. All three most daring encroaches onto sovereign power of US Constitution (Supremacy Clause, Commerce Clause, and a Necessary and Proper Clause) are in Southern Constitution. I really, really don't think that South decided to secede to prevent federal center to improve Boston Harbor with federal tariffs. At least, that's not what they said back then. > they were fighting for more than just the right to keep slaves. Having all your slaves being bought out by government kinda is opposite to the idea of keeping slaves.
@@khaerinaenno OK, first of all, that's not how secession works. When you secede, you take EVERYTHING. Government property moves with the territory. When the CSA was formed, a new CSA govermnent was formed with it, and therefore whatever the US Government originally owned on Confederate territory ceased to belong to it. The former US property on its territory naturally was partitioned and became CS government territory. That's NATURALLY how independence works. It's not like the Thirteen Colonies let the British government keep forts of the British Army when they declared independence (or ANY OTHER COUNTRY that ever unilaterally seceded from another). They seceded, and formed their own goverment, so the US Constitution would logically have been deemed to have ceased to have effect there. Secondly, I looked into your Delaware buyout plan. Interesting - but Delaware is not a Southern state. It was a slave state that remained loyal to the Union, and they rejected the plan. Do you know of any example where a buyout was offered to a Southern state, I.E., one that actually was in the CSA? I happen to think Lincoln should have let the South secede and that there should have been no Civil War. I don't think the Union should have been preserved by force. I think if Lincoln's primary aim was to emancipate the slaves, it would have been more constructive to let the South secede but to have the 13th Amendment passed back in 1861, in the North. Then slavery would have been unconstitutional where it remained in the North (as in Delaware, there were still a few parts of the Union where slavery remained legal), and if any Southern state wished to return to the Union, they would have been forced to free their slaves as a condition of being readmitted.
@@erracht > that's not how secession works First of all, that's not how US federal territory works. US didn't "own Fort Sumter on state territory"; when US acquired this land from the state, it stopped to be land of the state. But secondly, yeah, when you secede, you take what you can - and fight an independence war, if mother country don't want to let you leave. And yeah, it's treason. The thing is, I do agree that, naturally, rebels would take stuff. They're rebels, they ignore the laws, that kinda gets with a job. But the pretense that CSA somehow was legal and totally not a treason is laughable with this pretense. Legally speaking, confederates had as much claim on Fort Sumter as they had on DC or western territories. > Do you know of any example where a buyout was offered to a Southern state, I.E., one that actually was in the CSA? Not in a terms of legal acts, no. There was legislative attempts of doing so in some other non-CSA states (Missouri and Maryland), and there was a success of passing such an act for DC (because in DC federals could just enact it without asking locals). There was also general campaigning of Lincoln of doing so. > I happen to think Lincoln should have let the South secede and that there should have been no Civil War Yes, that's pretty obvious that you happen to think this. > I don't think the Union should have been preserved by force. I think that maybe Union shouldn't have been establiished by force, or as an instrument of tyranny to begin with. Still, it's not a question of legality now; it's a question of ethics and morals. Legally speaking, under terms of US Constitution, Southerners were traitors. You can argue that, maybe, they should've been allowed to be trairors (and slavers), but it's the best point people have here. > I think if Lincoln's primary aim was to emancipate the slaves, it would have been more constructive to let the South secede but to have the 13th Amendment passed back in 1861 No, if his aim was to emancipate the slaves in the very beginning (which is arguable!), it wouldn't be constructive.
It's not just "it's poor people's stuff, nobody thinks to save it", it's also the "Wear it out, then reuse what you can" mentality that is common among poor people, even today. It's part of why we had things like patchwork quilting - once a garment can no longer be repaired, or resized to fit one of the kids, or repurposed into another clothing item, it gets used in a quilt. It's really only in the last few decades that things have become truly disposable, and people are actually losing those "repurposing" skills.
Why would anybody think that they would destroy their ledgers I mean rich and powerful people STILL TO THIS DAY look down on people that are less fortunate than them and sometimes see them as absolute garbage... And on top of that a lot of wealthy people treat their actual staff like garbage and a lot of business owners still treat their employees like garbage and they feel proud that they have the ability to do that because of the power that they have I mean honestly people haven't changed very much since then
I appreciate your efforts. You are very knowledgeable, animated, entertaining and insightful; but this particular video is the most valuable to me, a lot of impact (impactful?) Thank you for all your efforts; the many years of schooling, perseverance, uncertainty, etc for you to deliver this accurate account of a dark period of human history. All the best regards to you 🙏
"Because that's poor peoples' stuff and nobody thinks to save it". We talk a lot about historical preservation of houses here (in Auckland) and what people mean, exclusively, is a particular style of colonial villa. Now, I hate the standard house you get round here... whenever it's overcast (which is often), they just contribute to a really depressing landscape. But from a strictly historical point of view, some of these properties need preserving, too. We don't even extend it to the Art Deco houses. Always and only villas. Obviously the purpose of historical preservation of houses is always actually #NIMBYism, which everyone knows (and so probably explains why they don't even bother pretending that they're actually motivated by historical preservation via a few "we want these properties to be preserved for historical reasons, we're genuinely about the history" examples).
Really? What about the wealthy dark skinned folk who did the enslaving and selling? Do you think they have feared the repercussions of their actions as well?
@TheHardys01 they didn't. They carried on enslaving and selling to the Arabs as they had been for centuries. The British tried to stop them and in the main did through actions, but unfortunately, not completely.
@@TheHardys01well, seems youtube are deleting my comments even though they do not violate any of their policies. So anyway, no, the dark skinned folk who did the actual enslaving did not fear repercussions for their actions, even when the British took action against them to stop their evil trade.
@@cplcabsAlso, not as many and done a lot more as "please, face-eating leopard, don't eat my face" than actual profitable occupation. Eventually, the leopards pounced.
It was legal.. not as many people had a problem with it as we like to think. That's why historical context is important. Slavery was.. not now, WAS... perfectly OK. Then it became not OK and that's that.
"Did slave owners destroy evidence?" I haven't watched the video yet but I'm going to make a wild guess and say, "Yes." Let's see if I am right. EDIT: No, got that wrong. Didn't think they'd be quite so blatant about it. Thought they might have a scintilla of a conscience.
It would be interesting to also know, how did those slave traders got the slaves in the first place. Did they chase and catch them in Africa? Or did they buy them from other african slave traders (as it still happens today)?
For the most part, the latter. Many west African kingdoms at the time were slave economies, and were happy to sell slaves to Europeans for manufactured goods like firearms. In the long run it wasn't really beneficial for them since they ended up raiding and fighting each other just to capture more slaves to sell.
I find it difficult to condem people from the past with our current values, because in their time it was (generally) accepted and not considered as morally wrong (this changed a lot towards the end of slavery) It would be the same as future people condemning us for using social media because “it’s toxic and encourages antisocial attitudes “ (or what ever reason they decide social media is bad) For us now, this is our society and this is what is considered normal and acceptable. In the future people may not consider some of the things we do the same way. We can absolutely point out the “bad” things that people have done and the effects that it had on our society. Being aware of our past helps us to not make the same mistakes
> because in their time it was (generally) accepted and not considered as morally wrong (this changed a lot towards the end of slavery) Define "their time" please. Because we can argue that it was (generally) accepted in 1700; but it definitely not generally accepted in UK in 1833, which is a time spoken of here ("once slavery was abolished").
@@khaerinaenno their time is the time that they lived in. Do I need to explain to you how, in each year leading up to and after the abolishment of slavery , how much people’s attitudes change, how a society isn’t a monolith and people in different stratas of society had different attitudes and opinions on the issue? You are asking about a specific time where slavery went from being legal to illegal and the people involved in that trade transitioning away from the slave trade. I am not trying to justify their position or their actions.
@@michaelold6695 > You are asking about a specific time where slavery went from being legal to illegal and the people involved in that trade transitioning away from the slave trade. What I'm asking is this - at which point it's starting to be ok to condemn slavers?
Hiding slavery is more of a now thing : there's this USA show where celebrities find out about their ancestry and apparently Ben Affleck found out his ancestors were slave owners and asked the show to never mention it. Meamwhile another celebrity I didn't know myself apparently a director or something took it wholesale and was filmed saying "wow my ancestors were asshole". Meanwhile LeVar Burton who was a host for a kids show about reading learned that in his fathers' family there was someone who made it his calling, along with his wife, to make is African American community literate by giving little black kids classes and later founding a school in this heavily segregated barely out of slavery for a generation society. And all of that was apparently hard to find because History is made by people who are rich. They're the ones who can take pictures, they're the ones who can have nice clothes that stand the test of time, they're the ones that get attention from "the media" (whatever it meant in that era)...
That's really problematic if they agreed to hide it and still aired the episode with the rest of his ancestors. I never understand this. Statistically, at least some of my ancestors must have been evil, maybe even most of them. I'm ok with that, it doesn't make *me* a bad person. I have German friends, not all of their ancestors were in the Resistance, does that somehow make them, today, bad people because their ancestors were? No!
I saw the second one. I don't remember who it was, but they went to town about it. It was lovely. Reba McIntyre had to face a similar issue on one of those shows as well. I want to see LeVar's episode in part because of his reaction to finding out he has a white ancestor who fought for the Confederacy. I want to see what he really said and did, not what second-hand Internet jockeys told me. Finding out his father's family was also big on education is a short I did see, and he was rightfully in tears.
First, Aristotle declared that family-owned slaves were members of the family, and for those who could not afford slaves, that place would be taken by their domesticated animals. Thus, of course the house slaves would be in their owners’ family portraits. Second, of course the slaves’ things were not kept as the slaves’ property, because they weren’t. And the slaves wouldn’t bother keeping their junk that the Masters gave for their use; they might buy and keep replacements. Slavery was ended by force in the USA, so the slave records were kept with the other stock breeding and purchasing records. I would come up with a nasty line about the British freeing their slaves by paying the masters but my state did the same thing, as opposed to in New England, where they were immediately freed unless too old. In any case, most of my family came from the Germanies around 1848, and settled in the North, where they could not participate in the Peculiar Institution.
Why are you surprised? 🙄 You invest your time and money in life into things, you're not just going to want to throw it away. That goes with anything. You might be confused, but emotional bonds can be formed.
In the US, we're often sold an image of a dozen enslaved people or so, working on a modest plantation. Slavery scaled MUCH larger woth people with enough slaves running MEGA plantations. There was money to be made across all kinds of agricultural products. It was the cotton farming that gets the most attention as it was the big boom in profiting before the civil war.
For all those saying that all the slaveowners should have gone bankrupt, do you think they would have just rolled over and done so peacefully? They would have fought tooth and nail to keep their slaves. The choice to compensate was pragmatic above anything else, Britain could have ended up fighting a far more expensive civil war within its own empire (including some African colonies because the native population also made money from the slave trade). While it may morally disgust many people with modern sensibilities, would it really be worth the risk of fighting a bloody war just so you can make sure the slaveowners are suitably punished?
Your end complaint doesn’t really make any sense. All those ramshackle shacks and sackcloth clothes should’ve been saved? Why? It wouldn’t have made any sense at the time. And in terms of objects, that’s not entirely true: some families have saved artefacts from that time.
My ancestors enslaved people in the islands (and probably were transporting them as well, since many of the men were mariners). No excuses for any of them. They all need to be called out and condemned for what they did. I’m glad they didn’t have the foresight to destroy all their records so today, we can do just that.
Imagine that while you're looking up your ancestry. You come across the information that your family was the largest and wealthiest slave holding dynasty in British history.
You know there are days I could use a little help here. Someone to milk the cows, do the dishes, gee, and vacuum the floors. I need to fix buildings. What do those ads say again?? 😉 😊
As an avid fan of the Find Your Roots tv show, I have seen that there is plently of evidence. But the saddest part is that most of the time a slave was hardly mentioned by name (only if they were bought): sometimes they guess this is the person they're looking for based on the age and gender in the document... sometimes not even a name can be found. It's scary to think about it.
Same thing over here in the Netherlands, where the last couple of years several cities (and our King) have started making excuses for their part in the slave trade.
People forget that slavery is common in all cultures throughout all of history until England and later America abolished it first. there are probably more people in slave now than ever due to the higher population.
Here’s a horrifying thought: I bet people put slaves as tax write offs. You know, because they would’ve been considered a business expense on a plantation.
Hmmmm kind of missing context, tho the rich owned slaves in the colonies slavery in Britain itself was illegal and the general population was widely unaware of it until a certain event which would bring about its downfall
I'm not sure it does. Compensation might have worked at the time of emancipation for the formerly enslaved. Now, centuries later, it's much more difficult. Descendents have moved around and mixed themselves in with other groups. Some have found good fortune and are on par with other citizens, others have not. Reparations would not only be complicated (do you have a "one drop" rule or a certain percentage? Is there an upper wealth or income limit or does everyone get it?), but risks creating an angry and jealous underclass who have similar economic circumstances but miss out on the criteria for one reason or another. The same argument could be applied now to descendants of slaveowners if compensation hadn't been given at the time. Probably the best way to avoid that is to use another metric, like poverty, rather than something tied to ancestry. Sure, it'll benefit some people who aren't descendants of slaves, but it'll likely benefit more people who are.
Money is both an incentive and an impediment. Slavery will exist as long as humans are willing to exploit others for profit. In a way we've never found the maturity to "be" without needing to "be better than." I greatly enjoy your posts. Thank you
Why would slave owners destroy evidence? Why would you think slave owners would be ashamed of themselves, just because slavery had been abolished? This is not at all like the Holocaust, because the nazis knew full well that what they did would be frowned upon if publicly known - which is why _they_ took steps to cover their tracks. The slave owners had done nothing wrong in their eyes, and the only thing they tried to hush down was any brutality perpetrated on their plantations. But especially for the European slave owners, their slaves were mainly in the colonies. Some house slaves in Europe, but these lived in conditions comparable to regular household servants and as such did not spark any outcry. And as for slaves in the colonies... the farther away something happens, the easier it is to turn a blind eye to it. Just like we turn a blind eye to the sweat shops, child labour and de facto slavery in the third world that provides us with clothes, electronics, toys, chocolate etc. etc. We _know_ these things still go on, we _know_ the conditions are horrendous, but... it's way over there, and the products are so nice, it's easy to conveniently forget about how these articles ended up in our hands. We really are in no position to judge the slave owners of the past for exploiting human beings the same way big corporations still do today, in all but name.
The very point of abolitionist movement was to make a REALLY BIG FUSS about slavery in colonies; and they perfectly succeeded. Heck, the whole idea that "slavery as an institution is morally horrible and pretty undefendable except of most daring situations that can lead to the positive law establishing it" was the reason freedom suits generally were successful in UK.
I don’t know about the tax write offs, but in the US some owners insured enslaved people and many companies still in existence today like New York Life, Aetna, and Manhattan Life had their wealth built in part off of this business.
its like why all the old armor in museums is high status stuff.
nobody saves the poor people stuff, and whatever metal parts they had probably got recycled into shovels or something
Or the aftermath of the Battle of Visby. The armor worn by the losing side was of such outdated quality that the bodies were just thrown into a mass grave without removing their equipment.
The Vasa Museum in Sweden has a ship full of poor people stuff. Because the bottom of Stockholm harbour is pretty inhospitable.
The stuff used by poor people tends to be cheaper, lower quality or more disposable in nature. The OP mentioned that slave stuff wasn't preserved. Slave huts in the caribbean were often made of very biodegradable material - often wood and palm thatch, whereas plantation owners houses woul ld have been stone buildings. The planters' houses are still standing - there are almost no preserved slave huts.
Very few people have much interest in saving shoddy hammers and cheap shovels because such things are ubiquitous, but high quality masterpieces of craftsmanship are another story. It has less to do with poor "people" and more with poor "quality."
Actually, the most common thing you find are garbage dumps. They are full of the everyday stuff (from both the rich and the poor) and it's invaluable info for archeologists and historians, but they are usually not pretty too look at for an ordinary viewer.
If they felt guilty of slavery, they wouldn't have held slaves in the first place. The fact they were forced to emancipate their slaves indicates that their moral position hadn't changed.
Some people thought that slavery was theoretically bad but still have slaves (Jefferson). So it wouldn't have shocked me that some people hide the fact they had slaves once it wasn't profitable. I wonder what records we'd have had if there wasn't compensation.
The Bible is quite clear that holding slaves is not immoral, so be careful what you define as moral or otherwise...
@@SteveInTokyo-b8n So the Bible is immoral?
@@markaxworthy2508 yeah. it endorses slavery, of course that makes it immoral
@@MoonRiver_118 ruclips.net/video/OFkeKKszXTw/видео.html
In Brazil we did destroy slavery records. For the precise reason you said on this video. Once slavery was abolished, in Brazil by the year 1888, the First Republic fearing they would have to compensate former slave owners allowed the destruction of the records of slave trade.
It was also one way of also avoiding compesate enslaved people since they could by First Republic law demand reparation. A true shame in our history I might say, since we lost how big the slave trade was in Brazil during XIX century. Also former enslaved and their family got no reparation.
We know the peculiar institution was huge in Brazil and the US because those two markets were the biggest consumers of enslaved people. We also know how big this was because the wealthiest plantation owner was, bigger the number of enslaved people since cotton, sugar cane and coffee required a huge number of hands tending the field.
Very interesting, thanks.
Thanks for the info! I was reading recently about how Confederates day is still celebrated in Brazil as US Southern slave owners moved there after the war. I was curious if that’s just a localized Anamoly or exaggerated or really is that bad.
@@Emelia39 As far as I am aware the Confederate Party is only celebrated in Americana, a small town in São Paulo. I don't think most Brazilians are even aware of Confederate immigration to Brazil, as there were only a thousand immigrants.
@@georgeomalley5638thanks- it can be hard to figure out how widely known things are in a country based off articles. People often forget that confederates didn’t just want to expand slavery to rest of the US but all of South America as well.
@@Emelia39Even if you don't count the slaves owned by the Mayan and Aztec, slavery was already in South America before Jamestown. A hundred years before Jamestown. The African slave traders were selling to the Spanish and Portuguese since the 1400s. Around 5% of African slaves went to North America, the remainder went to South America. The Confederates didn't go through to expand slavery, they went there because it was already there.
If you want a shocking realisation, take a look at when the final residues of the slave owner compensation payments were finally fulky paid off.
Since parts of the payments were made as government backed annuities the repaymebt scheme was still costing the British taxpayer money in 2015!
Pretty standard lol. The working class paying taxes, those taxes being used to pay for things the upper class want.
@@PumpkinHoard Indeed. Crazy to think that we had been paying back the descendants (or at least the financial descendants, the folks who bought up those annuities) for that long! It would be interesting to trace those annuities and see who actually profited from them over the years.
It was compensation to slaveowners that allowed the UK to end slavery sooner, and peacefully; the alternative would have taken decades longer. Here in the US, we did it later, spent more money per slave, killed hundreds of thousands, and even now face resentment from those who identify with the losing side.
@@TheFranchiseCA For sure, but the UK spent so much stopping slavery GLOBALLY that we only finished paying off the debts incurred by this in about 2014-2015. Most of the general public never knew about this, and those that do know mostly only know after the fact.
Had people known, I imagine there would have been widespread demands to stop paying taxpayer money to fabulously wealthy people as "compensation" for freeing their ancestors slaves. I mean, 2014 was a time of widespread austerity following the 2008 financial crisis, public services were getting cut left and right but we were apparently still throwing money at the ultra rich to compensate them for not being allowed to have slaves anymore.....
It may have been necessary in the first place, but after a certain point some of those debts should have just been written off. There was simply no practical or ethical justification for the money going to these people centuries later. It sure as hell isn't like they NEEDED the money.
@@TheFranchiseCA Slavery was such a huge and profitable industry in the US that this kind of compensation would have bankrupted the US. It's a large part of the reason Haiti is a failed state today--they were paying reparations to France for taking slaveowners' "property" for over a century.
Learned in accounting class- People aren't assets on your spread sheet (even if youre investing in training etc) but historically that's what slave owners did.
Also sinking a ship full of slaves on purpose to claim a loss on their taxes... yeesh
And insurance.
😮
Why would they do that? Even from their perspective that's a perfectly good product being thrown away (it felt gross to even write this)
@@amazinggrapes3045 Make a deal, sink the ship, spend the tax write off on cheaper/higher "quality" ""products""
The bastards probably even weren’t remorseful or ashamed. But Irritated and inconvenienced they couldn’t continue.
True, very true.
Of course not. There are parallels to the owners of animal livestock today who are irritated about all the 'irrational do-goodies' who demand animals might be kept with room to move in. They just diminish their profits.
Money will do that to you.
@@namastezen3300 The most dangerous grog of all!
@@charis6311 yeah but their livestock were human. Curiosity. When the Transatlantic Slave trade was taking heavy blow from UK slave owners decided to force uppon women on slavery to have more babies. That was because any person born from a enslaved woman was also a slave. So like livestock human were produced to gain more money for those in the upper crust.
I found a big metal box in an abandoned warehouse cellar marked 'Cavendish Files'. Sadly there were no files in it but, as you say, it was surprising how quick and easy it was to find out that they had been the files used to claim compensation for all the slaves Lord Cavendish had been forced to 'free'. The scale of the whole thing quickly became horrifically clear.
All slave owners were compensated by the government and the records still exist showing exactly what was paid and to whom. it would not be hard to find out. Probably held in the British Library or Public Records Office.
Another proof for the alleged Vlaams that they are Slavs. Once upon a time in Germany there were (still are) Slavic Polabanians Slovenste (Slovaks) also called Vendi. The Vendi also founded Venice (Venice) and operated in the North Sea in the same way as the Vikings. Well, their speech sounds much more like Dutch than Slovak. ruclips.net/video/gRYERyUlW2s/видео.html Then also Dutch(deutsch) is the same as Toth. Slovaks Germans Czechs Slovenes is one company. 😁
@@andrejuha164 Who cares?
@@andrejuha164 What’s that to do with the price of fish? 🤔
@@andrejuha164 Comment-Drift. Written under one video, entered under another
Years and years of watching Time Team informed me of this. History is most often informed by the wealthy 😐
A phrase that stuck with me - the history books were written by the winners.
Thanks for exposing this. The aristocracy in the UK rarely speak of it, but many ultra rich got that way because of the slave trade. I was horrified to hear a middle-aged British woman being asked recently what she would buy if given money, and she said, 'Slaves. Things were better in the old days.' People actually think like this? Apparently so.
😳😳😳😳😳😳
Omg that is awful.
what the fuuuuuuuuuck...
I fear there's more of this than we know. In the US, especially.
Anyone vastly wealthy and especially the aristocracy built their wealth - directly or indirectly - through terrible oppression and atrocities. It's depressing but predictable. So we should not be surprised when again and again throughout history the wealthy side with oppressors - funding coups, dictatorships, genocides and benefiting from slavery, apartheid, all kinds of crimes agains humanity.
Thank you for this. I've seen an increasing number of slavery deniers online who say stuff like "where are the ships?"
As a Dutch person i've seen the fecking records of the ships, because the records were saved.
Those ships were always fragile & lasted only a couple of voyages, same for the fishing ships, it's wood, it's only going to last so long...
Basically the only wooden ships we have right now are the ones that sank quickly enough to be buried by the sediment. Here we have the newest province of Flevoland, made out of polders, land that used to be sea & they keep finding former ships. But that's the "poor people" ships, they only found one British ocean sailing vessel, the rest is inland travel, small ships that carried things like bricks, grain, peat & excrement. I've seen the excavation of such a ship. I've also seen replicas of larger ocean going vessels that they've found. Been on the Batavia many times, but that was a ship bound for what is now Indonesia. Defragged History, a channel here on youtube has really good videos on that & other stories.
Anyway, here is a website where they use the records from loads of countries to let people see what happened:
slavevoyages.org
The question you are seeing is not "Where are the ships?" but "Who owned the ships?"
@@pennybright6386 no that's not the question I'm seeing.
@@LeafHuntress the evidence is there but some people don't want to look for it or believe it when they see it. I guess the truth isn't to everyone's taste.
@@pennybright6386 They’re both stupid. Companies that traded in slaves like the Royal African Company owned the ships, plus the government/the crown. The Portuguese crown and the British government, alongside private companies like the East India Company, exported the most slaves to the Americas according to records.
The basement level of the African American History Museum in Washington D.C. has a reconstructed slave cabin and other artifacts, such as the sorts of chains and cuffs they used to transport the slaves from Africa to Europe and the Americas. It's--quite eye-opening.
An ancient greek said that the powerful do what they want and the weak endure what they must. Still true
Melian Dialogue?
@@stanleyrogouski yes, exactly. Was trying to remember Thucydides, but only remembered it started with a "T"
*Laughs in guillotine*
I just visited the Museum of London Docklands today in Canary Wharf, which has most of the 2nd floor dedicated to the history of slavery in the British Empire. I learnt a lot from it and highly recommend a visit to anyone who has the chance.
In one of my sociology classes, I learned something that still haunts me about slavery. It was so obvious yet I would have never thought of it myself. Slave owners raped their female slaves not just because they're perverts, but also to MAKE MORE SLAVES. The childern born to slave women would be their slaves too so that was a way for them to have free labour for the future basically.
@whatever96 Perfectly obvious when you look at skin colour in present day African Americans. You don't lose skin pigmentation over just a few hundred years.
Plantation owners also forced certain male slaves to "breed" with certain female slaves to increase certain good traits and genetics in the babies, to strengthen the "herd", so to speak, just like cattle.
That's gross on so many levels because if you even spend a minute thinking about it, they're basically saying "Yay, my children are my slaves."
Weird that wp were saying Africans were animals and subhuman yet having sex with them
Yeah, obviously. It’s why slavery was mother-to-child and why the Black part of my family has English DNA. The owners profited handsomely from rape.
Your material is always welcome in my feed! Educational and entertaining. Just brilliant.
This is why, when working in Genealogy, it is a team effort. The descendants of Slave Owners have the potential to assist the descendants of slaves track their family through these records to at least discover the fragments of their past that were swallowed by history.
Well, in many cases they share ancestors, so cooperation would be the right thing to do.
@@HANNEKEHartkoorn-c1x completely! And the one has more resources available than the other. In our world we believe EVERYONE is entitled to a history. It may not be everything we would like it to be, but it is ours.
We would think "the gaul of the slave owners to do that," that's not the case.a really good thing to cover. In the US, we hear more about our own issues with slavery than other countries. Although some here in America would love to cover the wound of slavery and racism up.
Gall = Bile, as in the Gall Bladder, used to express confident arrogance
Gaul = ancient French person, possibly confidently arrogant but not part of this saying
Americans in 1900: Slavery was good. The Civil War was a tragic conflict of brother vs. brother.
Americans in 1980: Lincoln and the Republicans freed the slaves and ended the moral abomination of the slave power.
Americans in 2020: The 1619 Project demonstrates that the British were actually the good guys. The Somerset decision declared slavery illegal in 1770. King George was just about to free the slaves in North America when a band of slaveowners organized a "revolution" and broke away from the mother country.
British aristocrats in 1850: Here's a family portrait with all 172 of our slaves. We were a little short-handed that year.
Slavery is literally thousands of years old and practiced globally. You mean to say the Transatlantic Slave Trade.
Maybe it's just a U.S. thing but we 🇨🇦 hear about our slavery history, and Britain's, Spain, and Portugal...even the slavery that still exists worldwide. The part that galls me is that compensation was given to the slave owners and not the enslaved (in U.K and U.S). Shameful. Reparations need to be made.
@@wolverineeagle It's pretty obvious what was meant. There are lots of very clear context indicators.
We've preserved receipts for slaves in my family history archive. They stay there in the pages as a profound marker of remembrance and as a prompt for that sort of shame all humble people should embrace from time-to-time.
Love your channel, you're an excellent teacher of history. You know that already.
@@valeforedark So, what was wrong about today's post?
@@valeforedark Please explain, because I like how She teaches that history is not a definite account, she quotes from historical documents be they newspapers, church documents etc.
I think she tries hard to paint a picture of what it was really like for people to live in times she portrays.
I'm glad they didn't destroy the evidence. People need to know the facts of history, the good and the bad
yah, if you want a depressing but informative read, check out the Thistlewood Diaries. NOT for the faint of heart.
Imagine the Insights if poor peoples stuff got saved 😮
you ever see a hoarder... what you are proposing is hoarding... no one wants 4000 used Starbucks cups.
@@nunyanunya4147 You and me, for sure, we don't care for it... But the archeologists many, many years from now probably will
You have to keep the receipts if you want compo. Ironically, there may have been fewer slaves than thought, since exaggerating the numbers got you more money.
I once attended a book unveiling of the impact of the transatlantic slave trade upon European cities. This happened at William & Mary University which is next to Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. The author’s expressed mild surprise at the amount & availability of the records and the sheer amount of wealth generated, over considerable time, by the Slave Trade. The authors were surprised at the number of nations who took part in the Slave trade.
Many African nations still do, and many were only stopped when the "west" made it difficult for it to continue.
It explains all the "developed" countries with ports to the ocean. Most of the ones that didn't have a direct route to it are considered second class by others today, like Eastern Europe, and now we know why.
@@SteveInTokyo-b8n Whataboutery. Modern slavery is no where near the same scale as the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the volume of people trafficked doesn’t compare. The European powers and their colonies did so on an industrial scale like never before, because they treated chattel slavery like a capitalist enterprise. No other slave economy had the organisation or technology to do so prior to this.
Also, the number of people enslaved by West African states increased exponentially after contact with Europeans due to the sheer demand. The European powers turned those states into slave economies so of course the wealthy leaders of those states weren’t going to take kindly to losing their income. Kinda like the Western slaveholders who received compensation.
@@zarinaromanets7290 Eastern Europe had no problems sending “Slavs” to the big markets like Constantinople. Port cities are more efficient for shipping anything, whether bulk grains like Russia and Ukraine did until the war, or spices once the route was opened up by the Portuguese.
@@TrueEnglishMan01 Modern slavery is about as big now as it was in the 1700s or early 1800s, mainly because we have been ignoring it, having ended it in Europe and the USA and Brazil. And because the population has increased.
What many do not realise is that up until very recently we were still paying taxes to pay off the loans taken out to end slavery. When you add in the expenses of over a hundred years suppressing slavery you are looking at costs that only come second to waging a world war. So generations of Britains have payed to ensure the rich did not loose out.
Any idea of how much money insurance companies such as Loyd s of London made from the slave trade?🤔
Anyone doing research in the Islamic world? Should be easy since many of them abolished slavery much more recently, Saudi Arabia in 1962.
The compensation may fee icky today, but it brought abolition quicker and that is good. If the slaves freedom wasnt purchased via the government being forced by common British people to set them free, the slave owners would have done what they did in USA and Brazil and just started a civil war.
They were shameless sure, but its better the slaves were paid for their freedom sooner rather than spend longer in slavery so in 200 years time we could pretend to take a high horse about it
The slaves themselves were paid ZERO.
Prime Minister Gladstone paid off his father for the loss of his slaves, then inherited the money when the old man died. Gladstone wasn't the most fanatical imperialist but how much of that money the British aristocracy was given for the loss of their slaves just got channeled in late 19th Century imperialism and new forms of oppression?
@@brklynusa yeah and? Would you rather they have been enslaved for longer as happened in places that didnt buy their freedom?
As i said it feels icky to us today, but the alternate option was longer slavery as bared out in other countries. Youre not arguing the slaves should have been enslaved right up until the public managed to directly debit the slaves with money are you?
@@Rynewulf and they should have been compensated. Why shouldn't they have?
@@brklynusa that would have been nice, but freedom is always the priority whenever freeing people who are kidnapped and/or enslaved in general. Im not well read enough to know what the Abolitionists of the time thought about compensation, it probably would have been a novel idea. Welfare didnt exist in any form. Public compensation in courts virtually didnt exist.
Im not trying to be rude, but it feels like taking the high horse when in reality even this basic Abolition was remarkable and almost unique (though thankfully most slave states eventually stopped)
Modern workforce management, the practice of maximizing the productivity of a workforce, has deep roots in the management of enslaved people. People relying on enslaved labour often kept excellent records of the productivity of their labour, and worked hard to try to see what worked to maximize profits.
... So what?
Treatment of hypothermia has deep roots in antisemitism.
... So what?
@@Squiglypig it was the japanese who did most of the research on that
@@Squiglypigbecause maintaining a class system predicated on extreme haves and have-nots is pretty fucked?
@@Squiglypig It’s one of the ways and reasons for which slavers wrote down a lot of information about their slaves, and the video was about the records that slavers left behind of what they did.
You're right the so called modern management system is just dressed up slavery, just now it includes everybody in the States and much of the world
Greetings from across the pond
Here in Bristol Rhode Island is a tavern with manacles in the brick wall ( used for selling slaves )
Which tavern? I haven't been to Bristol in years, but I'm interested.
I really need to see Rhode Island. There's a great book - Travels With George, that does a terrific treatment on Washington's relationship with slave ownership, and it has a section on how RI, especially Providence, grew rich on the slave trade.
@@Brasswatchman Dewolfe
@@theemporersnewclothes I'll have to remember that, if just for a bit of gallows history. Thanks.
@@kerryjlynch1 Ironic if true. Given that Providence was founded on principles of tolerance... even if it didn't always quite work out that way...
Reparations were okay and easy to do… for the slave owners…
They did keep records for themselves, which I think is how so much information got lost. Since they kept records for themselves, the records called the enslaved people what the plantation owners wanted to call them, not the indigenous African names they had for themselves so there are massive amounts of people alive now who can only find the enslaved names of their family ancestors if they’re lucky and no one is able to trace their actual family name. It’s heartbreaking.
Don't forget that they were slaves because their people lost a war in Africa against other Africans. The ones who wanted their names erased were other black people, since what better victory than to eliminate your opponent from history altogether?
@@Squiglypig Your claim: "the ones who wanted their names erased were other black people", presupposes that every African alive must have really cared about something as specific as "[Eliminating their] opponents from history altogether". This could be charitably referred to as 'population-level armchair psychology'.
It's also provably false: there are records from ships where the slaves' original African names are recorded, before they were transported and sold to their eventual owners in Europe.
I was under the impression that this is part of what informs African American culture, the fact that their family names and cultural heritage were destroyed by slave owners, sometimes intentionally, is the reason why they actively do a lot of the defining for themselves. I can't even begin to imagine what it must've been like, being removed from one's roots like that. Slavery is one of humanity's greatest shames.
@@DeinosDinos it is, you were correct to assume that. That's why "Black" is a racial & cultural identity on its own in the US, separate from that of free Africans who immigrated to the country in recent years.
Once arrived at destination people where just numbered and written where the boat came from . No names were recorded. I know that because I am a 5th generation and I cannot find anything
It's not surprising people felt this way when slavery was the norm, not only in the anglo-american world, but other cultures as well. Among the US Marines first deployments were to dissaude Barbary coast slavers from taking Americans as slaves. When the British Empire outlawed slavery in the 1830s it was a progressive anomoly, not a long overdue acceptance of a taken for granted norm. Only 30 years later, the Americans came to terms with slavery at the cost of a devastating civil war. Whether it be child labour on cocao plantations, forced labour on fishing boats, or human trafficking, slavery still exists today.
> When the British Empire outlawed slavery in the 1830s it was a progressive anomoly, not a long overdue acceptance of a taken for granted norm.
Except that, say, Russian Empire abolished slavery (serfdom was another matter!) in 1723, Qing Empire abolished slavery in 1730, England as a part of British Empire forbade slavery in 1772, Scotland (as a part of British Empire) forbade slavery in 1778 (both of them were court decisions that slavery just don't exist in this jurisdictions, as no law _allows_ it), France abolished slavery in 1794 (and then reinstituted by Napoleon, though), most colonial rebellions included ban on slavery as part of their platform (like Haiti in 1804, Chile in 1812 or Mexico in 1813). Heck, _Hawaii_, as independent kingdom, abolished slavery before UK and USA.
It absolutely was a long overdue legal acceptance of a taken for granted norm that "slavery is actually immoral and harmful to a person taken as a slave".
@@khaerinaenno That still excludes whole continents and large parts of others where slavery was the norm. No often mentioned is the internal african slave trade nor the white slave trade of the middle east.
@@larryclemens1850
> No often mentioned is the internal african slave trade nor the white slave trade of the middle east.
First of all, are we in good faith assuming that Morocco, Ashanti, Dagomey or even Ottomans were norm definers for London, New York, St. Petersburg or Vienna?
Secondly, it's mentioned all the time; like, in this comment section only I saw it mentioned at least couple of times. What IS not mentioned often that UK _and US_ pressured this governments to stop slavery and slave trade claiming that it's abhorrent and amoral practice that is against all the natural laws of the people which leads to horrible suffering (which is true). Which, again, British (and American) abolitionists of the era pointed at and claimed that no one would assume that this calls are done in a good faith when UK and US profits immensly from slavery. Because it's kinda goes against the general narrative "well, everyone believed that it's ok, and just magically decided to abolish slavery in 1834, it was just sudden unexplained anomaly".
To quote an influential and wildly circulated pamphlet on the topic: "By making it felony for British subjects to be concerned in that inhuman traffic, England has only transferred her share of it to other countries. She has, indeed, by negotiation and remonstrance, endeavoured to persuade them to follow her example. But has she succeeded? How should she while there is so little consistency in her conduct? Who will listen to her pathetic declamations on the injustice and cruelty of the Slave Trade -whilst she rivets the chains upon her own slaves, and subjects them to all the injustice and cruelty which she so eloquently deplores, when her own interest is no longer at stake? Before we can have any rational hope of prevailing on our guilty neighbours to abandon this atrocious commerce - to relinquish the gain of oppression, - the wealth obtained by rapine and violence, - by the deep groans, the bitter anguish of our unoffending fellow creatures; - we must purge ourselves from these pollutions; - we must break the iron yoke from off the neck of our own slaves,-and let the wretched captives in our own islands go free."
That was published in 1824, eleven years before abolishing the slavery in British colonies.
@@khaerinaenno As much as a historical debate is informative, it serves to distract from our own responcibility for contemporary enslavement whether that be child enslavement on cocao plantations, child "artisnal" lithium miners, kidnapped labouers on fishing trawlers, forced labour in reeducation camps, Indian citizens tricked into fighting for the russians on the front lines, or uniquely modern, prisoners - mostly falun gong practioners - being executed to supply organ transplants on demand in communist china. Cheap chocolate bars, fish, clothes, batteries and other products means we all probably benefit from slavery in its modern forms.
@@larryclemens1850
No, it's not. You totally can discuss both.
Especially when people using historical arguements to actually deflect the problems of slavery to "well, it's not like slavery is universally bad, it's more or less depends on what people thought of the time; now we believe that it's bad, but back then people believed that it's ok".
No, they didn't. People kinda believed that slavery, in general, isn't exactly a good thing - philosophically speaking, of course, they always believed it's bad when applied to them - for a long, long, long time.
it still amazes me that slavery was once fairly commonplace... i wonder if there are any practices we currently do that will go the way of slavery in future.
It amazes me that you think it is no more. Check in modern African slavery (yes the same people who originally sold their own people to Europeans, lest we forget)...
Besides the slavery still going on today? I'm betting industrial animal farming. The only reason people widely accept that is because they don't have to see the horrors of it personally.
If we're being hopeful, I'd also say the marketisation of the essentials of life. Stuff like food, water, housing, healthcare, education...We're already pretty close to abolition on the last two in some places.
Slavery is still going on, even where you live.
As the world has more people than ever, there's assumed to be more slave than ever. In the west these are mainly people pressed to do domestic work or in brothels, but in the rest of the world agricultural slavery is the most common.(hence Tony Chocolony's, fair trade logo etc.)
Anyway, besides that fact, there's Peter Singer, an Australian philosopher that has pondered on that question. His book "The life that you can save" is free to read, either as an e-book or you can listen to a podcast with the audio version.
Q: what do you call wealthy, well respected people who made their family fortunes years earlier doing extremely evil things? A : wealthy, well respected people .
During the American Revolution, the majority of British troops were stationed on the island colonies (Jamaica) to protect their slaveholdings. There’s been an unfortunate myth (due to the British army promising freedom to American slaves who served in their army-though its seldom mentioned how badly they were treated or that their “owners” were compensated) that Britain was more moderate on slavery, when it was not the case.
When the French entered the fray in 1778, their main focus was annexation of British-held possessions in the Caribbean. Given that the economy of Jamaica alone was larger than all 13 American colonies put together, this caused a huge distortion in the distribution of British forces. The main contribution by the French to American independence was distraction rather than direct action: from the British perspective, from that point onwards, the Americans became a side-show in the war they had started.
In America, some places slaves were kept have been "found" and turned into museums. Or, if you were a wealthy slave owner, "preserved" (like Thomas Jefferson's place) as part of th owners history.
And, if you wait long enough, historians rewrite your history to make it look like you weren't slaves (Look at Egypt)
@jonathanwessner3456 Yes, you SHOULD look at Egypt. The notion that slaves built the pyramids is a Hollywood concept with no basis in fact. It was Hollywood that rewrote the history. Proper archaeologists and historians are putting it right.
Not quite. Egypt had slaves, tons of them, its just that they had weird ideas about religious purity and figured that temples and pyramids were too important to be built by slaves, who they veiwed as unclean.
But "not as bad as you could have been" has never been acceptable moral standards.
@@TheAussieBluethe true issue is that Egypt treated slaves differently than "Modern" slavery. They were valued, and treated similar to employees. In many cases. I mean, Joseph of the many colored coat was basically an official in Egypt, and a slave
@@jonathanwessner3456 try "Trans Atlantic." Slavery existed further east as well, and it was pretty much the same situation. A real life case for example would be Malik Ambar, an enslaved soldier from Africa who eventually ended up becoming a king in India.
@@jonathanwessner3456There's no evidence of the Jews being enslaved in Egypt to any degree as it's currently discussed. Maybe a smaller group whose story grew over time, but they were not kept by the thousands for multiple generations. There are no records in Egypt of this and they'd have written it down for keeps. PS: This means Moses didn't exist. Sorry not sorry.
The costs for reimbursing the slave owners was so high, that it was only paid off in 2015.
Every single British taxpayer from abolition, till 9 years ago helped pay.
But... It was a necessary (if very sour tasting) evil.
Without reimbursement the abolition of slavery within the Empire (which started a domino effect first in Europe then around the world) would have taken years or maybe decades longer to achieve, and that's If it happened at all!
Very limited viewpoint. If you go back further then the relative debt owed the UK by earlier slavedealers is way higher. Think.
@alexthomson3001 Except that other countries abolished slavery before Britain did.
@@Poliss95only 1 and it did it a few months before and did nothing about it.
@@Poliss95 Haiti was a society of former slaves who rebelled, so their early laws to make it illegal were to be expected, yet had zero effect beyond their borders.
Denmark banned the Import of further slaves to it's colonies, but didn't make slavery itself illegal. The slaves already in their colonies remained slaves.
Aside from those earlier pieces of legislation... which other nations (that practiced slavery) prior to Britain banning slavery (even if the effect was solely within their own borders) and operating directly against the Trans Atlantic slave trade, were you thinking of?
@@SteveInTokyo-b8n it Is limited, but a broader overview would be an essay. The rich and powerful had in many cases become such as a result of plantations that used slaves, or directly from the transport and sale of slaves. Wealth (and influence) growing generation by generation.
The opposition these folk Could have applied (to retain such profitable revenue streams indefinitely) would have mired parliament in deadlock... had they felt they would financially lose out, and for some, it would have crippled them.
The decision to go down the route of compensation, removed The huge barrier to abolition.
The endless debates and lobbying from each side, silenced by something So huge, so staggeringly costly, that few had considered such a thing could be done, and is an absolute testament to those abolitionists who fought so hard.
Humans: absolutely wonderful creatures.
It would be interesting if you did a video on the way Gladstone helped pay his father an enormous amount of compensation for his slaves.
Slavery was never abolished. It was criminalised.
0:55 Oof. The irony of that name is horrible.
It was a legal business, probably 20,000 years old. Then outlawed. Inventing shame came later.
None of this surprises me. I know full well that at the time slavery was abolished, people had a lot of morals that are just rotten by today's standards. It never would have occurred to me that any of the slave owners would have been ashamed, but rather that they would have been angry that the slaves had been emancipated. I think Britain's solution to compensate the slave owners was a very good one for the time. Certainly better than what happened in the USA, where in order for slaves to be freed, first unilateral secession had to be equated with treason, then the bloodiest war in American history had to be fought, a war that divides American society to this day.
> Certainly better than what happened in the USA, where in order for slaves to be freed, first unilateral secession had to be equated with treason
Fair is fair; unilateral secession wasn't equated with treason. Waging war against United States, though, was (and still is) a Constitutional definition of it.
Still, it's not like no one offered Southern slaveowners this solution, even during Civil War itself. They refused.
@@khaerinaennoIt was equated with treason. Lincoln told the newly-independent South that they wouldn't be attacked but that they had to give over "US government property", I.E. ex-US Army (now Confederate Army) forts to the US. Of course the South would not do such a thing, because that would have been tantamount to negating the validity of their own secession and independence. Davis offered to negotiate. Lincoln's answer was "I don't negotiate with traitors". So of course the war came. It started when US troops wouldn't leave Fort Sumter. Of course the South wasn't going to let what they now considered a foreign army occupy their territory. Had the US troops vacated Fort Sumter, the South wouldn't have fired.
As for your comment about the North offering to pay the South for freeing slaves, this is the first time I hear this. I'll have to look into that one. But even if that was so, there was more at stake during the American Civil War than just slavery. The South wanted a different approach to government than the North did. So I'm not surprised if they refused such offers - they were fighting for more than just the right to keep slaves.
@@erracht
> Had the US troops vacated Fort Sumter, the South wouldn't have fired.
Well, South started to attack federal installations - arsenals, mostly, which didn't belong to states, even if they were surrounded by state territory (in case you don't know, federal bases and arsenals, including Fort Sumter, exist more or less on the same grounds that DC). I mean, naturally, if South is unilaterally seceded, everything they gave away to federal government is belonging to federal government.
Essentially, Fort Sumter wasn't "their territory", if they didn't believe they're US anymore. If they believed that secession was in effect, shooting at Fort Sumter was an act of war against United States. And, again, that's the definition of treason, given in US Constitution.
> As for your comment about the North offering to pay the South for freeing slaves, this is the first time I hear this.
To start with, look into Delaware buyout plan.
> The South wanted a different approach to government than the North did.
The principal differences between approaches to government, considering Constitutions of US and Confederation, were that, first, Confederation forbade central government to use revenue from one state to improve the infrastructure of another state, second, the ban of promoting any industry by central government (the fervent desire of slaveowners, but generally, a question of taxation policy in US; like, for years US had tariff policy like this before Civil War), and third, that the right to hold African slaves. All three most daring encroaches onto sovereign power of US Constitution (Supremacy Clause, Commerce Clause, and a Necessary and Proper Clause) are in Southern Constitution.
I really, really don't think that South decided to secede to prevent federal center to improve Boston Harbor with federal tariffs. At least, that's not what they said back then.
> they were fighting for more than just the right to keep slaves.
Having all your slaves being bought out by government kinda is opposite to the idea of keeping slaves.
@@khaerinaenno OK, first of all, that's not how secession works. When you secede, you take EVERYTHING. Government property moves with the territory. When the CSA was formed, a new CSA govermnent was formed with it, and therefore whatever the US Government originally owned on Confederate territory ceased to belong to it. The former US property on its territory naturally was partitioned and became CS government territory. That's NATURALLY how independence works. It's not like the Thirteen Colonies let the British government keep forts of the British Army when they declared independence (or ANY OTHER COUNTRY that ever unilaterally seceded from another). They seceded, and formed their own goverment, so the US Constitution would logically have been deemed to have ceased to have effect there.
Secondly, I looked into your Delaware buyout plan. Interesting - but Delaware is not a Southern state. It was a slave state that remained loyal to the Union, and they rejected the plan. Do you know of any example where a buyout was offered to a Southern state, I.E., one that actually was in the CSA?
I happen to think Lincoln should have let the South secede and that there should have been no Civil War. I don't think the Union should have been preserved by force. I think if Lincoln's primary aim was to emancipate the slaves, it would have been more constructive to let the South secede but to have the 13th Amendment passed back in 1861, in the North. Then slavery would have been unconstitutional where it remained in the North (as in Delaware, there were still a few parts of the Union where slavery remained legal), and if any Southern state wished to return to the Union, they would have been forced to free their slaves as a condition of being readmitted.
@@erracht
> that's not how secession works
First of all, that's not how US federal territory works. US didn't "own Fort Sumter on state territory"; when US acquired this land from the state, it stopped to be land of the state. But secondly, yeah, when you secede, you take what you can - and fight an independence war, if mother country don't want to let you leave. And yeah, it's treason.
The thing is, I do agree that, naturally, rebels would take stuff. They're rebels, they ignore the laws, that kinda gets with a job. But the pretense that CSA somehow was legal and totally not a treason is laughable with this pretense. Legally speaking, confederates had as much claim on Fort Sumter as they had on DC or western territories.
> Do you know of any example where a buyout was offered to a Southern state, I.E., one that actually was in the CSA?
Not in a terms of legal acts, no. There was legislative attempts of doing so in some other non-CSA states (Missouri and Maryland), and there was a success of passing such an act for DC (because in DC federals could just enact it without asking locals). There was also general campaigning of Lincoln of doing so.
> I happen to think Lincoln should have let the South secede and that there should have been no Civil War
Yes, that's pretty obvious that you happen to think this.
> I don't think the Union should have been preserved by force.
I think that maybe Union shouldn't have been establiished by force, or as an instrument of tyranny to begin with.
Still, it's not a question of legality now; it's a question of ethics and morals. Legally speaking, under terms of US Constitution, Southerners were traitors. You can argue that, maybe, they should've been allowed to be trairors (and slavers), but it's the best point people have here.
> I think if Lincoln's primary aim was to emancipate the slaves, it would have been more constructive to let the South secede but to have the 13th Amendment passed back in 1861
No, if his aim was to emancipate the slaves in the very beginning (which is arguable!), it wouldn't be constructive.
It's not just "it's poor people's stuff, nobody thinks to save it", it's also the "Wear it out, then reuse what you can" mentality that is common among poor people, even today.
It's part of why we had things like patchwork quilting - once a garment can no longer be repaired, or resized to fit one of the kids, or repurposed into another clothing item, it gets used in a quilt.
It's really only in the last few decades that things have become truly disposable, and people are actually losing those "repurposing" skills.
Why would anybody think that they would destroy their ledgers I mean rich and powerful people STILL TO THIS DAY look down on people that are less fortunate than them and sometimes see them as absolute garbage... And on top of that a lot of wealthy people treat their actual staff like garbage and a lot of business owners still treat their employees like garbage and they feel proud that they have the ability to do that because of the power that they have I mean honestly people haven't changed very much since then
important to mention that just because slavery was abolished it didn't mean they thought of black people as equals.
I appreciate your efforts. You are very knowledgeable, animated, entertaining and insightful; but this particular video is the most valuable to me, a lot of impact (impactful?) Thank you for all your efforts; the many years of schooling, perseverance, uncertainty, etc for you to deliver this accurate account of a dark period of human history. All the best regards to you 🙏
"Because that's poor peoples' stuff and nobody thinks to save it".
We talk a lot about historical preservation of houses here (in Auckland) and what people mean, exclusively, is a particular style of colonial villa. Now, I hate the standard house you get round here... whenever it's overcast (which is often), they just contribute to a really depressing landscape. But from a strictly historical point of view, some of these properties need preserving, too. We don't even extend it to the Art Deco houses. Always and only villas.
Obviously the purpose of historical preservation of houses is always actually #NIMBYism, which everyone knows (and so probably explains why they don't even bother pretending that they're actually motivated by historical preservation via a few "we want these properties to be preserved for historical reasons, we're genuinely about the history" examples).
0:21 Gee...I wonder why?.......
Wealthy light skin folk have feared the repercussions of their actions since the first slaves escaped their bondage.
Really? What about the wealthy dark skinned folk who did the enslaving and selling? Do you think they have feared the repercussions of their actions as well?
@@cplcabs Yes
@TheHardys01 they didn't. They carried on enslaving and selling to the Arabs as they had been for centuries. The British tried to stop them and in the main did through actions, but unfortunately, not completely.
@@TheHardys01well, seems youtube are deleting my comments even though they do not violate any of their policies.
So anyway, no, the dark skinned folk who did the actual enslaving did not fear repercussions for their actions, even when the British took action against them to stop their evil trade.
@@cplcabsAlso, not as many and done a lot more as "please, face-eating leopard, don't eat my face" than actual profitable occupation. Eventually, the leopards pounced.
It was legal.. not as many people had a problem with it as we like to think. That's why historical context is important. Slavery was.. not now, WAS... perfectly OK. Then it became not OK and that's that.
It wasn’t really ok at the time. That’s why abolition existed
"Did slave owners destroy evidence?" I haven't watched the video yet but I'm going to make a wild guess and say, "Yes." Let's see if I am right.
EDIT: No, got that wrong. Didn't think they'd be quite so blatant about it. Thought they might have a scintilla of a conscience.
Well, the rest of the world kept on on slaving!
It would be interesting to also know, how did those slave traders got the slaves in the first place.
Did they chase and catch them in Africa?
Or did they buy them from other african slave traders (as it still happens today)?
For the most part, the latter. Many west African kingdoms at the time were slave economies, and were happy to sell slaves to Europeans for manufactured goods like firearms. In the long run it wasn't really beneficial for them since they ended up raiding and fighting each other just to capture more slaves to sell.
I wonder how was life right after slavery ended. How sudden of a change it was? How did society adapt to that? What were the "mishaps"?
Sharecropping AKA Slavery by another route.
I find it difficult to condem people from the past with our current values, because in their time it was (generally) accepted and not considered as morally wrong (this changed a lot towards the end of slavery)
It would be the same as future people condemning us for using social media because “it’s toxic and encourages antisocial attitudes “ (or what ever reason they decide social media is bad)
For us now, this is our society and this is what is considered normal and acceptable.
In the future people may not consider some of the things we do the same way.
We can absolutely point out the “bad” things that people have done and the effects that it had on our society.
Being aware of our past helps us to not make the same mistakes
> because in their time it was (generally) accepted and not considered as morally wrong (this changed a lot towards the end of slavery)
Define "their time" please.
Because we can argue that it was (generally) accepted in 1700; but it definitely not generally accepted in UK in 1833, which is a time spoken of here ("once slavery was abolished").
@@khaerinaenno you even quoted the part where I said that attitudes changed a lot towards the end of slavery
@@michaelold6695
Yes. And asked when was "their time" for slaveowners of 1833, who are the people being condemned here.
@@khaerinaenno their time is the time that they lived in.
Do I need to explain to you how, in each year leading up to and after the abolishment of slavery , how much people’s attitudes change, how a society isn’t a monolith and people in different stratas of society had different attitudes and opinions on the issue?
You are asking about a specific time where slavery went from being legal to illegal and the people involved in that trade transitioning away from the slave trade.
I am not trying to justify their position or their actions.
@@michaelold6695
> You are asking about a specific time where slavery went from being legal to illegal and the people involved in that trade transitioning away from the slave trade.
What I'm asking is this - at which point it's starting to be ok to condemn slavers?
Rich people of course have never felt shame, since they created it
Don’t I know it that’s how you were always treated when you are not in the 1% league
One of the best educational shorts evee
Hiding slavery is more of a now thing : there's this USA show where celebrities find out about their ancestry and apparently Ben Affleck found out his ancestors were slave owners and asked the show to never mention it. Meamwhile another celebrity I didn't know myself apparently a director or something took it wholesale and was filmed saying "wow my ancestors were asshole". Meanwhile LeVar Burton who was a host for a kids show about reading learned that in his fathers' family there was someone who made it his calling, along with his wife, to make is African American community literate by giving little black kids classes and later founding a school in this heavily segregated barely out of slavery for a generation society. And all of that was apparently hard to find because History is made by people who are rich. They're the ones who can take pictures, they're the ones who can have nice clothes that stand the test of time, they're the ones that get attention from "the media" (whatever it meant in that era)...
That's really problematic if they agreed to hide it and still aired the episode with the rest of his ancestors.
I never understand this. Statistically, at least some of my ancestors must have been evil, maybe even most of them. I'm ok with that, it doesn't make *me* a bad person.
I have German friends, not all of their ancestors were in the Resistance, does that somehow make them, today, bad people because their ancestors were? No!
I saw the second one. I don't remember who it was, but they went to town about it. It was lovely. Reba McIntyre had to face a similar issue on one of those shows as well. I want to see LeVar's episode in part because of his reaction to finding out he has a white ancestor who fought for the Confederacy. I want to see what he really said and did, not what second-hand Internet jockeys told me. Finding out his father's family was also big on education is a short I did see, and he was rightfully in tears.
“Did slave owners feel guilt about slavery?”
Actual slaver owners: *Use a child slave as a human coffee table “mhm, capital! 👌🏻🎩☕️”
First, Aristotle declared that family-owned slaves were members of the family, and for those who could not afford slaves, that place would be taken by their domesticated animals. Thus, of course the house slaves would be in their owners’ family portraits.
Second, of course the slaves’ things were not kept as the slaves’ property, because they weren’t. And the slaves wouldn’t bother keeping their junk that the Masters gave for their use; they might buy and keep replacements.
Slavery was ended by force in the USA, so the slave records were kept with the other stock breeding and purchasing records.
I would come up with a nasty line about the British freeing their slaves by paying the masters but my state did the same thing, as opposed to in New England, where they were immediately freed unless too old. In any case, most of my family came from the Germanies around 1848, and settled in the North, where they could not participate in the Peculiar Institution.
Why are you surprised? 🙄 You invest your time and money in life into things, you're not just going to want to throw it away. That goes with anything. You might be confused, but emotional bonds can be formed.
Well damn, no goddamned shame at all huh?😲
In the US, we're often sold an image of a dozen enslaved people or so, working on a modest plantation. Slavery scaled MUCH larger woth people with enough slaves running MEGA plantations. There was money to be made across all kinds of agricultural products. It was the cotton farming that gets the most attention as it was the big boom in profiting before the civil war.
For all those saying that all the slaveowners should have gone bankrupt, do you think they would have just rolled over and done so peacefully? They would have fought tooth and nail to keep their slaves. The choice to compensate was pragmatic above anything else, Britain could have ended up fighting a far more expensive civil war within its own empire (including some African colonies because the native population also made money from the slave trade). While it may morally disgust many people with modern sensibilities, would it really be worth the risk of fighting a bloody war just so you can make sure the slaveowners are suitably punished?
All I can say about this topic is the following....I don't f**king care what they did or didn't delete. Bon voyage.
Your end complaint doesn’t really make any sense.
All those ramshackle shacks and sackcloth clothes should’ve been saved? Why? It wouldn’t have made any sense at the time.
And in terms of objects, that’s not entirely true: some families have saved artefacts from that time.
My ancestors enslaved people in the islands (and probably were transporting them as well, since many of the men were mariners).
No excuses for any of them. They all need to be called out and condemned for what they did. I’m glad they didn’t have the foresight to destroy all their records so today, we can do just that.
You are quite the subversive. “In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act”.
-Some guy called Eric, then later George .
Imagine that while you're looking up your ancestry. You come across the information that your family was the largest and wealthiest slave holding dynasty in British history.
You know there are days I could use a little help here. Someone to milk the cows, do the dishes, gee, and vacuum the floors. I need to fix buildings. What do those ads say again?? 😉 😊
As an avid fan of the Find Your Roots tv show, I have seen that there is plently of evidence. But the saddest part is that most of the time a slave was hardly mentioned by name (only if they were bought): sometimes they guess this is the person they're looking for based on the age and gender in the document... sometimes not even a name can be found. It's scary to think about it.
LMAO just because something is made illegal doesn't mean people gain morals and or empathy.
Some of the same families are still powerful and happy to reintroduce slavery in all but name, and through economic means. 🇬🇧
Why would they be ashamed? They thought it was ok before, and it's not like they were being punished for it.
Same thing over here in the Netherlands, where the last couple of years several cities (and our King) have started making excuses for their part in the slave trade.
The descendants who profited should be tracked down and publicly held accountable.
People forget that slavery is common in all cultures throughout all of history until England and later America abolished it first. there are probably more people in slave now than ever due to the higher population.
I dont know why this is so shocking. Slavery is as old as humanity. And yes slaves represented an investment.
I think they just thought they were like really cool friends.
Any records of the whites enslaved by Africa?
It's stuff that belonged to poors, so it wasn't like it was nice.
They were expecting to be compensated at some point, that's why they kept their receipts.
A comment for the algorithm.
Here’s a horrifying thought:
I bet people put slaves as tax write offs. You know, because they would’ve been considered a business expense on a plantation.
Tax write offs didn’t exist back then.
Thanks for the video and sharing your work.
Hmmmm kind of missing context, tho the rich owned slaves in the colonies slavery in Britain itself was illegal and the general population was widely unaware of it until a certain event which would bring about its downfall
It was still practiced in Britain despite it being technically illegal
Money? Feeling guilty....Never.
Excellent. More on this please.
Jdraper really said "no, worse"
Jdraper really said "no, worse"
If nothing else, this makes very plain the case for reparations for the descendants of slaves
I'm not sure it does. Compensation might have worked at the time of emancipation for the formerly enslaved. Now, centuries later, it's much more difficult. Descendents have moved around and mixed themselves in with other groups. Some have found good fortune and are on par with other citizens, others have not. Reparations would not only be complicated (do you have a "one drop" rule or a certain percentage? Is there an upper wealth or income limit or does everyone get it?), but risks creating an angry and jealous underclass who have similar economic circumstances but miss out on the criteria for one reason or another.
The same argument could be applied now to descendants of slaveowners if compensation hadn't been given at the time.
Probably the best way to avoid that is to use another metric, like poverty, rather than something tied to ancestry. Sure, it'll benefit some people who aren't descendants of slaves, but it'll likely benefit more people who are.
Weird to think they’d be ashamed of something that had been normal.
So normal that not many people did it. Only a portion of rich people did, don’t say “everyone did it”
Evidence of what?
“their black enslaved people and their black servants”
A bit of confused language there.
There were some black free non-slave servants I guess
@@videonofan I can discern that, but why would having paintings of yourself with your waged staff be an issue?
Money is both an incentive and an impediment. Slavery will exist as long as humans are willing to exploit others for profit. In a way we've never found the maturity to "be" without needing to "be better than." I greatly enjoy your posts. Thank you
Lost their very names
😢The loss of the culture.
Why would slave owners destroy evidence? Why would you think slave owners would be ashamed of themselves, just because slavery had been abolished? This is not at all like the Holocaust, because the nazis knew full well that what they did would be frowned upon if publicly known - which is why _they_ took steps to cover their tracks. The slave owners had done nothing wrong in their eyes, and the only thing they tried to hush down was any brutality perpetrated on their plantations. But especially for the European slave owners, their slaves were mainly in the colonies. Some house slaves in Europe, but these lived in conditions comparable to regular household servants and as such did not spark any outcry. And as for slaves in the colonies... the farther away something happens, the easier it is to turn a blind eye to it. Just like we turn a blind eye to the sweat shops, child labour and de facto slavery in the third world that provides us with clothes, electronics, toys, chocolate etc. etc. We _know_ these things still go on, we _know_ the conditions are horrendous, but... it's way over there, and the products are so nice, it's easy to conveniently forget about how these articles ended up in our hands. We really are in no position to judge the slave owners of the past for exploiting human beings the same way big corporations still do today, in all but name.
The very point of abolitionist movement was to make a REALLY BIG FUSS about slavery in colonies; and they perfectly succeeded. Heck, the whole idea that "slavery as an institution is morally horrible and pretty undefendable except of most daring situations that can lead to the positive law establishing it" was the reason freedom suits generally were successful in UK.
I don’t know about the tax write offs, but in the US some owners insured enslaved people and many companies still in existence today like New York Life, Aetna, and Manhattan Life had their wealth built in part off of this business.