I generally ignore Glenn Beck, but I think I need to respond to his latest outrage. He was trying to say that Obama’s health care reforms are going to basically enslave people by making them paying higher premiums. Then he said this:
The President is exactly right when he said ’slaves sitting around the campfire didn’t know when slavery was going to end, but they knew that it would. And it took a long time to end slavery.’ yes it did. But it also took a long time to start slavery.
And it started small, and it started with seemingly innocent ideas. And then a little court order here, and a court order there and a little regulation here and a little more regulation there. And before we knew it, America had slavery.
It didn’t come over in a ship to begin with, as an evil slave trade. The government began to regulate things because the people needed answers and needed solutions. It started in a court room then it went to the legislatures. That’s how slavery began. And it took a long time to enslave an entire race of people, and convince another race of people that they were somehow or another, less than them. But it can be done.
Even a brief view of the Wikipedia page for the Atlantic Slave Trade will make it obvious that Glenn Beck is very wrong.
In some ways, slavery has always been with us. It still exists in some places, like Sudan. So, it’s kind of strange for Beck to say that slavery began with a court order. But, even when we consider slavery only in the context of Colonial America, Beck doesn’t make any sense. African-American slavery began because African kings paid for European goods by selling their own slaves. Those slaves were paid for with tropical fruits, molasses, rum, cotton, and tobacco, which were sent back to Europe. It was a triangular system of trade. The Europeans sold processed goods and bought agricultural products, the Africans sold manpower and bought processed goods, and the Americans sold agricultural products and bought manpower.
And the Americans only bought African manpower because plentiful and cheap land made it easy for European settlers to move quickly into land ownership and the Native peoples tended to die from Old World diseases when put to work as slaves.
Slavery existed in the New World even before the importation of Africans. And Africans were brought here specifically to be slaves.
What Beck might be referring to is the system that evolved that gradually differentiated African slaves from all other slaves. In the beginning, slaves and indentured servants were able to win their freedom after a period of service. But, over time, African-Americans lost that right in the South of this country. Then white slavery withered away completely, leaving a system in the 19th-Century of exclusively black slavery.
But, regardless, blacks were brought here as slaves in order to be slaves. It’s probably easiest to understand this history by reading about the Haitian Revolution, because it contains all the components of what went on here, but in a very compressed timetable.