"Antonio a Negro": America's first slave owner.

reply to post by StlSteve


no, slavery is human kinds fault, race matters little to greed. the earliest recorded slavery is in africa.

Ok, I think I know what you guys are saying here - slavery in America was because of black people. Is that it?

reply to post by StlSteve


smells like troll. greed is at fault

Originally posted by gougitousakusha
reply to post by StlSteve

 

smells like troll. greed is at fault

But aren't there lot of poor white people at that time? But they and their children are not made slave?

reply to post by Jazzyguy


guess they weren't sold out by TPTB. gonna add, the earliest text about slavery was written in sumerian.

Originally posted by gougitousakusha
reply to post by Jazzyguy

 

guess they weren't sold out by TPTB

Why not? Why not turn white children to slave too?

reply to post by gougitousakusha


Is that like your standard respose when you can't debate a subject on its own merit?

reply to post by StlSteve


which post exactly? oh i understand people that dont agree arent automatically trolls...


reply to post by Jazzyguy


there was white slaves , probably no white american slaves though.

reply to post by gougitousakusha


I would ask what your debate is on the subject, but what's the point.

Do people really believe that slavery was caused/aided by blacks, based on one person's account. It's nonsense. Based on this 'one person' account, do we re-write history - put whitey in a better light?

Originally posted by gougitousakusha
there was white slaves , probably no white american slaves though.

Shouldn't there be a lot more white slaves and white american slaves since tptb is very greedy?
Why tptb spared them? I don't think the number between white and black slaves are proportional at all. They're mostly black, as far as I know, too few white.

Originally posted by SamTGonzalez
"Antonio a Negro" was among the very first Angola-African people to arrive in America. He came by boat on "The James" to Virginia in 1619, with other blacks and whites, as an indentured servant.

They neglect to mention how he got here:

Early in 1620, Johnson was captured by slave traders in his native land of Angola and sold to a merchant belonging to the Virginia Company. (snip) Johnson was sold to a white planter named Bennet to work on his Virginia tobacco farm. wiki

*my edits

Wait a minute.

So he was captured by slave-traders, taken from his native land, and sold to a merchant...then resold once he got to Virginia, but he wasn't a slave?

OOOOOkay.

Sounds like someone was playing loose with the "terminology" at the time.

What's even funnier is the article makes it seem as if he just strolled onto the American shores.
He was kidnapped and twice sold.

Let's just ignore the fact that slavery was still going on in America before Antonio's court win.

Originally posted by SamTGonzalez

And there you have it, folks. Before this court case, there was no such thing as a "slave". There were only indentured servants. Therefore, The first legal SLAVE owner in America was BLACK!

Now before everyone gets excited that the first slave owner may have been Black for some strange reason, keep this in mind:

Although it was Anthony Johnson's court case against John Casor that established the legal status of slavery in Virginia, it is difficult to identify him as the 'first' slaveholder in the state. Johnson himself arrived in Virginia as an indentured servant. The practice of importing Africans started in the Virginia area in 1619, a practice earlier established in the Spanish colonies as early as the 1560s. wiki

Also a White man named Hugh Gwyn in 1640 (15 years earlier) owned the first slave, in Massachusetts named John Punch.

Massachusetts was the first slave-owning colony.
Slavenorth.com

Everyone owned slaves in America.
Including Native Americans.

Not every slave-owner had equal rights or privileges, though.

Johnson himself was not looked on as an equal regardless of what he owned.
Which is why the government seized his property because of his skin color once he died:

In 1665, Anthony Johnson moved to Maryland and leased a 300-acre plantation, where he died five years later. But back in Virginia that same year, a jury decided the land Johnson left behind could be seized by the government because he was a "negroe and by consequence an alien." In 1705 Virginia declared that "All servants imported and brought in this County... who were not Christians in their Native Country... shall be slaves. A Negro, mulatto and Indian slaves ... shall be held to be real estate." PBS.org

The same State that acknowledged that he could own a slave, also stripped him of his property because he wasn't White.

Policy Makers: White Men.
Everyone Else: Unequal to the policy makers.

It's interesting information, though not sure what this is supposed to prove or mean.

- Lee

reply to post by lee anoma


you provided good info TY. I liked this OP because i felt good to hear anthony johnson was able to climb up and out, but i guess the ending isnt so good huh?

reply to post by lee anoma



Execellent post. Thank you

Op,
I am glad that you are shedding some light on what has been kept in darkness. Here is a link that should help in your research.
americancivilwar.com...
I have posted it in a couple of my threads about racism and what drives it. It has some interesting facts. Just look at the ratio of black owned slaves compared to white owned slaves in relation to population.


Quad.

Originally posted by freedish
I think it goes to show that slavery is not exclusive to whites, it a human problem, not a white problem.

Always has been.
Anyone with a history book could tell you that.

The problem is people seem to think this absolves U.S. Whites living at the time, of their treatment of slaves and African-Americans as the country was founded.

Blacks aren't responsible for Klan lynchings, slave rapes, and Jim Crow/segregation in America.

The policy makers have at one time exclusively, and only now predominately, been White men.

So even if these other people of color held Slaves, if they took up residence in certain areas, they could end up enslaved themselves, lynched, or stripped of various rights afforded to their White slave owning counterparts.

Dred Scott found this out when he demanded freedom since he lived in a State where slavery was illegal, only to be rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court because they declared "neither he, nor any person of African ancestry, could claim citizenship in the United States".

Finding a handful of Blacks that owned slaves really doesn't say much at all.

Ever hear of "benevolent slavery"?

Slaves who'd been permitted to earn money in their spare time sometimes made enough to buy their freedom. Another route was being bought and freed by free relatives or friends. But some who bought slaves in this way didn't formally free them for years, partly because freedmen paid higher taxes than slaves or whites. Courts since colonial times had recognized the right of free blacks to own slaves. This gave rise to an odd arrangement in which people lived as free but were legally someone else's property. This was benevolent slavery.

Between 1800 and 1830, slave states began restricting manumission, seeing free blacks as potential fomenters of slave rebellion. Now you could buy your friends, but you couldn't free them unless they left the state – which for the freed slave could mean leaving behind family still in bondage. So more free blacks took to owning slaves benevolently. Being a nominal slave was risky – among other things, you could be seized as payment for your nominal owner's debts. But at least one state, South Carolina, granted nominal slaves certain rights, including the right to buy slaves of their own.

TheStraightDope.com

That's right.

Freed Black slave owners routinely bought family and friends in order to either legally free them or let them technically live as free.

Wouldn't you, if the people you saw chained up were from your country?
I'm amazed people don't even consider that.

There were also many Whites who worked to free slaves as well, and did the exact same thing. In some cases, as with White abolitionist John Brown, things got bloody.

Still...a slave owner wasn't considered the same all around nor were all slaves treated the same.

As I said, some slave owners weren't considered human, afforded equal rights, or even legal citizens simply because they weren't White men.

- Lee

Debating who had the first slave is really pointless, especially since slavery has existed for thousands of years all around the world. Nobody is innocent here, and it certainly doesn't matter who brought the first slave to America. The word "slave" came from the Romans who had enslaved the Slavs (white people from Eastern Europe). The word "Slav" became "slave", and soon it became synonymous with slavery..... So there you have it. White slaves! Since I'm a Slav, I'm also familiar with the Hungarian nobles who for hundreds of years basically enslaved Slovaks and forced them to work on their lands. They tried wiping out their culture by forbidding them to speak Slovak and forcing them to learn Hungarian. Eventually the Slovaks liberated themselves somehow and now are a free country.

While all this was going on, black tribes in Africa were fighting each other, enslaving each other, and selling each other to white, black, brown and yellow slave traders, who then transported these slaves to different parts of the world and sold them again. Being a slave is not exclusive to the blacks, but since the U.S. has been trying to improve it's reputation, it's gone through a process in which it tries to bring these wrong-doings to light and discusses them to no end. We apologize again and again, we celebrate black history month, we teach kids about the evils of slavery, and some continue to use their history as a crutch. Slavery is bad, O.K.? Whether you're black, white, yellow or brown, chances are your people were enslaved at some point in history by either your own group, or some other group or race. Whenever a battle or war was won, a good portion of the defeated side ended up as slaves. Please, let's stop with this who did what first. We don't know, because the practice of slavery stretches so far back in time. We just can't remember who's idea it was first. All of our people were victims of it at one point in time, and maybe in the future slavery will re-emerge again someday. That's just the way I see it.

Originally posted by 2manyquestions
Being a slave is not exclusive to the blacks, but since the U.S. has been trying to improve it's reputation, it's gone through a process in which it tries to bring these wrong-doings to light and discusses them to no end. We apologize again and again, we celebrate black history month, we teach kids about the evils of slavery, and some continue to use their history as a crutch.

I hear what you are saying and a lot of it of course makes sense, but in what way are Blacks using slavery as a crutch?

The only people I ever see bringing up slavery, tend to usually be White, and around here, whenever it is brought up, it's usually to reduce or misconstrue the events surrounding slavery in America.

Are Blacks unified in asking something from Whites regarding slavery?
I haven't heard anything about it.

I don't know one African-American asking me or anyone else to help them get paid because of slavery.

Putting slavery aside though, America had issues with equality long after slavery, and people fought all the way up until the 60-70's to gain equal footing in a Country that didn't even want to recognize them as human beings, let alone citizens, but the mere mention of slavery seems to set peoples eyes rolling

In fact, this is the first time the subject has even been brought to my attention this year. I've heard (and seen) more about the Holocaust than I have about slavery, but no one seems to be in a fuss over that or calling it "whining".

How many mainstream movies this year will bring up or feature some aspect of slavery?

How many Blacks will ask us to pay them for slavery this year?

How many have already asked the people upset about it in this thread.

Chances are slim to none.

I honestly think this notion of Blacks walking around 24/7 with slavery on the mind, and demanding something from Whites because of slavery, is a phantom being drummed by White supremacists and political opportunists to get a lot of desperate people supportive of an agenda.

I think a lot of people are simply projecting without cause.

- Lee

reply to post by lee anoma


Lee, thank you for shedding some more light on this subject. You provided some excellent information and I really appreciate your effort. Just to clear things up to everyone, I did not post this to put blame on blacks for slavery. I did not post this to put blame on anyone.

The purpose of this thread is to show people that whites were not the only people that owned slaves in early America. I was inspired to share this information because the area I grew up in is predominantly black, and most of them have such an ignorant, hateful attitude towards white people.

In high school, all I was taught was how blacks were oppressed by whites ever since slavery started. The history books never speak of people like Anthony Johnson. The history books never go into detail about slavery in other parts of the world. They make it seem so one-sided. I once had a black history teacher, and she was extremely racist towards white people. This is ironic because the reason most blacks here are just as racists as whites once were. It is a vicious circle.

That is the attitude of most of the black people in my environment. They are very ignorant to the truth, and cannot look past the fact that they were treated badly by white people. What everyone needs to realize is that white people are not the only ones to blame for slavery. It has been going on way before America existed, and it is not exclusive to any particular group of people. We need to look past this ignorance and see slavery for what it truly is, a HUMAN problem, not a WHITE problem. False knowledge is more dangerous than ignorance.

reply to post by freedish


Itis amazing that that meme keeps going. It was never the slavery but the destruction of Africa via depopulation but even worse than that was the entire white supremacy that was developed to justify black slavery and also the continuation of said supremacy to this day (as a meme).

It was not the slavery as slavery was a natural stage in all civilisations.

There is a political anti-white agenda with the way slavery is used and "taught" in history. We are propagandized that it's ALL about race, and the evil white man oppressing the poor black. This is what most people think, especially blacks, as this has been drilled into their heads, not only by our pandering PC government, but the black racist agitators. They don't want to put any "blame" on the black Africans, or acknowledge any black slave owners in the US.