10 Interesting Facts You Never Knew About Slavery

INTRODUCTION.

Slavery is one of the most controversial topics out there today. Although we all agree it was
terrible, we probably never learned enough about it in school. Slavery was much more
complicated than we think, and contrary to what most people believe, it was not all about
blacks. Whites were also kept as slaves.

Nevertheless, slavers did all they could to justify the practice, including creating a dedicated
Slave Bible. That did not stop the slaves from running away, though. However, the daring
escapes often ended after the slaves were tracked and attacked by dogs bred only for that
purpose.

10-Slavers Used A Different Bible That Justified Slavery

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

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

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

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

09- Vicious Dogs Were Bred To Hunt Runaway Slaves

Runaway slaves were usually difficult to track and dangerous to approach and capture.
Plantation owners later found a solution: breeding vicious dogs solely to track, attack, and
capture runaway slaves.

“Negro dogs” were strong and aggressive breeds like bloodhounds and bulldogs which could
tear a man to pieces. In fact, slavers often allowed the dogs to viciously maul captured
runaway slaves. However, they quickly subdued the dog before it killed the slave.

One infamous Negro dog was the Dogo Cubano (aka the Mastin Cubano, Cuban Mastiff, or
Mastin de Cuba). The dog was bred by crossing a Spanish war dog with the English mastiff
and scent hound. The animal was engineered to catch runaway slaves, although it also
guarded livestock and engaged in dogfighting. Unsurprisingly, the dog went extinct after
slavery was abolished in Cuba.[2]

Negro dogs were trained with real slaves. They never saw a black slave until they were
required to pursue him during training. The dogs followed the scent of the slave after picking
up the individual’s distinctive smell from some clothing items. Then they went after the slave
and aggressively attacked him. Successful dogs were rewarded with chunks of meat.

08- The First Slave Owner Was A Black Man

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

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

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

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

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

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

07-Whites Were Also Kept As Slaves

When we talk about slavery, we often think of transatlantic slavery—that is, the slaves who
were transported from Africa to the US on ships traveling over the Atlantic Ocean. But that
was just one form of slavery. Other kinds took place elsewhere and included whites as
victims.

One form of slavery was run by the Barbary corsairs, the infamous slave raiders of the
Ottoman Empire who lived along the coasts of today’s North African countries around AD
1600. The Barbary corsairs were often Muslims, although they also included English and
Dutch pirates.
Unlike the transatlantic slave trade, the Barbary corsairs did not discriminate against their
victims. They raided anyone, including fellow Muslims. The men were kept as slaves, while
the women were sold as concubines. The male children were forcefully converted to Islam
and eventually conscripted into the slave corps of the Ottoman army.

The Barbary corsairs started off by capturing passengers traveling on ships in the
Mediterranean. They later switched to raiding coastal villages in England, France, Italy,
Ireland, Spain, and Portugal. In 1631, they captured the entire population of Baltimore in
Ireland as slaves. The raids became so frequent that many European coastal townspeople
fled inland to escape the pirates.[4]

The Barbary slave trade slowed down in the 17th century when the European navies started
to attack the Barbary pirates on the high seas. By the 19th century, the US and European
navies were already striking the pirates right in their territory. This forced them to stop
enslaving European Christians, although they continued to raid other territories.

06-Slave Owners Bred Slaves And Used Them As Currency

The 1808 proscription of the transatlantic slave trade was supposed to be a win for the black
slaves and the antislavery movement in the US. However, if anything, it was a win for the
proslavery movement. Before the act, slavers depended on individuals captured or
purchased from Africa. After the ban, they turned to slaves bred in the US.

Slave breeding was the act of encouraging slaves to give birth to as many children as
possible. Many slavers maintained breeding farms where they kept a few male slaves with
many female slaves. Their offspring became slaves at birth and remained on the farms until
they were old enough to work.

Slave breeding became the mainstay of states like Virginia, which quickly became a top
exporter of slaves to other colonies. Slaves were the state’s major product at the time. They
quickly became a sort of currency and were more valuable than gold. In 1860, slaves in the
US were valued at a total of $4 billion.

For comparison, all currency in the US was worth $435.4 million at that time, while all
circulating gold and silver was valued at $228.3 million. Some slavers also mortgaged their
slaves and then formed banks that converted the mortgages to bonds that were sold across
the world—even in regions where slavery was illegal.[5]

05-Fleeing From A Master Was Considered A Mental Disorder

Samuel Cartwright was a medical doctor in the proslavery South. He supported slavery and
even used medicine and science to justify it. In 1849, he was appointed the leader of a
Louisiana state committee tasked with documenting the diseases of African-Americans.

Cartwright submitted his report, which was titled “Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the
Negro Race.” He claimed that blacks were inferior to whites. According to Cartwright, blacks
had small brains, immature nervous systems, and sensitive skins, all of which made them
good slaves. He added that a black would never be happy unless he was a slave.

Cartwright added that slaves sometimes got afflicted with drapetomania, a mental disorder
that made them flee from their masters. Drapetomania was formed from the Greek words for
“crazy” and “runaway slave.” The disorder was supposedly caused by masters who treated
their slaves like humans.

Cartwright wrote that slaves planning to run away often got “sulky and dissatisfied without
reason.” However, they and captured runaway slaves could be cured by “whipping the devil
out of them” and amputating their toes.[6]

04-Laziness Was Also Considered A Mental Disorder

Cartwright did not stop at drapetomania. He also claimed the existence of another
fictional mental disorder that he called dysaesthesia aethiopica, which supposedly
made slaves lazy. Cartwright declared that dysaesthesia aethiopica often set in
when the skin became less sensitive. This supposedly made the black slaves work
sluggishly, as if they were half asleep.

Cartwright claimed that dysaesthesia aethiopica affected more free blacks than
slaves because the free blacks didn’t have masters to care for them. However, he
added that this illness could be cured by washing the desensitized skin with soap
and water. Then the skin was cleaned in oil before the slave was made to work
under the sun. Cartwright added that the slave would be very grateful.[7]

03-Convict Leasing Replaced Slavery After The Civil War

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

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

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

02-Freed Blacks Were Kidnapped And Resold Into Slavery

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

The Underground Railroad was soon countered by the Reverse Underground Railroad,
which worked the other way around. Runaway slaves and free blacks were kidnapped in the
North and sold in the South as slaves. Kidnapped free blacks often had difficulty proving
they were free because the courts often rejected their papers over forgery concerns.[9]
Other free blacks could not testify that a fellow black was a free man because the law
forbade blacks to testify against whites in courts. Only a white could prove that a black was a
free man. However, many whites would not participate because they would be hated for
helping a black man and sending a white man to prison.

01-Africans Sold Africans Into Slavery

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

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

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