Reclaiming Our History

A review of Matt Walsh’s The Real History of Slavery.

Over the past few years, conservative podcaster Matt Walsh has made several documentaries that challenge leftist dogmas. His new series, Real History with Matt Walsh, aims to “confront the lies used to rewrite America’s past,” and to “challenge decades of propaganda, question untouchable stories, and reexamine the history generations were taught to reject.”

Mr. Walsh opens his series with an episode on slavery. He premiered it on YouTube during Black History Month, and pulls no punches.

The Real History of Slavery begins with examples of misinformation. Schools often teach children that the United States stands alone in its wickedness. Mr. Walsh cites a 2016 survey showing that many college students believe slavery both began in and was limited to the United States. He shows a clip of Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia claiming that “the U.S. did not inherit slavery from anyone. We created it.” In another clip, black activist Nikole Hannah-Jones asks how a society can “get over” something as “foundational” as slavery, while Oprah Winfrey nods sagely in agreement. He cites a 2019 Washington Post poll reporting that 67 percent of respondents believe slavery still affects America today.

Historical slavery

Of the 12.5 million slaves transported to the Americas during the Transatlantic slave trade, half went to Brazil. Only 472,372 — around 4 percent — arrived in what is now the United States. While it is fashionable to say that whites “captured,” “stole,” or “kidnapped” black slaves, slave traders bought them from Africans. Mr. Walsh shows a clip from a Ken Burns’ documentary that uses passive voice to give the impression that it was whites, not other Africans, who did the enslaving.

Mr. Walsh highlights the Kingdom of Dahomey (in present-day Benin) as a major supplier. The Dahomey raided their neighbors often, and its rulers were extremely brutal. Mr. Walsh recounts reports from missionaries who described villages completely depopulated through slave raids. Slaves who could not be sold were killed, and slaves were tortured and executed to celebrate when a new king took over. The Dahomey chief’s throne sat on the skulls of 4 enemy chiefs. This sort of savagery ended only in 1894, when French colonizers banned slavery in Dahomey.

Slavery is as old as human history. The Real History of Slavery notes that ancient societies such as Babylon, Egypt, Greece, and Rome practiced it. Plato and Aristotle defended slavery as a natural institution. The Code of Hammurabi defined slaves as property and enforced separate legal standards for slaves and free men. In Sparta, helots (publicly owned slaves) outnumbered citizens. The Spartans had a police force to intimidate and control the helots. Although Mr. Walsh does not mention it, the Jews of the Old Testament practiced slavery, and the Apostle Paul instructed slaves to obey their masters. The Bible never condemns slavery.

In the 5th century, Irish raiders regularly attacked the English coast and took captives. In one instance, they seized an English boy named Succat and forced him to work on a farm in the north of Ireland. After several years, he escaped, returned to England, and became a priest. He later went back to Ireland as a missionary. Today, Succat is known as Saint Patrick.

By the 1700s, the balance had shifted. The English enslaved the Irish and transported many to the Caribbean. Mr. Walsh argues that nearly every living white person probably has ancestors who were slaves, and not always at the hands of other Europeans.

Muslim slavery

The word slave derives from Slav because Muslim raiders — both Turks and Arabs — so frequently captured and sold Eastern Europeans between the 8th and 11th centuries. They were not the only Europeans slaves. Mr. Walsh recounts a 1631 attack on the small fishing town of Baltimore on Ireland’s southern coast. Turkish Janissaries carried out the raid. Ottoman soldiers had originally kidnapped these Janissaries as Christian boys from the Balkans and forcibly converted them to Islam. They then trained them as elite soldiers and pirates, who in turn raided European coastal towns and captured more Christians. This system of kidnapping, conversion, and enslavement continued for more than 300 years.

Muslims raped, plundered, and murdered their victims. They delighted in slaughtering priests and carrying off church bells as trophies. Some sailed as far as Iceland in search of white captives, though they concentrated on the Mediterranean coast.

Captured whites often faced a brutal fate as galley slaves for the Ottomans. According to Spanish sources, they forced more than 12,000 Europeans into this misery. They shackled the men around the clock — even in port — and worked them for hours on end. The ships offered no space for the men to lie down or relieve themselves, and contemporaries claimed you could smell an Ottoman vessel from a mile away. Muslims worked galley slaves to death and tossed their bodies overboard when they died. The slaves could hope only that a European navy would defeat their captors and free them.

Between 1500 and 1800, Barbary pirates captured an estimated 1.5 million Europeans and sold many of them in the slave markets of Algiers. After especially large raids, locals reportedly said it was “raining Christians.” Rather than expressing guilt over slavery, many Muslim captors justified their actions as “revenge” for the expulsion of Muslims from Spain and for the Crusades. White women were particularly prized as sex slaves.

European navies sometimes managed to rescue white slaves. In 1683, French forces attacked Algiers to free slaves. After the defeat, Algerian authorities retaliated by executing French officials stationed there, reportedly forcing the diplomats into cannons and firing them.

Arabs built a vast slave-trade network across East Africa, capturing and transporting millions of blacks. On the island of Zanzibar, traders operated perhaps the largest slave market in the world, with an estimated 17 million captives over time. This dwarfs the transatlantic slave trade, yet few today learn about it.

Arabs treated African slaves with extreme cruelty. They routinely castrated male captives, and many died from the procedure before reaching the market. One notorious raider, Tipu Tip, marched as many as 100,000 slaves from the Congo to supply labor for the ivory trade. Arab owners fornicated with black slaves, but almost always killed half-black babies.

European colonial powers finally shut down the East African slave trade in 1909, but historians, academics, religious leaders, and politicians rarely talk about that. Mr. Walsh explains that “it is not a useful tool for a demoralization campaign against white Americans.”

Slavery in the New World

The Real History of Slavery notes that American Indians practiced a form of slavery in the New World that was at least as brutal as Muslim slavery and often involved cannibalism. It gives graphic accounts of white settlers falling into the hands of Indian raiding parties that leave no doubt as to why the Declaration of Independence refers to “merciless Indian savages.”

Between 1620 and 1776, up to 70 percent of British immigrants to the United States arrived as indentured servants — a number that probably surpasses the population of black slaves brought to the colonies. Many endured lifelong bondage and many were brought to America against their will. George Washington owned white indentured servants, and Mr. Walsh notes newspaper ads from the era in which the first president sought one who had escaped.

Whites did the same work as black slaves. Moreover, whites did not hold a monopoly on slave ownership in America — blacks and Indians also enslaved thousands, often with particular cruelty. Mr. Walsh profiles one such owner, William Ellison, a free black man who owned 63 slaves and donated money to the Confederate government at the outbreak of the war.

The Real History of Slavery presents many inconvenient facts:

• At the outbreak of the Civil War, roughly 3,000 Black Americans owned 20,000 slaves.
• The 1860 census shows that only 1.2 percent of white Americans owned slaves.
• In the South, black slaves averaged a life span of 40 years — compared with 20 years in East Africa and 30 years in Cuba. They also experienced lower mortality, married more often, and more frequently lived indoors than slaves elsewhere in the world.
• Slaves were expensive, and it was cheaper to use poor whites for the most dangerous work.
• In 1800, no nation in the world had abolished slavery, and all societies that eliminated it during the 19th century were either European or under European influence.

Walsh ends his documentary with a pointed message:

White men are the heroes of the slavery story. It was the Royal Navy that freed hundreds of thousands of African slaves, all done at the expense of the British taxpayer. Nearly 400,000 Union soldiers died in the Civil War, and the entirely white Congress and white legislatures passed the 13th Amendment that ended slavery. If the legacy of slavery is a permanent unpayable debt that justifies racial redistribution in perpetuity, then literally every ethnic group on the planet owes every other one.

The Real History of Slavery packs a tremendous amount of information into just 44 minutes, but it could have included more. Mr. Walsh could have mentioned the American Colonization Society, which spent decades seeking a solution to the effects of slavery. Some of the most prominent figures in American history served as its officers, including James Madison, Andrew Jackson, James Monroe, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster. Had they succeeded, American slavery would be a niche academic concern.

The Real History series will tackle the myths that demonize and demoralize whites. An advertisement for the next episode, which focuses on American Indians, opens with these words:

What do Snow White, Cinderella, and smallpox blankets have in common? They’re all fairy tales. For decades, people have told you that you live on stolen land, that the Indians were peaceful, and that your ancestors committed genocide. And guess what? None of it is true.

Matt Walsh is doing an important service. Subscribers to The Daily Wire can watch each episode as it premieres, though the slavery episode appeared on YouTube weeks later. In just five days, it had 588,000 views.

Over the past few years, Mr. Walsh has shifted from standard “Conservatism Inc.” pablum to attacking anti-white propaganda. Has he evolved, or did he at first remain silent to avoid risking his career? Either way, that a mainstream pundit now openly addresses anti-whiteness and speaks candidly about race marks a major victory and shows that more people are waking up and reclaiming our history.

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