Free Republic

Thursday, if you eat a nice meal, thank the Pilgrims. They made Thanksgiving possible. They left the Old World to escape religious persecution. They imagined a new society where everyone worked together and shared everything. In other words, they dreamed of socialism. Socialism then almost killed them. As I explain in my weekly video, the Pilgrims attempted collective farming. The whole community decided when and how much to plant, when to harvest and who would do the work.Gov. William Bradford wrote in his diary that he thought that taking away property and bringing it into a commonwealth would make the...

For there to be slavery in any colony, laws had to be written making the practice legal. Prior to the slave laws, indentured servants were given the same contracts regardless of where they were from. Once the contracts were fulfilled, servants were free regardless of where they came from. There is a stubborn myth in American history that claims Virginia was the first colony to legalize slavery. If not Virginia, then some other southern colony. It was as if the northern colonies were completely untouched by the horrors of owning a person. The first colony to legalize slavery was not...

Here’s something you won’t read about in the US history books. The first legal slave owner in America was black and he owned white slaves. Anthony Johnson (BC 1600 – 1670) was an Angolan who achieved freedom in the early 17th century Colony of Virginia. Johnson was captured in his native Angola by an enemy tribe and sold to Arab (Muslim) slave traders. He was eventually sold as an indentured servant to a merchant working for the Virginia Company. Sometime after 1635, Antonio and Mary gained their freedom from indenture. Antonio changed his name to Anthony Johnson. In 1651 Anthony...

I am certain we never heard this in school. The Irish slave trade began when James II sold 30,000 Irish prisoners as slaves to the New World. His Proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies. By the mid 1600s, the Irish were the main slaves sold to Antigua and Montserrat. At that time, 70% of the total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves. Ireland quickly became the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants. The majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white....