The second half of Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Thomas Sowell points out that slavery existed as an accepted institution worldwide and throughout recorded history.The Epistle to Philemon is a letter from Saint Paul to a slaveowner imploring, almost demanding, that he forgive his runaway slave:
10 I appeal to you for my child [j] Onesimus, whom I have begotten in my [k]imprisonment,Sowell says that the institution of slavery was so accepted that there did not exist any literature defending the institution until it came under attack and was defended in the American South.
11 who formerly was useless to you, but now is useful both to you and to me.
12 I have sent him back to you in person, that is, sending my very heart,
13 whom I wished to keep with me, so that on your behalf he might minister to me in my [l] imprisonment for the gospel;
14 but without your consent I did not want to do anything, so that your goodness would not be, in effect, by compulsion but of your own free will.Sowell Points out that behind the leadership of William Wilberforce, Britain became antislavery in the era of the founding of the US. And that Britain maintained a squadron of its navy off the coast of Africa for no purpose other than the altruistic motive of suppressing the slave trade. Christianity did not immediately delegitimate the institution of slavery - but no one but Christians ever delegitimated slavery as an institution. And, among Christians it was historically Protestants in the forefront of opposition to the institution, and among Protestants it was English speaking Protestants who were in the lead. The institution basically was delegitimated in the Nineteenth Century because of the influence of the British Empire.
And, of course, the American Civil War. The conclusion is that if you are enslaved, even if those who are enslaving you are themselves Christians with rifles, you don’t look to any other demographic than Christians with rifles to free you.
I favor reparations be paid to any surviving slaves, and any descendants of those slaves who can prove that they would even exist without the institution of slavery. I put it to you that no living American can make that claim with any assurance. The Butterfly Effect says that although there would be people in America if there hadn’t been any slavery here long ago, none of the people now living are descended from the same parents who would have married and had children in an alternate universe without the institution of slavery, and the resultant civil war, in America. Our grandparents would not even have met, even in the unlikely event that their own parents did meet and marry.
Do black Americans imagine that, absent America and the unfortunate slave trade of the Seventeenth Century, Africa today would have all the people it does today and all of black America as well? Do they imagine that their unfortunate ancestors enslaved in America were worse off than those who were imported into Muslim countries in vast numbers but not permitted to reproduce, thereby leaving no descendants in those Muslim countries?
The Spanish crown tried to protect the Indians from enslavement. The Spanish, of course, then brought people from Africa to be slaves in the New World--but non-Christians only. The Christian/non-Christian distinction was more important than skin color.
The Stono uprising in colonial South Carolina seems to have involved slaves who were from the kingdom of Kongo (roughly modern Angola) who had been Catholics before being enslaved, who hoped to get to Spanish Florida where they hoped to be recognized as free because of their religion. They didn't manage to get that far.