The Concept of Freedom for Every Human Being was born in these United States on July 4, 1776
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
— The Declaration of Independence
The freedom that Washington, Jefferson and the other patriots sowed eventually lifted all boats. It took time, but the concept of freedom for every human — endowed by God and irrevocable by government — was born in these United States on July 4, 1776.
Whether they were deists or orthodox believers, this emancipation of man and woman derived from a milieu saturated in principles of Gospel liberty. Freedom was born in the minds of Americans who, from cradle to grave, inhabited a society and culture where the struggle to have “No King but Jesus,” resonated with the power of a dynamo.
By Michael Hoffman
Copyright©2020. All Rights Reserved
The recent upheaval in our streets has sometimes been dubbed the “1619” protests in a tip of the hat to the “1619 Project” published by the New York Times, which is woefully inadequate as history. For example, the 1619 Project suppresses the significant Judaic part in the enslavement of black people. The magisterial three volume history penned by black scholars that does study these matters, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, was banned by Amazon during Black History Month, in February, 2019.
When it takes up the ideology of white supremacy, the "1619 Project” omits all mention of the pivotal influence of the rabbinic Midrash and Rabbi Moses Maimonides in shaping savagely racist Judaic and gentile attitudes which dehumanized black people and furnished the specious justification for their brutalization in the holocaust that constituted the black experience of slavery in the United States.
The rabbinic Midrash consigns black people to the role of inevitable enslavement as a matter of divinely established heredity (nowhere does the Bible say this).
Maimonides, for whom countless buildings in America are named and whose marble plaque hangs in a place of honor in the halls of Congress, taught that black people are “irrational animals” and “lower than human” in his celebrated text, Guide of the Perplexed.
Thomas Jefferson on the History of White Slavery
Jefferson’s views on slavery were drawn from the classical world of Greece and Rome, where in many cases the majority of the slaves were white. In his Notes on the State of Virginia (1781) Jefferson wrote of the history of the oppression of white slaves (p. 151):
“...in this country the slaves multiply as fast as the free inhabitants. Their situation and manners place the commerce between the two sexes almost without restraint. The same Cato, on a principle of economy, always sold his sick and superannuated slaves. He gives it as a standing precept to a master visiting his farm, to sell his old oxen, old wagons, old tools, old and diseased servants, and every thing else become useless...It was the common practice to expose in the island of Aesculapius, in the Tyber, diseased slaves, whose cure was like to become tedious….
“We are told of a certain Vedius Pollio, who, in the presence of Augustus, would have given a slave as food to his fish (fed his slave to the fish), for having broken a glass. With the Romans, the regular method of taking the evidence of their slaves was under torture….When a master was murdered, all his slaves, in the same house, or within hearing, were condemned to death….they were of the race of whites.
“That a change in the relations in which a man is placed should change his ideas of moral right and wrong, is neither new, nor peculiar to the color of the blacks. Homer tells us it was so 2600 years ago... ‘Jove fix’d it certain, that whatever day makes man a slave, takes half his worth away.’ But the slaves of which Homer speaks were whites.”
We cannot fully or adequately comprehend slavery in America without 1. taking into account the complacency with which the Founders viewed the enslavement of whites in antiquity and 2. without considering the extent to which Queen Elizabeth I’s empire established the buying and selling of sub-Saharan Africans as an important base of the economy. Let us recall too that Elizabeth was steeped in Renaissance Kabbalism, under the influence of her Protestant “Astrologer Royal” John Dee, the British empire’s occult founder.
Jefferson’s Ethics vs. the Barbarism of Maimonides
Undoubtedly Jefferson’s racist assessment of the intellectual and moral disabilities of black Africans played a key part in the acceptance of their bondage. Compared to Maimonides however, our future third president made that assessment reluctantly, with many qualifications, and one could almost say, in the fear of God:
Notes on the State of Virginia, p. 153: “The opinion, that they are inferior in the faculties of reason and imagination, must be hazarded with great dissidence. To justify a general conclusion, requires many observations...let me add too, as a circumstance of great tenderness, where our conclusion would degrade a whole race of men from the rank in the scale of beings which their Creator may perhaps have given them.
“To our reproach it must be said, that though for a century and a half we have had under our eyes the races of black and of red men, they have never yet been viewed by us as subjects of natural history.
“I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind” (p. 153).
“Hazarded with great dissidence...as a circumstance of great tenderness...I advance it therefore as a suspicion only…”
Jefferson is not establishing a dogma, he is thinking aloud, while making allowance for error and in the fear of daring to do as Rabbi Maimonides did and deny to black people the Imago Dei:
“... as a circumstance of great tenderness, where our conclusion would degrade a whole race of men from the rank in the scale of beings which their Creator may perhaps have given them.”
There is no foundation in the preceding statement by which the evil Ku Klux Klan praxis, Seedline Identity theology, or neo-Nazi hatred can build a white racist imperium upon. Jefferson’s early views, in 1781, were not intended as doctrine. This intellectual of the Christian Enlightenment wrote his words mindful that they were conditional upon his further observation and study, as we discover when we read the letter he penned in 1809 to Henri Gregoire Washington:
“I have received the favor of your letter of August 17th, and with it the volume you were so kind as to send me on the Literature of Negroes. Be assured that no person living wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a complete refutation of the doubts I have myself entertained and expressed on the grade of understanding allotted to them by nature, and to find that in this respect they are on a par with ourselves. My doubts were the result of personal observation on the limited sphere of my own State, where the opportunities for the development of their genius were not favorable, and those of exercising it still less so.
"I expressed them therefore with great hesitation; but whatever be their degree of talent it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others.
"On this subject they (black people) are gaining daily in the opinions of nations, and hopeful advances are making towards their re-establishment on an equal footing with the other colors of the human family. I pray you therefore to accept my thanks for the many instances you have enabled me to observe of respectable intelligence in that race of men, which cannot fail to have effect in hastening the day of their relief; and to be assured of the sentiments of high and just esteem and consideration which I tender to yourself with all sincerity” (emphasis supplied).
To make a cartoon of American history and cast Thomas Jefferson as a “hate-filled, evil white supremacist” who deserves to have his statues dynamited and his Declaration of Independence burned, is the kind of sheer bad faith and ill will of the sort the Bolsheviks visited with similar erasures and rewrites upon Russia.
The conceit that people living in 1781 were required to exhibit the suffocating political correctness of 2020 lest they otherwise stand accused of monstrous iniquity, is a species of stupidity so abysmal it could only have been concocted on our Orwellian college campuses, corporate boardrooms and the dens of government bureaucrats.
Let a competent team of historians survey the attitudes toward labor and bondage in 1776 or 1781 of the rabbis of Judaism, the imams of Islam, the chieftains of the Congo and the mandarins of China, and see how many Jeffersons they find among them. Precious few, we’ll warrant.
The freedom that Washington, Jefferson and the other patriots sowed eventually lifted all boats. It took time, but the concept of freedom for every human was born in these United States on July 4, 1776.
Whether deists or orthodox believers, this emancipation of man and woman derived from a milieu saturated in principles of Gospel liberty. Freedom was born in America derived not from the Talmud or the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita or Buddha. It was the gift of minds who from cradle to grave inhabited a society and culture where the struggle to have “No King but Jesus,” resonated with the power of a dynamo.
It was in the air. It was on the printed page. It was inescapable. Colonial and early America were Bible-literate societies to an astonishing degree. America’s gift of the idea of liberty evolved into a framework for gradually achieving freedom for all.
On the steps of the ladder of liberation the first to gain the benefits of liberty were the free white yeomanry of America, then the enslaved (“indentured”) whites, and decades later, enslaved blacks. The second step has been almost completely erased from our nation’s history. For years this writer has been gathering new research material for a sequel to our book, They Were White and They Were Slaves. Most of this recent research testifies to the fact that the condition of whites in bondage was even more severe and more enduring than what we first detailed in our book.
One must dig deeply in the archives because white slaves are nearly always mislabeled “servants.” Recently we found a military law imposed in 1756 on the American colonies by King George II (1683-1760), entitled, “An Act for the Better Recruiting of His Majesty’s Forces.” It was promulgated from Boston. Under this act, white slaves were seized from their owners and forced into the Redcoat’s army.
How do we know they were slaves and not servants? By reading the protest of their owners against the king’s law, such as in Pennsylvania where the opposition was worded in terms of the army’s conscription of “a great number of bought servants.”
The objection was to the interference with the legal property and rights of the owners of the whites in bondage, constituting a “manifest and grievous injustice.” To distinguish themselves from their white slaves, their petition was signed “the Freemen.” (Humble Address of the Representatives of the Freemen of Pennsylvania [to Lt. Governor Robert Hunter Morris], February 11, 1756).
After the American Revolution the British Crown could no longer dump white slaves in America under the “Transportation” of “felons” laws. These “felons” subject to capital punishment or enslavement in the colonies, were often English male and female shoplifters who had pilfered food or clothing, or poachers who had killed a deer or a hare on an aristocrat’s property. After 1786 they were shipped to “Botany Bay” (Australia). Their white skin did not prevent the merciless suffering inflicted upon them.
Their enslavement is concealed by the juggling of words. Like the American white slaves misnamed servants, our potential outrage is mollified by the application of the term “convicts” to the white slaves of Australia. Approximately 160,000 were transported and placed in bondage in Australia, or Van Diemen’s Land (present day Tasmania).
These “convicts” performed slave labor, and the females among them often toiled under the additional penalty of suffering enforced whoredom. These whites were regularly whipped. At the dreaded white slave camp of Port Arthur in Tasmania they were used as beasts of burden to pull passengers in a railway.
In the face of these revisionist facts we find ourselves overwhelmed with contempt at the liberals’ idea that all the white people in that era were members of the “Master Race,” possessed of “white skin privilege.” To have credibility this hoax must exclude all considerations of class in the British empire, wherein destitute and indigent whites were regarded as a barely human, hereditarily tainted class.
We know the identity of the members of the Master Class then and now, and they are not and never were white Christian slaves and paupers.
This essay originally appeared in Revisionist History® no. 104 (September, 2019). Subscribe here.
Michael Hoffman is a professional historian and the author of nine books. His new history of the ruling class war on its own people, Hanging Poor Whites, is due for publication in early 2022.
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