Are You Being Duped? A Truthful History of America and the British Slave Trade

by Robert Ingraham

June 18, 2020 — Much is being said right now about “racism in America.” The public is inundated with talking heads in the mainstream media regurgitating various opinions about the so-called universal problem of racism. There are even demands that America should pay “reparations” for slavery. Others are outraged by such assertions and demands. People are being whipsawed emotionally, and the crisis is driving citizens further apart (as intended), not bringing them together. Emotions and frustrations are manipulated, and truth and insight are orphaned. Given the danger of this situation, it is time for some very blunt talk on these matters. Hopefully, such a discussion will provoke some people to look at this subject in a more serious and honest way.

The current attempt to inject racial strife into the ongoing coup against President Donald Trump is one of the most dishonest political tactics in modern times. Slavery and racism are not an “American problem.” Slavery and racism are features of the oligarchical domination which has plagued mankind since before the dawn of recorded history. The subjugation of large numbers of people into de facto or de jure slavery is the essence of oligarchical rule.

Racist mass-murder has always been a feature of oligarchical culture, but to understand it within the context of today, you must raise your scope of vision from the individual to the broader killing fields which are imposed by the economic policy decisions of the financial elite.

Consider the post-1971 financial and economic diktats of the City of London and Wall Street, which have led to economic looting and mass murder in Africa, Latin America and elsewhere at the hands of the trans-Atlantic mega-banks, the International Monetary Fund and the private equity funds. Look at the current locust plagues in Africa and the threat of famine in large parts of the world, which threatens the lives of tens of millions. Debt slavery, which destroys the economic basis for survival, has been imposed on the majority of the world’s population, savagely in the case of the poorest of nations, but also upon the “lower 99 percent” in Europe and America.

Murder is not simply a matter of pulling a trigger or kneeling on someone’s neck. Deliberate mass murder is as simple as “signing one’s name” to a document, issuing policy directives, withholding loans, extracting usurious debt payment, or cancelling contracts for nuclear power development. No one gets blood on their hands. No one has to gaze into the eyes of the victims. The dead are invisible. This is what we see today in the decisions made in the richly-carpeted and ornately-bedecked boardrooms of the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Bank of England, and Goldman Sachs. This is real racism, organized racism, organized mass murder, and it comes from the financial oligarchy based in London. Its intention is not simply to kill people, but to kill posterity, to destroy any possibility for a productive future.

Likewise, Malthusian mass murder is the heart and soul of the “green finance” proposals of former Bank of England head Mark Carney (and his pal Michael Bloomberg), which if enforced worldwide, will kill hundreds of millions. The same Malthusian game plan is seen in the intention of Obamacare and the current destruction of Britain’s National Health Service, where essential medical treatment is routinely denied to the very sick and elderly who no longer have “lives worth living.”

To the extent a moral prejudice of racism exists within the population of any country, it is the product of oligarchical masters who seek to divide the very people they wish to oppress, and manipulate them into fighting one another. It is a tactic of oligarchical rule, and to become a foot soldier on such a battlefield is very foolish. Indeed, it is a sign of one’s own acceptance of servility.

Consider that the money to create Black Lives Matter was donated—to the tune of tens of millions of dollars—by the likes of George Soros and the Ford Foundation. How is it possible to fight oligarchical oppressors if your entire movement is financed by them? At the same time, much of the most vicious of the anti-Trump rhetoric is a product of digital and social media operatives backed by the Silicon Valley “billionaires club,” and their friends in and around British Intelligence, some of the same people who are intent on bringing you the Surveillance State.

Whence Slavery?

Long before Spanish and Portuguese ships began transporting slaves out of Africa, slavery already existed in every corner of the world, including in Africa, where it was endemic among both the sub-Saharan and northern Islamic states and tribes. There were black slaves in Africa long before there were black slaves in the Americas. For millennia, slavery existed in China, Russia, India and in Europe. By far, the greatest number of slaves in the Islamic world were white Europeans. Slavery was also widespread among almost all of the pre-1492 Native American population. When Europeans landed in North America there were already slaves here. Where legal slavery did not exist, brutal caste systems and feudal entailments, such as the serf system in Russia, and other forms of de facto slavery prevailed. Everywhere where oligarchical and imperial systems existed,—which was almost everywhere on earth, among all races—slavery was universal.

Of course, the trans-Atlantic slave trade of 1500-1776 was an abomination and took institutionalized slavery to a new previously un-imagined level. But who did it? Who was responsible? Who brought the slaves to the Americas? The greatest number of slaves, by far, was in Latin America. This was a product of the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, two of the most reactionary imperial regimes in Europe, both financed by the banking establishment of Genoa. The first African slaves to arrive in North America, at Jamestown in 1619 and New Amsterdam in 1626, arrived on ships of the Dutch West India Company, the slave-trading arm of the Dutch Empire.

After 1713, the Spanish granted the Asiento de Negros,—the right to bring African slaves into the Americas—to the British Crown, i.e., the British monarchy itself. In the 18th century, the British monarchy brought more than 6 million slaves out of Africa, including a staggering 110,000 in 1768 alone. This was an imperial policy, a policy under the control of the Monarchy, the Privy Council, the Bank of England, and the Royal Africa Company.

Imperial systems have always been financial empires, controlled by a financial oligarchy. This was as true of the Roman Empire as it was of the 17th century Netherlands, where the creation of the Bank of Amsterdam, the Bourse and the Dutch East and West Indies Companies—all between 1600 and 1610—resulted in the Netherlands becoming the greatest slave-trading empire on the planet. By the 18th century, the British Empire,—with the new Bank of England, the Exchequer, the Royal Africa Company, and the East India Company—began to elbow the Dutch out. But always, the slave traffic—much like the later opium/narcotics traffic—was a financial policy, with huge profits financing the London stock market and the Bank of England.

This was the new Anglo-Dutch financial paradigm,—a monetary empire financed by mass-murder. Today’s misled amateur student of history who sees Spanish Conquistadors killing Aztecs or British soldiers slaughtering Africans, and cries “racist genocide,” fails to recognize that these foot-soldiers, like the Roman legions before them, served a higher master.

In the 13 American colonies, all of the slaves were brought in under the authority of the British monarchy, with the most notorious operation being the Royal Africa Company, headed by the future King James II. Many of the colonies, particularly those which retained a semblance of self-rule, resisted the deluge of slaves. Massachusetts, Virginia, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and other colonies all passed laws banning or restricting the importation of slaves, and all such laws were nullified by the Board of Trade and the Privy Council in London.

Up until about 1640-1650, slavery, as it later became codified, did not actually exist in the American colonies. In almost all of the colonies, black Africans were legally considered indentured servants. This gave them the same legal rights as white indentured servants, and their servitude was not inherited by their children.

By mid-century this began to change, and with the founding of the Royal Africa Company in 1660, Britain’s rulers became determined to impose on the colonies an economic system based on slave labor, exactly as they did in Barbados and their other Caribbean colonies. Key to this was the eradication of self-government among the colonies. One by one, Charter Colonies, such as Massachusetts, Connecticut and Virginia, and Proprietary Colonies, such as Pennsylvania and Maryland, had their charters revoked and their independence quashed. By the time of the Treaty of Paris in 1763, all 13 colonies had Royal Governors, appointed by the monarchy, with the authority to override the decisions of elected legislative bodies within the colonies. These developments coincided with the massive expansion of slave importation carried out under Royal supervision in the 18th century.

To repeat the point, it was the British monarchy which imposed—by force of arms and legal prosecution—a slave economy on the 13 colonies from 1650 to 1775, and it was that monarchy against which the colonists—white and black—rebelled in 1775.

The Birth of Freedom

The single initiative, the single act of courage which made possible humanity’s escape from the omnipresence of oligarchical slavery was the 1620 voyage of those who became known as the Pilgrims, and the establishment of the Plymouth colony that same year. This was the act which proclaimed the determination of a people to live free, and it was the 1620-1776 developments in America which created—for the first time in human history—the possibility of eliminating oligarchical slave systems worldwide. That 1620 voyage was perhaps the greatest blow against human slavery in the history of our species.
This year we mark the 400th anniversary of that voyage. Where are the celebrations? Where are the names and motivations of these heroes proclaimed? In 1920, on the tercentenary of the Pilgrim voyage, parades, conferences, and celebrations were held across America. Proclamations were issued. Special coins were minted, and special postage stamps were issued. Today, history is turned on its head, and a lying narrative is propagated that, somehow, this initiative by the Pilgrim Brethren ushered in a new era of slavery and genocide. It is time to reclaim the glory and the wondrous truth of what was accomplished.

Between 1585 and 1626, several attempts at colonization were made in North America, including at Roanoke (VA), Cuttyhawk (MA), St. Croix (Maine), Popham (Maine), Jamestown (VA) and New Amsterdam (NY). Of these, all but Jamestown and New Amsterdam failed. The most significant characteristic of all these colonies, however, is that they were commercial efforts, established primarily with the intention of returning financial profits to London. One telling feature is that all of these colonies consisted entirely of men, except for a small number of women in the second attempt at Roanoke in 1587.

When the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth with 102 colonists, that number included 48 men, 24 women and 30 children. What the Pilgrims brought to Plymouth were families. Their intention was not to establish a colony which would transmit loot back to London, but to create an entirely new type of society, grounded in human freedom. This is identical in intent to John Winthrop’s later proclamation for establishing a “City Upon a Hill” in Boston. ^{11. For a more in depth report on the Pilgrims, see “A Temple of Hope … A Beacon of Liberty,” EIR, Vol. 33, No. 43, October 27, 2006.}

The Pilgrims, in fact, were escaping from two oligarchies. They had fled England for the Netherlands in 1608 to escape from the oligarchical nightmare which was descending upon England in the wake of the coronation of James I in 1603, dark developments explored profoundly by William Shakespeare. But by 1619 their situation in the Netherlands had become untenable. Amsterdam was becoming a clone of the Venetian paradigm of slavery, usury, and financial speculation; the maritime Dutch Empire was expanding, and Europe was descending into the murderous chaos of the Thirty Years War. The decision was made by the Pilgrim congregation to relocate to the New World,—not a light commitment, given the record of previous colonization attempts in North America.

What the Pilgrims brought to North America was the belief that all human beings, of whatever station, were endowed with reason, that the potential for productive creativity, in the image of a creative deity, exists within each one of us, regardless of race, religion or status. That was the foundation on which they determined to build a new society, and the guiding spirit of their efforts was a commitment to the agapic ideal of the Common Good. ^{22. One of the greatest tributes to the Pilgrims was given by John Quincy Adams. His speech, given at Plymouth in 1802, is available.}

As the Pilgrim pastor John Robinson declared in his essay, “Of Created Goodness”:

First, We must do good in obedience to God’s commandments…. Secondly, That we do it at all times, as we have opportunity…. Thirdly, We must do good readily…. Fourthly, According to our ability…. Fifthly, We must have respect to men’s present wants; and not only consider what we can spare but withal what they stand most need of…. Sixthly, We must do good to all….

This dedication “to do Good” would later be enshrined by Cotton Mather in his work, Bonifacius: An Essay upon the Good … to do Good.

Set into motion was a process of creating an anti-oligarchical culture, one coherent with the principle which Gottfried Leibniz later termed “Happiness.” This effort proceeded through stages, with many reversals and crises, but in 1776 the call went forth—as a self-evident truth—that “All men are created equal,” and in 1789 a new Republic was formed, pledged to defend the General Welfare and secure the “Blessings of Liberty” for future generations.

What we are discussing here is the “Idea of America,” the well-spring from which all later great developments flowed. Martin Luther King possessed a profound moral grasp of this issue, and Lyndon LaRouche battled for this ideal, this vision, throughout his life.

The Breakthrough

Prior to 1775, slavery was legal—under the authority of the Crown—in all thirteen British colonies. The people of these colonies were not Americans, but British subjects, and the rapid development of a
slave-based economic system in America was overseen and enforced by the London Board of Trade, the King’s Privy Council, and the Royal Governor of each colony.

Then, within ten years of the founding of the new United States of America, seven states—Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont, and New York—had abolished slavery. New Jersey joined them a few years later, and in Delaware abolition was defeated by a margin of only one vote. Nothing like this had ever been seen before in human history. This was not slavery, or some other injustice, being abolished by royal decree, but free people voting to willfully end the persecution of a portion of the nation’s people. This is what became possible once free from the British Empire.

From 1776 to 1801, the political dynamic in the new nation was toward the diminution and eventual end of slavery. The moral inhumanity of slavery was widely acknowledged, and its abolition recognized as a mandatory requirement to fulfill the mission of the Revolution.

In the southern states, many slave owners voluntarily manumitted (freed) their slaves. Between 1780 and 1800, as a percentage of the black population, the number of freed slaves in the South went from below one percent to more than ten percent. This anti-slavery tendency was particularly strong in Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware, and in Delaware the number of freed slaves eventually outnumbered the number of slaves 8 to 1. In Maryland, by 1800, 25 percent of the slaves had been freed. At the same time, by 1801 the vast majority of abolition societies in the nation—scores of them—were in the South, and they were very active and winning supporters.

In 1785, only two years after the independence of the new nation had been recognized at the Treaty of Paris, the first society aimed at ridding the nation of slavery was formed in New York. This was The New-York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves, and Protecting Such of Them as Have Been, or May be Liberated, with John Jay as president and Alexander Hamilton as secretary. The founding document of this society read, in part,

The benevolent Creator and Father of all men, having given them all an equal right to life, liberty, and property, no sovereign power on earth can justly deprive them of either, but in conformity to impartial government, and laws, to which they have expressly or tacitly consented.

Two years later The Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage was founded in Philadelphia, with Benjamin Franklin as president. Its founding constitution stated, The Creator of the world to make of one flesh all the children of men … it is the especial duty of those who acknowledge the obligations of Christianity, to use such means as are in their power to extend the blessings of freedom to every part of our race.

In 1787, the Continental Congress unanimously—including all the southern delegates—adopted the Northwest Ordinance, which forbade slavery in the Northwest Territory, a vast area in which slavery had previously been legal under British rule. This set the stage for the future admission of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin as free states. The very next year, at the Constitutional Convention, Gouverneur Morris would denounce slavery as a “nefarious institution” and make the point that in the regions where slavery was most widespread, poverty and the lack of economic development were most pronounced.

After 1789, the leadership of the new Washington administration would spearhead the drive to end slavery. Washington himself, contrary to modern-day accusations, was virulently anti-slavery. John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, Rufus King, Gouverneur Morris and Philip Schuyler led the way. In 1790, shortly before his death, Ben Franklin, together with Alexander Hamilton and other notables, submitted a petition to Congress proposing that all children born on U.S. soil after 1808 would be born free, thus eliminating slavery for future generations. By 1796 every state in the nation – north and south – had shut down the slave trade.

Continuing Warfare

The 1801-1825 reign of the Virginia dynasty of Jefferson-Madison-Monroe derailed the intention of Franklin, Washington, and Hamilton. Then, following the four-year interregnum of the Quincy Adams Presidency, the twelve additional years of Jackson and Van Buren brought the nation to the brink of ruin. By the time of the Polk Presidency in 1845, the proponents of a permanent slave-based economic and cultural order were firmly in control of the nation. This continued up to the Lincoln Presidency.

The death of Washington in 1799 and the assassination of Hamilton in 1804 removed the two impenetrable obstacles to this transformation. Jay, Morris, King, Rensselaer, and others fought, but they were unable to stem the tide.

This was a counter-revolution, against the intention of what had been fought for from 1775 to 1783. Simultaneously, between 1801 and 1833, the entire economic system of Hamilton was dismantled. The credit of the nation was placed into the hands of London financiers, who in the wake of the Napoleonic wars controlled both the world gold trade as well as international finance. Wall Street emerged as London’s junior partner, and after 1815, the slave hub of New Orleans, previously part of the French Empire, would become the banking capital for the cotton trade and expansion of the slave economy. By 1840, New Orleans possessed 12 percent of the nation’s total banking capital.

The South became the cotton plantation of the British Empire. Between 1801 and 1835, U.S. cotton exports grew from 100,000 bales to more than a million, reaching four million bales by 1860. Eighty percent of this cotton was shipped to Britain, where over 20 percent of the entire population were directly or indirectly involved in producing cotton textiles. The financial triangle, London-Wall Street-New Orleans, financed and managed this slave economy.

Politically, the counterattack against the founding intention of the nation—the drive to make a slave-based economic system an hereditary part of the nation—was led by a new organization established in 1816—The Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color of America, a.k.a., the American Colonization Society (ACS). Its creator and foremost member was Henry Clay, who served as president of the Society for 13 years. Madison also served as president, and Monroe and Jefferson were both members. All of its founders were southern slave-owners.

On the one hand, the ACS launched a nationwide movement to send freed slaves back to Africa. The vast majority of these freed slaves had gained their freedom during the fight to create the new Republic from 1775 to 1801, some taking up arms in the revolutionary cause, and all possessing U.S. citizenship, as dictated by the Constitution. They were simply to be gotten rid of, while those who had not yet been freed would remain as slaves.

The true intention of the ACS, however, went way beyond this hare-brained colonization scheme. With backing from the Jefferson and later Jackson leadership of what became the Democratic Party—but with many Whig allies—the ACS quickly emerged as a powerful national organization. Its primary purpose was not to propose colonization but to destroy all efforts at abolition.

Toward that end, leading newspaper owners and editors were recruited, and vicious racist editorials were printed in many northern cities. Mobs were mobilized. Abolition meetings and conferences were broken up by armed hooligans. Abolitionist leaders were assassinated. Anti-abolition riots, targeting both white and black proponents of abolition, were unleashed. A literal reign of terror descended on the nation. One of the most egregious incidents was an 1822 race riot, organized by ACS leaders in New York City, which interrupted a performance of Shakespeare by the great black actor James Hewlett, culminating in the actors being savagely beaten and the theater burned to the ground.

In 1832 Andrew Jackson imposed censorship on the U.S. Mail. Tens of thousands of pieces of mail, particularly those traveling to southern states, were routinely examined. Pro-abolition letters were seized and not delivered. Northern newspapers which contained anti-slavery editorials, communique@aas between abolition organizations, and even personal letters which expressed anti-slavery views,—all of this was confiscated.

Simultaneously, legislation was introduced in a number of northern states to make it a crime to publicly advocate the abolition of slavery. All of this was intended to utterly silence all challenges to the slave system. This went so far that in 1836, the U.S. House of Representatives adopted the “Gag Rule,” which prevented any of the elected members of the House from openly discussing slavery on the House floor, particularly in the form of reading anti-slavery petitions that had been sent to the House by constituents. All of these outrages were organized by the ACS.

Throughout the South, abolition societies were outlawed, abolition proponents jailed or murdered, and laws were passed to re-enslave previously freed slaves. Pro-abolition newspapers, such as The Emancipator in Tennessee, The Abolition Intelligencer in Kentucky, The Liberalist in Louisiana and the Genius of Universal Emancipation in Maryland were all shut down. In all of this, the ACS was the deployer of the shock troops, on behalf of the resurgent slave system.

Taken as a whole, this was a coup against the intention of the Revolution, and it was noted as such by none other than the Marquis de Lafayette who, during his 1824 tour of America, remarked that he was astonished to discover “the aggravation of the prejudices against the blacks,” saying that in the Revolutionary War, “the black and white soldiers messed together without hesitation.”

William Jay

Into the midst of this battle stepped William Jay, the son of John Jay and the lifelong intimate friend of James Fenimore Cooper. Frederick Douglass described Jay as “our wise counsellor, our fine friend, and our liberal benefactor.” Lewis Tappan, the individual who persuaded John Quincy Adams to represent the Amistad defendants, stated that Jay, “by his pen and active labours, has performed a greater service to the cause than perhaps any other man.”

Jay began his public career at the age of 30, in 1819, when he joined with his father in publicly opposing Henry Clay’s Missouri Compromise. He stated at that time, in a letter to Elias Boudinot:

I have no doubt that the laws of God, and, as a necessary and inevitable consequence, the true interests of our country, forbid the extension of slavery. If our country is ever to be redeemed from the curse of slavery the present Congress must stand between the living and the dead and stay the plague. Now is the accepted time, now is the day of salvation. If slavery once takes root on the other side of the Mississippi, it can never afterwards be exterminated, but will extend with the future Western Empire, poisoning the feelings of humanity, checking the growth of those principles of virtue and religion which constitute alike the security and happiness of civil society.

In 1833, Jay became a founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS). The founding convention of that organization in Philadelphia was attacked by a mob organized by the American Colonization Society, and six months later the ACS instigated a reign of terror in New York City, including assassinations, mob attacks and arson. These events were organized by James Webb, a New York leader of the American Colonization Society and publisher of the Courier and Enquirer. Over a period of days, churches were burnt down, the homes of abolition leaders Lewis Tappan, Joshua Leavitt, and the Rev. Peter Williams, Jr. were attacked, and people were assaulted in the street. One eyewitness of the 1834 violence, Mrs. Lydia Maria Child, of Brooklyn, described the scene thus:

I have not ventured into the city, nor does one of us dare to go to church to-day, so great is the excitement here. You can form no conception of it. ’Tis like the times of the French Revolution, when no man dared trust his neighbour. Private assassins from New Orleans are lurking at the corners of the streets to stab Arthur Tappan. Five thousand dollars were offered on the Exchange in New York for the head of Arthur Tappan on Friday last. Elizur Wright is barricading his house with shutters, bars, and bolts. Judge (William) Jay has been with us two or three days. He is as firm as the everlasting hills.

William Jay responded to these outrages with the publication of his Inquiry into the Character and Tendency of the American Colonization and American Antislavery Societies. He would go on to author numerous other works, including View of the Action of the Federal Government in Behalf of Slavery (1839), “On the Condition of Free People of Colour in the United States” (1840), and A Review of the Causes and Consequences of the Mexican War (1849). He became the leading intellectual voice of the anti-slavery movement. He also was the most prominent critic of the 1850 Compromise and the Fugitive Slave Law, issuing a proclamation condemning Daniel Webster for his perfidy.

In his 1835 Inquiry, Jay declared war on the American Colonization Society, enunciating in depth the betrayal of the American Revolution by the ACS. He demonstrated that numerous tenets of the ACS, adopted at their founding meeting, were un-Constitutional, i.e., in violation of the founding intent of the nation. His most severe criticisms were directed toward Henry Clay, personally, the individual who had declared at the founding meeting of the ACS, “Of all classes of our population, the most vicious is that of the free colored—contaminated themselves, they extend their vices to all around them.”

In January 1836, Jay issued an Open Letter to Andrew Jackson, enumerating, at length, the illegal and un-Constitutional actions of that administration.

Defending the True America

In 1840, Jay, together with Arthur and Lewis Tappan, Joshua Leavitt, James G. Birney and Gerrit Smith, resigned from the American Anti-Slavery Society. They were joined in this exit by almost the entirety of the leading black members of that organization, including Samuel Cornish, Charles Bennett Ray, Theodore S. Wright, and Samuel Ringgold Ward. These individuals, and others, then founded the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. ^{33. For more on the African-American abolition leaders, see “Hail Columbia, Happy Land!” EIR, Vol. 44, No. 22, October 20, 2017.}

The crisis which provoked the split in the AASS was that by 1840, William Lloyd Garrison had begun to declare that the United States had been constitutionally based on slavery from its inception; he publicly called for Northern secession from the “slave nation.” Later, Garrison would publicly burn a copy of the U.S. Constitution, uttering the words, “The Union must be dissolved.” This characterization of the United States as a “slave nation” was not only shared by the plantation owners of the South; today, it defines the declared outlook of Black Lives Matter.

Jay and his allies vehemently opposed this slander against America, and many proceeded to establish a new political party, the Liberty Party. Initially, Jay would not join the new party, because he judged that it might prove divisive and alienate Whig and Democratic allies. By 1843, however, as Democratic and Whig leaders lined up to support the annexation of Texas and its admission as a slave state, Jay joined the Liberty Party and became a member of its executive board.
This principled conflict with Garrison is perhaps best expressed by Frederick Douglass. Upon his return from England in 1847, Douglass also split with Garrison, for the same reason as Jay and others had done in 1840. In his famous 1852 speech, known today as “What to the Slave is the 4th of July?” Douglass said the following:

I differ from those who charge this baseness on the framers of the Constitution of the United States. It is a slander upon their memory, at least, so I believe. There is not time now to argue the constitutional question at length; nor have I the ability to discuss it as it ought to be discussed. The subject has been handled with masterly power by Lysander Spooner, Esq., by William Goodell, by Samuel E. Sewall, Esq., and last, though not least, by Gerritt Smith, Esq. These gentlemen have, as I think, fully and clearly vindicated the Constitution from any design to support slavery….

In that instrument I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing; but interpreted, as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a Glorious Liberty Document. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway? or is it in the temple? it is neither. While I do not intend to argue this question on the present occasion, let me ask, if it be not somewhat singular that, if the Constitution were intended to be, by its framers and adopters, a slaveholding instrument, why neither slavery, slaveholding, nor slave can anywhere be found in it. What would be thought of an instrument, drawn up, legally drawn up, for the purpose of entitling the city of Rochester to a track of land, in which no mention of land was made?…

Now, take the Constitution according to its plain reading, and I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it. On the other hand it will be found to contain principles and purposes, entirely hostile to the existence of slavery.

Jay on the Mexican War and Fugitive Slave Act

In 1849 Jay published “A Review of the Causes and Consequences of the Mexican War,” and the following year he authored a searing critique of the 1850 Compromise and the Fugitive Slave Act, which was printed as a pamphlet and enjoyed wide circulation. He viewed the annexation of Texas, and the subsequent war with Mexico, with horror, as the death-knell of emancipation. Opposing the admission of Texas as a slave state, Jay said:

My opposition to the increase of slavery in this country, or to the increase of slave representation, is general and universal. It has no reference to the lines of latitude or points of the compass. I shall oppose all such extension at all times and under all circumstances, even against all inducements, against all supposed limitation of great interests, against all combinations, against all compromises.

In response to the Fugitive Slave Act, Jay stated:

The law is an outrage upon the Constitution of our country and the precepts of our religion. It is a burlesque on justice and on all the acknowledged rules of evidence in the trial of issues. The demand it makes upon individual citizens to aid in hunting and enslaving their fellow-men is diabolical. I have made up my mind to suffer imprisonment and the spoiling of my goods rather than hazard my soul by rendering any active obedience to this sinful law. It is horrible that so many of our fashionable cotton divines are now preaching up the supremacy of human law and virtually dethroning Him whose ambassadors they profess to be.

William Jay died on October the 14th, 1858. Informed of his passing, Frederick Douglass issued the following remarks:

In common with you, my friends, I wear the hated complexion which William Jay never hated. I have worn the galling chain which William Jay earnestly endeavoured to break. I have felt the heavy lash, and have experienced in my own person the cruel wrongs which caused his manly heart to melt in pity for the slave…. In view of the mighty struggle for freedom in which we are now engaged, and the tremendous odds arrayed against us, every coloured man and every friend of the coloured man in this country must deeply feel the great loss we have sustained in this death, and look around with anxious solicitude for the man who shall rise to fill the place now made vacant. With emphasis it may be said of him, he was our wise counsellor, our firm friend, and our liberal benefactor. Against the fierce onsets of popular abuse he was our shield; against governmental intrigue and oppression he was our learned, able, and faithful defender; against the crafty counsels of wickedness in high places, where mischief is framed by law and sin is sanctioned and supported by religion, he was a perpetual and burning rebuke.

Healing the Nation’s Wounds

Today, the cry for “racial justice” is omnipresent, and the treasonous mainstream media plays the same role as the ACS-controlled newspapers of Jay’s era, declaring that America is an intrinsically racist nation, founded by slave-owners. Violence and the determination to censor alternative views—in a manner reminiscent of the ACS-imposed reign of terror and the “Gag Rule” in the 1830s—is increasingly the accepted norm.

How, then, can we pull people together? How can we win a happier future?

The answer is to be found in the life of Martin Luther King. The provocateurs of his day, such as Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, attempted to destroy King’s organizing with calls for “Black Power,” but King would have none of it. His vision, his mission, was always inclusive. He fought not for “racial justice,” but for universal justice for each suffering human being. He fought for posterity, for a future he held firmly in his mind,—for each new child, yet unborn, to have the opportunity to develop, in freedom, their God-given skills and potential.

Proverbs 29:18 warns, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” That is exactly what we are seeing today. Where is the vision of a better more productive future in what we are witnessing? It is certainly not to be found in inane demands to “defund the police,” let alone in the smashing of windows and looting.

Yes, there is organized evil in the world today, but rage-filled “identity politics” is impotent against that evil. As a result of the massive financial speculation and economic cannibalism of recent decades, combined with the devastating world-wide economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, we now face a crisis of historic consequence. Policies are being implemented, and much worse policies are proposed—at the highest level of the financial oligarchy—which will kill hundreds of millions.

In considering the nature of today’s financial oligarchy, don’t just think of Queen Elizabeth and her half-witted son. The 21st century imperial system is more of the form of what Lyndon LaRouche characterized as a “slime mold,” a foul-smelling putrescence of like-minded billionaires and oligarchical elite. Like the hereditary aristocracy of centuries ago, they believe in their right to rule over humanity. Their policy is Malthusian: kill off as many people as possible and halt human scientific progress.

The British elite and their hangers-on have always hated the Idea of America. From Plymouth, through to Ben Franklin, Washington and Hamilton, America’s ideas were impermissibly revolutionary, valuing the creative divinity in every human individual and the ability to advance the human race. Under Presidents Bush and Obama, the alien culture of racism, this time in the form of identity politics, was resurrected, as the Bush and Obama regimes sought to achieve the complete eradication of the American revolutionary idea and the integration of the United States into the globalist post-1989 design. It is high time we taught the actual history, and it is high time to turn upon the actual slave masters.

The crisis of today cries out for sovereign nations the world over to work together toward rebuilding the physical economic potential of our species. That is the task before us. Under the Artemis program, America is returning to the Moon. The Chinese are going to the Moon. Russia is expanding its space program, and many other nations are joining this effort. It is cooperation among nations which will create a more productive future. It is the intention of empire and oligarchy to divide us and destroy our future.

Shall we be dupes or heroes? If we accept the vision of what might and must be, and fight together for that future, we will have honored those who landed on these shores 400 years ago.

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