The truth about slavery

Recently, Senator Tim Kaine spoke on the Senate floor and made a provocative statement: "The first African-Americans sent into the English colonies came to Point Comfort in 1619. They were slaves, they had been captured against their will, but they landed in colonies that didn't have slavery — there were no laws about slavery in the colonies at that time." Senator Kaine went on to say, "The United States didn't inherit slavery from anybody. We created it. It got created by the Virginia General Assembly and the legislatures of other states. It got created by the court systems in colonial America that enforced fugitive slave laws." The mention of the year 1619 was certainly not random. It coincides with the New York Times' 1619 Project, which attempts to conflate Britain's slavery with that of the United States. Senator Kaine is wrong in two regards. First, the United States didn't invent slavery — not even close. Slavery was universally practiced by every civilization at one time or another since time immemorial. And second, we did in fact inherit slavery from the British.-- More...