European nations embark on an empire-building spree by founding new colonies in the new world, chief among them being the thirteen colonies established by Great Britain, which began with Virginia. Failed attempts at making the investment work eventually lead to the institution of slavery, which sees the first Israelites shipped to Jamestown in August of 1619. Millions more follow over time, fulfilling specific Scriptural curses and prophecies.
Show Transcript
Shalom, and welcome to our history podcast. This is a production of Kingdom Preppers.org. I’m your host, Kingdom Prepper, and you’re listening to: Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. We continue with our history.
Part 29: Prophesied Enslavement
While the sixteenth century saw the rise of the Portuguese and Spanish empires, which had divided new conquered lands and peoples between them, the seventeenth century was occupied with other European colonial powers building up empires of their own in the new world. France staked a claim to Quebec and settled it in 1609. The first Dutch settlement was established in the Americas around 1615 along the Hudson, near what is Albany, New York today. New Amsterdam, or the southern tip of Manhattan Island, came next. It served as the seat of the colonial government of what was then called New Netherland and became capital of the Dutch province by 1625. Great Britain, however, eventually eclipsed all European rivals in this new arena of overseas expansion. The thirteen colonies, which would later become the United States, were among its first enterprises.
Spain’s early conquests of the new world is often contrasted to that of Great Britain’s. The Spanish empire was able to exploit the vast riches of the Aztecs and Incas, and they forced large populations of natives to work the land. The British experienced none of this. The British had no hope of enslaving natives, who could flee into the wild interior to avoid capture. Instead, they looked to trade with the natives as a means of amassing wealth, but that was a bitter disappointment. Another solution was agriculture. Produce could be yielded from the land and exported to Europe to fill the coffers of the owners of the colonies. This initially required British indentured labor, since the land was owned by colonial companies and not free colonists at the time. But relying on white indentured servants was a problem.
“White servants had not yet been brought over in sufficient quantity.”
Writes Howard Zinn in his book A People’s History of the United States.
“Besides, they did not come out of slavery, and did not have to do more than contract their labor for a few years to get their passage and a start in the New World. As for the free white settlers, many of them were skilled craftsmen, or even men of leisure back in England, who were so little inclined to work the land that John Smith, in those early years, had to declare a kind of martial law, organize them into work gangs, and force them into the fields for survival.”
All around them, Native Americans were living off the same land, able to support themselves and were, in that sense, superior to the white settlers, who had better technology, but no means of creating enough food with it. The so-called savages had the advantage over the “civilized” invaders. It got to a point where white settlers deserted the colonists and joined forces with the natives. This frustrated the Virginians, who resorted to killing and torturing natives, and burning their villages and cornfields in a show of what they considered superiority. Regardless, their many failures forced them to look to yet another avenue for survival.
“Black slaves were the answer,” writes Howard Zinn. And the first of those slaves were twenty and odd Israelites who were captured in the Kingdom of Ndongo in Angola and brought to Jamestown aboard a British ship on August 20, 1619. Zinn goes on to say:
“And it was natural to consider imported blacks as slaves, even if the institution of slavery would not be regularized and legalized for several decades. Because, by 1619, a million blacks had already been brought from Africa to South America and the Caribbean, to the Portuguese and Spanish colonies, to work as slaves. Fifty years before Columbus, the Portuguese took ten African blacks to Lisbon—this was the start of a regular trade in slaves. African blacks had been stamped as slave labor for a hundred years. So it would have been strange if those twenty blacks, forcibly transported to Jamestown, and sold as objects to settlers anxious for a steadfast source of labor, were considered as anything but slaves.”
We discuss the ramifications of that 1619 event in our Scripture study video 400 Years: Sentence Served.
The enslavement of so-called blacks was prophesied in the Scriptures in several places. Jeremiah chapter 17 gives an interesting overview of the particulars of that national punishment, which, in the case of the tribe of Judah—the negroes and blacks who were a large percentage of the transatlantic slave trade—endured due to their sin and rebellion against Yah. Captivity and the loss of their heritage are two key circumstances they would suffer, as mentioned in the following verses:
[1] “The sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron; with a point of diamond it is engraved on the tablet of their heart, and on the horns of their altars, [2] while their children remember their altars and their Asherim, beside every green tree and on the high hills, [3] on the mountains in the open country. Your wealth and all your treasures I will give for spoil as the price of your high places for sin throughout all your territory. [4] You shall loosen your hand from your heritage that I gave to you, and I will make you serve your enemies in a land that you do not know.…”
—Jeremiah 17:1 – 4
Historian Howard Zinn adds:
“Their helplessness made enslavement easier. The Indians were on their own land. The whites were in their own European culture. The blacks had been torn from their land and culture, forced into a situation where the heritage of language, dress, custom, family relations, was bit by bit obliterated except for the remnants that blacks could hold on to by sheer, extraordinary persistence.”
This prophecy was slow in coming to pass, however, because for centuries, the people of Israel, having migrated south to other lands on the African continent, enjoyed prosperity following their assimilation into various national African cultures. While Europe was still discovering and inventing itself, the Israelites, as well as other African nations, had long found their footing. Timbuktu was one region Israelites were known to dominate, with one of our ancient communities being discovered in Mali as late as 1996. Part of the Songhai empire at the time, the land was only a portion of a vast region the Arab conquerors called bilād as-sūdān, or the lands of the blacks.
“The African civilization was as advanced in its own way as that of Europe. In certain ways, it was more admirable.”
Writes Howard Zinn.
“It was a civilization of 100 million people, using iron implements and skilled in farming. It had large urban centers and remarkable achievements in weaving, ceramics, sculpture. European travelers in the sixteenth century were impressed with the African kingdoms of Timbuktu and Mali, already stable and organized at a time when European states were just beginning to develop into the modern nation.”
But the prosperity would not last. Eventually the Gentiles would live out their role in fulfilling recorded prophecy, most strikingly in the Americas. When the British tried their hand at earlier colonial ventures, those efforts failed. Under Queen Elizabeth, Sir Walter Raleigh—for whom the city of Raleigh, North Carolina is named—was given the go ahead via royal charter to establish a colony in North America. The region was named Virginia in honor of the virgin queen, Elizabeth. Twice Sir Walter Raleigh tried at the colonial game, first in 1585 and again in 1587. The settlers of the first round simply returned to England after the failed attempt, but the second set disappeared in 1590. That group left behind no more than two clues: the words “Croatoan” carved into the gatepost of a fort and “Cro” etched into a tree. It is thought that they were either annihilated by disease or killed by Native tribes.
At any rate, earnest colonization would not take root until the spring of 1607, with the month of May seeing 105 new settlers landing near the mouth of a river they named James, in honor of the Scottish king who succeeded Elizabeth. Thus, the founding of Jamestown. While the venture was an economic one, the Virginia Company, which financed the voyage, claimed to be motivated by religion, in that it aimed to establish an arm of the Church of England in the new colony to minister both to the Natives and the English settlers. But no bishop was ever appointed in Virginia or any of the other thirteen colonies. The stockholders of the Virginia Company looked to trade with the Indigenous Americans and then to agricultural yields in the hope of a handsome return on their investment, as stated.
When the Virginia colony was founded, Puritan influence was at a high point in the Church of England, therefore the stockholders of the Virginia company, as well as many settlers, thought it prudent to allow the new colony to be ruled according to Puritan principles. Early laws, therefore, were of a strict religious bent, requiring settlers to attend worship twice daily, in addition to observing Sunday as the Sabbath and enduring punishment for dressing immodestly and using profane language. But the Puritan ideal never won out in Virginia. For one thing, King James denounced the Puritan way and refused to allow it in his colony. By 1624, Virginia was placed under his direct rulership and Puritan influence waned considerably. King Charles I, who succeeded his father James, followed the same course and was equally intolerant of Puritan views. In time, as Puritan preaching was restricted and ministers suspended from their posts or removed entirely, many Puritans considered emigrating and therefore looked to new American lands, namely New England, which, as author Wendy Warren writes in her book New England Bound, were:
“[A] cluster of colonies perched on the edge of England’s fledgling North American empire. Colonized in the early seventeenth century by stern people wearing black hats and somber clothes, the popular story goes, New England became an exceptional land of hard work and bountiful crops and thrift and curtness and fervent religiosity. Puritans, we call these fabled people, a sort of shorthand used to describe a motley array of Protestants interested in reforming a Church of England they considered too encumbered by vestiges of Roman Catholicism. Between the years 1620 and 1640 alone, more than twenty thousand English colonists emigrated to the northeastern coast of North America, where they founded in quick succession the colonies that would become jointly known as New England: in 1620, Plymouth (a colony that later joined with Massachusetts); in 1630, the Massachusetts Bay Colony; in 1636, the colonies of Connecticut and of Rhode Island; in 1637, the New Haven Colony (eventually joined to Connecticut).”
And so on. After the colonies were established and settled, they had to be made economically viable. For that, slavery was needed in all of them. The Virginia colony, which started as a marginal concern, soon achieved economic success in the tobacco trade, which took great labor to grow and export. Slaves were routinely acquired from Africa for that reason. Unlike the Spanish Catholics, who were ordered to baptize slaves even before they left the African coast (as seen in episode 24) the Christians of the Virginia colony were part of the Church of England, and did little to convert slaves to their religion. Part of the reason for this was the belief that Christians were not to hold other Christians in bondage, which stemmed from ancient principles.
To assure that the ancient principles were not violated by the modern custom, a law was passed by the Virginia Assembly on September 23, 1667 to settle the matter. It declared plainly that the spiritual condition of a slave did not change as a result of baptism. All black people (i.e., Israelites) who were baptized into the Church of England were not thereafter exempt from bondage. The great lengths that Christians went to in order to protect the property rights of Christian enslavers was a demonstration of the corruption that had been inherited from the mother church. But even after this law was passed, slaves were not put through the process of conversion and indoctrination, because enslavers believed an ignorant slave would be more submissive and provide better service.
We’ll be back with more exciting scriptural history . . . in a moment.
[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]
We now continue with our podcast.
In his book The Great Stain, author Noel Rae introduces his readers to the concept of a slave as follows:
“ ‘What is a slave?’ Asked William Wells Brown in a lecture to the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem, delivered on November 18, 1847. One of the abolitionist movement’s most effective black orators, Brown had himself been a slave, and knew what he was talking about.”
Brown went on to say:
“ ‘A slave is one that is in the power of an owner. He is a chattel; he is a thing; he is a piece of property. A master can dispose of him, can dispose of his labor, can dispose of his wife, can dispose of his offspring, can dispose of everything that belongs to the slave, and the slave shall have no right to speak; he shall have nothing to say.’ And what was a chattel? According to the then-current edition of Webster’s dictionary, ‘Chattels personal are things movable, as animals, furniture.’ The word chattel is derived from cattle. The word slave derives from sclavus, the medieval Latin word for Slav—probably because so many of that nation were enslaved by the Holy Roman Emperor, Otto the Great, in the tenth century.”
Colonial slavery was not the kind of slavery that was represented in the Scriptures. Slaves in those ancient times had many rights and limits on their terms of service for instance, whereas slaves in the Americas were rendered such for life, and had no rights whatsoever, as William Wells Brown explained.
Prior to colonial slavery, being a Christian meant that you were superior in society. But with some slaves having access to that leavened religion, a new standard of superiority had to be invented.
“[S]lave owners adapted.”
Writes Katharine Gerbner in her book Christian Slavery.
“They created the concept of ‘whiteness’ and revised their prerequisites for voting to exclude nonwhite Christians from enfranchisement. By the end of the seventeenth century, the term ‘white’ had begun to replace ‘Christian’ as an indicator of freedom and mastery.”
But believing that Christianity was central to the culture and faith of colonial slaves is a mistake, as many historians have done in the past. There were core Christian believers among enslaved Israelites, to be sure, and they preached that Yah would deliver them out of slavery as he had done in ancient Egypt. But the majority among them did not convert to Christianity until after the Civil War, and emancipation, which seemed to deliver on that promise. That’s when slaves began to convert in large numbers.
Daniel L. Fountain, an associate professor of history and author of Slavery, Christianity, and Salvation, found that there were many obstacles present in the life of colonial slaves that made mass conversion difficult, and if fact, unlikely. Evidence shows that they had infrequent access to religious instruction, and when they did hear the Christian message at all, that message was inconsistent, and thus colonial slaves had to carve out their own spiritual culture. What seemed to be a Christian bent among the converted, Daniel L. Fountain discovered, was actually a holdover of the ancient practices maintained during the African diaspora.
“West African religions contain many beliefs similar to those characterizing the evangelical Christianity that dominated the antebellum southern United States.”
Fountain writes.
“Among them, both African Traditional Religion and evangelical Christianity emphasize a single creator […], symbolic death and rebirth, water as a spiritual symbol, blood sacrifice, religious prayer and song, and belief in an afterlife. According to most interpretations of nineteenth-century slave religion, these similarities facilitated the conversion of slaves to Christianity by allowing them to incorporate familiar beliefs into their New World environment. This confluence resulted in a slave-created form of Christianity that reflected African as well as European Christian ideals.”
In other words, colonial Christians did not introduce Israelite slaves to a belief system that was completely alien to them. Christians essentially borrowed heavily from the ancestors of the slaves they held captive, then reintroduced to those slaves an Anglicized version of their own spiritual culture. But by the time Christianity was fully embraced by subsequent generations of these slaves, the brutal institution of slavery had wiped away the last vestiges of the ancient culture that was once their own, which cemented the loss of their true identity in fulfillment of prophecy. This was part of the punishment for the national sin of covenant-breaking on the part of true Israel, as recorded in the book of Deuteronomy.
Of course, the culture that was maintained following their expulsion from the Promised Land was already tainted, being a mixture of pagan practices coupled with their own Israelite heritage, as is seen in the ancient Israel of the Scriptures, who followed the custom of the nations around them. This was the idolatry that led to their expulsion; the aforementioned breaking of the covenant. But during the African diaspora, Israelites—some having assimilated into local tribes, others forming communities of their own—resettled new lands and continued along their tribal course.
“In fact, it was because they came from a settled culture, of tribal customs and family ties, of communal life and traditional ritual, that American blacks found themselves especially helpless when removed from this.”
Writes Howard Zinn.
“They were captured in the interior (frequently by blacks caught up in the slave trade themselves), sold on the coast, then shoved into pens with blacks of other tribes, often speaking different languages. The conditions of capture and sale were crushing affirmations to the black African of his helplessness in the face of superior force. The marches to the coast, sometimes for 1,000 miles, with people shackled around the neck, under whip and gun, were death marches, in which two of every five blacks died. On the coast, they were kept in cages until they were picked and sold.”
The slave trade became a thriving industry when other commodities joined tobacco, such as coffee, rice, cotton, and chief among them, sugar. The year 1515 recorded the first accounts of sugar being exported to the east from the Spanish West Indies. Yet 1518 marked the first recorded shipment of slaves westward from the African coast, to accommodate the new sugar industry. Sugar production is thought to have originated in northern India, and in time it spread to the Middle East, then to the Mediterranean—namely Cyprus, Crete, and Sicily—and again to islands like Madeira, Cape Verde, and the Canaries off the west African coast. The method of growing and refining sugar would cross the Atlantic after that and take on a new life with increased slave labor. European demand for the sweet crop fueled the increase of production and exports, and sugarcane byproducts, molasses and rum, were also in high demand.
“But raising sugar was labor-intensive…”
Writes Noel Rae.
“… [a]nd the work was so exhausting, the conditions so brutal, the birth rate so low and the mortality rate so high, that on average West Indian plantation owners had to replace one tenth of their workers every year. This may have seemed wasteful, but the planters had worked it out and the consensus among them was that it was ‘cheaper to buy than to breed.’ ”
As more and more Israelite slaves were forced to interact with whites, prejudice ripened. True Israel in this case became a nation of reproach in the eyes of even common-born European citizens. Of this Yah promised through the prophet Jeremiah:
[18] “I will pursue them with sword, famine, and pestilence, and will make them a horror to all the kingdoms of the earth, to be a curse, a terror, a hissing, and a reproach among all the nations where I have driven them, [19] because they did not pay attention to my words…”
—Jeremiah 29:18 – 19
Author Noel Rae adds:
“Unlike the aristocratic Portuguese adventurers, who waged war on Africans but did not despise them, the middle- and lower-class north Europeans were soon complaining about the innate vices of the people they were busy enslaving. According to John Barbot, the Yarays were ‘perfidious’ and ‘expert at stealing’; the Senegalese were ‘lazy to excess … knavish, revengeful, impudent, liars, impertinent, gluttonous, extravagant’; the natives of Guinea were ‘the greatest and most cunning thieves that can be imagined.’ … The Dutchman, Willem Bosman, writing of the Gold Coast, declared that ‘the Negroes are all, without exception crafty, villainous and fraudulent … These degenerate vices are accompanied with their sisters, sloth and idleness, to which they are so prone that nothing but the utmost necessity can force them to labour.’ ”
Among modern whites, many of these things are still being said about so-called blacks today. What is more, the Europeans who directed those accusations at slaves were themselves guilty of the very things they condemned: perfidiousness (or being untrustworthy), theft, laziness, vengefulness, impudence, gluttony, craftiness, villainy, and extreme fraudulence. These were people who owned vast tracts of land that was taken from native inhabitants through theft or trickery, which they refused to work themselves. Because Europeans were too lazy to cultivate their own fields, they turned to slave labor, using so-called Negroes—who did not see a slim dime from their grueling efforts—to do what they would not. Yet slaves were accused of being lazy.
That said, the low societal status of so-called blacks was prophesied from of old, being a result of our sin and rebellion against the Most High, who we swore we would serve through a ratified covenant. It is a plight we brought on ourselves as a people, in other words, but it is not one that will have to be endured much longer, per many other prophecies.
That wraps it up for this episode of Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. A production of Kingdom Preppers.org, this episode was written, produced, and hosted by yours truly, Kingdom Prepper. All praise, honor, and glory are due to my boss, Yah Elohim, and to his right hand, Yahushua HaMashiach. You can access the transcript for this episode on our website. Yah willing, our history will continue in the next podcast. Shalom.
Keywords: New Amsterdam, New Netherland, Kingdom of Ndongo, Mali, Songhai empire, bilād as-sūdān, bilad as sudan, Sir Walter Raleigh, Croatoan, New England colonies, colonial slavery, sugar production, prejudice, nation of reproach, jeremiah 29 18, jeremiah 17 1-4, churchianity, two thousand years of leaven, history of Christianity, church history, Hebrew history, kp, kingdom preppers
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