Transcript

Welcome to another edition of the Awakening podcast on American Family Radio

Bishop EW Jackson: Welcome to another edition of the Awakening podcast podcast here on American Family Radio. I'm your host, Bishop E.W. jackson. Great to be with you again today. I'll tell you folks, I've got something very special planned for you today because we are nearing, our semi quincentennial. Can you say that quickly five times the 250th anniversary of the birth of the assembly United States of America, the country which I love. And a lot of great things are going to be happening in this coming week. But I wanted to share with you some thoughts.

Bishop Jackson: Everybody likes history if they really understand it

As I've said to you, I have embarked on what I'm calling the Truth Tour, in celebration of our, 250th and a subtitle Untold facts about American history or facts about American history. You were never taught. Because I'm convinced, sadly, that what's been done to our history is to pervert it in order to convince people to convince Americans, frankly, to think ill of, our country. I want to talk a little bit about some of the misinformation that's been put out there and give you some accurate information to help you better understand, the nature of our country. And of course, I'm going to deal with, some of the issues that are usually, or some of the accusations and allegations lodged against our country, and address those in a factual way. You know, it's interesting. I love history. I am definitely a history buff. I'm not an expert, but I'm definitely a student of history. and yet, you know, you meet people who don't like history, say, I don't like history. You know, I teach a group of young boys, at our school, Maximum Potential Christian Academy. And I asked did, they like history? And I think out of the group of, six or seven of them, only one said, yes. The rest said, oh, I don't like history. And I think a lot of people feel that way, but, you know, well, history is boring and this, that and the other. But I would suggest to you that actually everybody likes history if they really understood it. Because it really depends on what kind of history you're talking about, doesn't it? You know, they think of history as a bunch of stories about things that are distant from them in the past. And, that bear no relevance or relation to anything that they care about. But I guarantee you that every one of you listening to me right now has stories about your history. Your father, your mother, your grandfather, your grandmother, maybe, a brother, someone in. Sister, someone in your family has told you stories or a story probably more than one that's been handed down. Your grandfather did this, your father did that. Or, you know, some uncle did that. And they tell you stories about things that have happened in your family. Some good, maybe some bad, maybe you know, some that you don't particularly want to share. But I'll tell you what, you wouldn't say that you find it boring because you're highly interested. You know why? Because it's your history. It tells stories about your family, so it's relevant to you. That's really all history is. All history is, is stories about people of the past. That's really what it is. My father told me many stories about my great. About my great grand. Some about my great grandfather. He didn't know a lot about my great grandfather, but he'd have a couple. But had a lot about my grandfather because my grandfather raised him. My father told me a story one time about, being in school. And something had happened. Some kind of controversy had arisen. My father was in the sixth grade, and he got into a fight and hit another kid. And the teacher came back and it was. Happened to be a female teacher. Raised her hand to slap my father. And he parried her blow and hit her. needless to say, he got into a lot of trouble for that. Even though he felt. Even when he told me the story, he felt it wasn't really his fault. Although he knows he shouldn't have hit the teacher. But the teacher shouldn't have come back there and sought to slap him either. She should have tried to understand what had happened. Because what had happened was that another kid had insulted him. And, that's what got the conflict started. Well, somehow they got my grandfather to come to the school and help my father in the principal's office. My grandfather came up. my grandfather, the infamous Frank Jackson, who never allowed himself to be called Frank. His name was Charles, as far as anybody else was supposed to know. Even though the census and his birth name clearly was Frank. But he wouldn't acknowledge that, not even to his own son. In fact, my father said to him one time, my father called his father Pop. He said, pop. Uncle Willie was my grandfather's brother. Said that your real name Is Frank. He said my grandfather looked at him with a snarl he will never forget and simply said, what did I tell you my name is? He said, well, you said your name is Charles. He said, well, then, that's my name. and of course, the theory was that my grandfather was probably a fugitive, from the law because he was a very, very rough man and probably had done some things that he didn't want to associate with the name Frank Jackson. So he changed his name to Charles. But at any rate, they, told him what happened. My grandfather said to the principal and to the teacher said, well, I want to apologize for this young man. He said, and I guarantee you that when he comes back to school, because he was going to be suspended when he comes back to school, he will be a genuine good fellow. And my father convinced my grandfather not to take him from school at that moment. He said, because I have a test that I need to take before I leave. And the teacher and the principal agreed to let him stay and take this test. Well, my father did. He stayed and took that test. And it took him five years to come home. That's right. He said it took him five years to come home because he wasn't about to come home and face my grandfather because he was rough. and so my father said he spent some nights on the streets. And we had some relatives on my grandmother's side who died in August of 1918. I, believe she probably died during the Spanish flu epidemic, but I'm not, you know, I don't have any proof of that. But it was around that time that she passed away. I, mean, my goodness, you know, what, 30 years, 30 plus years before I was 18. what is 28, 30? 50. What am I saying? 40. 40, I think 44 years, I guess, or so, before I was even born. My grandfather died, in 1944, which was eight years. I never met my grandparents on my father's side. In fact, I never met any of my grandparents, period. But at any rate, now that I find that fascinating, that's my history. That's part of. Of my background. And all of you have the same sorts of experiences. So history is really not boring. It just really depends on what history we're talking about right now.

Bishop: History can be told in two different ways

the other thing that I think is worth observing about, and I say that by way of maybe having you think a little bit differently about history, a little bit differently about investigating it and understanding it, because in many ways, depending on what you're investigating, it will help you understand all that's gone before you to bring you to where you are. But look, history can be told in two different ways. It can be told to inform with a commitment to truth, a commitment to helping people understand the past. But, you know, it can also be told with an intention to misinform, to manipulate people, to make people think a certain way about things. And I really believe that's what's happened with American history instead of history. What we've gotten to a very large extent in our country is propaganda. When propaganda masquerades as history, it's not designed to inform. It's designed to manipulate, to control. It's designed to move people in a certain way. You hide the truth or you distort the truth, or you ignore the truth and you just tell outright lies in order to get people to think a certain way. You know, I am reminded. I don't know whether you've ever thought about it this way, but the Bible is really a book of history as well as spiritual revelation. But the Bible tells history truthfully, not in order to mislead anyone, but in order to rightfully lead everyone. You know, you may not never have heard it said this way before, but the fact of the matter is everything the Bible says is true. But not everything said in the Bible is true. Now you may throw your hand. Wait. Wait a minute. What are you saying, Bishop? What are you saying? Well, just hold on a second. When I say that everything the Bible says is true, that you accept when I say, but not everything said in the Bible is true. That's because not everybody speaking in the Bible was speaking truthfully. The Bible quotes people as saying things that are categorically untrue. And you have to know who's speaking in order to know whether you give that statement credence or not, right? I mean, the scribes and Pharisees said many things about Jesus. The Bible truthfully tells you what they said, but we know that much of what they said was not true. So it depends on who's speaking. But the Bible is a book of history that gives you the truth about what was said and what was done. And of course, we know that what the Bible is teaching us is that the central figure in human history is God, and that the central human figure in history is Jesus Christ. I think historians got a revelation of that when they divided history between BC before Christ and AD after Christ in the year of our Lord. Of course, secularists came along and said they didn't like that idea, so they called it now called BCE before the common era. but we know what they're really referring to is before the Advent, before Christ was born, and after Christ died on the cross and was resurrected and ascended back to heaven. Isaiah 46, 9, 10 says of God, the overruler, shall we say, the overseer of human history. God says, remember the former things of old, for I am God, and there is no other. I am God, and there is none like me. Declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times, things that are not yet done, saying, my counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure. See, we understand God places himself at the center of human history and says he is the final arbiter of its outcome. And when we understand that, we know this is why the Word of God is the most liberating book that's ever been written. In fact, I would argue it is really the only book of liberation ever written. And all others that inform us or help us to be set free only help us because they make reference to the Word of God. Jesus said in Jon 8:32, you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. The truth, if you embrace it, the truth, if you believe it, the truth, if you act on it, will set you free from the bondage of Satan and sin, into the liberty of a child of God. Also set you free from the ultimate consequences of sin, which is eternal damnation, and allow you to live with God for all of eternity.

The Bible really is your history

now, so in many ways, I started out talking about your history and how that's interesting to you. Well, the Bible really is your history, ultimately, because it tells where you came from, it tells who you came from, it even tells you who your ultimate physical father is, which is Adam, and your ultimate physical mother, which is Eve. Our genetic history all begins in the same place, every single one of us. Adam and Eve are our ultimate parents, and they are the source of our physical genetic heritage. Genesis 1:27 says, so God created man in his image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them. So God is our originator. God is our creator. And then Adam and Eve are, our first father and mother. The NewSong Testament Corollary in Ephesians 2:10 says, we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. In other words, God had a history laid out for us before we were ever created. Now, since we are Americans, America is part of our history and God's plan for us. and America is part of Our history and America is central to God's plan for us. And to understand America is to, in part, understand yourself, because we are all enculturated, we are all educated. And I don't just mean formally educated, but we all experience, the American idea. You know, when I was about to go to law school and I wanted to go to Harvard Law School, and I went to three of my professors. I'd done very, very well in college and graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa key. And I sang that to Bragg. Just to give you the sort of, the context. I go to my professors and I say, I would like to get a letter of recommendation to you for Harvard Law School, because that's where I want to go to law school. Every single one of them said the same thing to me. They said, wow, you want to go to Harvard Law School? I said, yeah, I want to go to Harvard Law School. They said, well, if I were you, I'd lower my sights because, you know, black people don't do well on standardized tests and Harvard puts a lot of emphasis on the LSATs. If I were you, I would lower my sights and look for schools that you can more likely get into now because of the way I was raised by my beloved father, I just. I just absolutely. I was livid to hear somebody tell me that what I can't do, because I. But this is my thought. My family goes back in this country 200 years. I think I've got the culture, because that's what they were saying, because they're culturally biased. They're culturally biased. I said, well, my family's been here at least 200 years. Probably more like 300, but at least 200 because my great grandfather was born the year before George Washington died. So I think I've got the culture. But. Oh, no, no, no, no. Somehow. Somehow as a black person, you haven't absorbed the culture. And things are. I paid. I just. I just thought that was a lot of horse manure and, and paid no attention to it. But I said that simply to say, no. America's history is very much part of my history. And so it's important that we know what that history is rather than propaganda that people have spewed about it. Now, what we know about America, sadly, has been primarily informed, most of us, even if we don't know it, by Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, which was published in 1980. Howard Zinn was a confirmed, Marxist, socialist and anarchist, self confessed anarchist and he wrote a people's history of the United States. He said, to give the underside of history. But what he was really doing was writing a polemic to teach people why they should hate America. I mean, that's really what it boiled down to. Now, the sad thing is this is the most influential history book in on American history that's ever been written. And it's. And the, and the sad thing is it is a mosaic of lies, you know, distortions and basically propagandistic perspectives to make you, as I said, history can be told in order to inform you and to help you understand what, is going on before you. Or it can be told in order to manipulate you, to control you, to make you think a certain way. And that's what Howard Zinn's book did. and by the way, the book is still very widespread in America's public education. because even when people don't cite the book itself, Howard Zinn has a project called the Zinn Education Project, in which materials are provided on history for teachers throughout the country. And they don't cite necessarily Howard Zinn's book, but all the information that they've been given is being given from Howard Zinn's perspective. And so, for example, here is one lesson from the, Zinn Education Project, the Gay Liberation Front. This is a class that Howard Zinn's, project produces called Teaching the Fight for Queer Liberation. It's designed for grades six through eight. Here's, another downloadable lesson called Deportation History for fourth Graders. And the historian who wrote this article, the sort of a disciple of Howard Zinn, basically the lesson is America's immigration and deportation history is one of, mass kidnappings and racial expulsions. Now, that's just a lie, but that's the way they want America to be viewed. Did you know the truth is, America right now, with all of the controversy over illegal immigration, we take in more people into our country annually than any other nation in the world. Legal immigrants. More than any other nation in the world. We take in people. We take in over a million people a year legally. And by the way, 90% of those people that we take in are non m Europeans. They're coming in from Latin America, which is the primary source. They're coming in from Africa, they're coming in from Asia, they're coming in from all over the world. And only about 10% of those people are actually coming in from European countries or as would normally be described as white people. You wouldn't know that from the way people talk about Our immigration policy that 90% of the people we allow into the country legally every year are what, again, what some would call, quote unquote, people of color. Of course, defenders in history say, oh, well, it's, he's just trying to give the non elite side. No, he's trying to give the Marxist socialist viewpoint of how we ought to see America. He's trying to delegitimize our country because you have to delegitimize the country and discredit the country in order to prepare people for the notion that the country needs a revolution. It needs a fundamental transformation because it is so inherently wrong, so inherently racist, so inherently evil that you can't, it simply can't persist in its present state. It's got to be fundamentally altered. And you convince people of that by first showing them just how bad the country really is. So I want to test a few propositions, that sort of undergird that viewpoint. And I, hope leave you with a different perspective. Here's proposition number one. The Constitution of the United States defined black people as three fifths of a person. Now, I can tell you absolutely categorically, without any equivocation, that is a complete and total lie. I guarantee you, everyone, probably everyone in this room has heard that it's just not true. The three fifths clause of the Constitution made no reference whatsoever to the value of a black person as an individual. It was simply a compromise as to how many slaves, what percentage of the slaves would be counted for purposes of congressional representation? Because the Constitution provided that the census would count. people would have to be counted. But how much do you count people who are in a limbo state? They're not citizens, they have no political power, but yet they are clearly a major part of the population. I mean, by the Civil war, there are 4 million black people in the South. That's a lot of people. And if the, if the congressional representation is based upon the number of people, that means wherever you have large numbers of slaves, you're going to get more congressional representation unless you don't count them. And, the irony is that the history been told is the exact opposite of the truth. The truth of the matter is that the people who were opposed to slavery did not want the slaves counted at all. Because they knew that if you count them, you are adding to the power of the slave owners. And the people who were in favor of slavery wanted each slave counted as a whole person because they knew that if you counted the slave as a whole person, no matter what they thought of that no matter what they thought of the slave, if you counted the slave as a whole person, it increased their power. And of course none of that power was going to be shared with the slave. Charles Pinckney was a national legislator from South Carolina. We're in South Carolina. No disrespect to South Carolina intended, but during the constitutional convention on July 12, 1887, Charles Pinckney said the following quote. Make blacks equal to the whites in the ratio of representation. This is nothing more than justice. That's Charles Pinckney of South Carolina. He didn't mean a word of it. Charles Pinckney owned 100 slaves. He was simply appealing to the anti slavery people saying well if you say they're, you say they're equal, then we should count them all. But he wasn't interested in counting slaves because he thought that they were equal or because he thought that they deserved justice. He wanted to count them because he knew that in doing so it would increase his power and the power of the slaveholders in the south, by the way. and some of you will say, well, you know, where, where's your information? And I, I could cite you a whole bunch of different books, but I would suggest to you, you know, you've got something at your disposal that people in past generations didn't have. You can just look this stuff up. It's not hard to find. But of course people don't want to do that because people don't, educational institutions don't want, they don't want you to know this stuff. They want you to think differently than this. So I would just say, you know, you, you'll find plenty of books that will lay this stuff out. and, and, and ah, because this is not, you don't have to go mining to find this stuff. It's really easy to find. Which is, makes it all the more amazing that we've been lied to about it. so the three fifths clause was a result of the debate about how what percentage of the slaves would be counted for purposes of census. The southern slaveholders particularly didn't wanted them all counted. And the anti slavery forces, most of the people in the north didn't want them counted at all. And so they had where they come up with three fifths, they came up with three fifths because that was the arrangement that they had made under the prior governmental arrangement called the Confederacy, not the Southern Confederacy of the Civil War, but before we became the United States of America with our Constitution, we were a Confederacy of states, a Sort of a loose, amalgam of states with very little power given, to the federal government. And so the debate about counting slaves, there was not a debate about congressional representation, but about taxation. To what extent should the slaves to slave owners, owe taxes for the ownership of a slave? And the way they calculate that said, well, what. What's the average person earn? And we'll say the average person. Let's say the average person earns, let's just say, 1,000 bucks a year. I'm just picking a number out of the air. The average person earns a thousand bucks a year, they say. So every slave owner ought to pay taxes on $1,000 per slave per year, because that's what the average person would earn, and a slave would earn that. But of course, the slave masters said, well, yeah, but the average person pays for their own housing. They pay for their own food, they pay for their own clothes. And we pay all of that for the slave. The slave does not have to go out, and they don't have to pay for their clothing. They don't have to pay for their shelter. They don't have to pay for their food, they don't have to pay for their health care. We pay for all of that. and so we should not have to pay taxes on the full earnings that a free laborer would make. And the number that they settled on was about 3/5. So if the slaves earnings the equivalent of 1,000 bucks a year, we'll take 60% of that. We'll owe taxes on 60% of that. So the equivalent of $600 a year. That's how it was arrived at. It wasn't. Well, since they're only 3/5 of a person, we're going to. That was not the debate at all. Now, look, I'm not saying that to, in any way suggest that slavery was good or right or fair, but the truth is enough, isn't it? I mean, we don't need to make these stories up to try to make the country more evil than it is now. let me add something else to this that I'm sure most of you are probably not aware of. Slavery and the ownership of slaves was strictly a minority occurrence. Look, by the time of the Civil War, slavery was over in the North. So there were no slaves in the North. Slaves were all in the south. But only 5% of the people in the south own slaves. Only 5%. Now, that number may be shocking to you because, you know, the way we talk about slavery every you know, every, every European American owned slaves. Well, that's the way it feels when people talk about it, but that's not the reality. So now let me just add this. Boy, that seemed like a shockingly no number. Really low number. Really? Yes. But here's how they've gotten the number up. That's the patriarch. That's the person who is in charge. That's the person who's actually doing the transactions, going out and buying slaves. that's the plantation owner. When you add in the wife, the children, maybe grandchildren, maybe in laws. Now, maybe you've got living on that plantation 15 people, 20 people, all part of the patriarch's family. You add those people in as slave owners, so to speak, even though they're not necessarily owners of slaves anyway, they're just part of the family where the patriarch owns slaves. Then you can get the number up to about 25 or 30% of Southerners owning slaves.

75% of people in the south didn't own slaves, studies show

That's adding in the entire family. That means 75% of the people in the south didn't own slaves. Now they say, by the way, South Carolina and Mississippi, the numbers may have been higher. It may have been about 10%, which meant that you add their families in, maybe you can get up to 40 or 50%. But still, even in those states that were considered very, very labor intensive, of course, primarily because the advent of the cotton gin, you had a major influx from the northernmost, plantations and states to more Southern plantations and states, in order to turn out the, the cotton crop, particularly after the invention of the cotton gin, by Eli Whitney, I think, in about, I think he invented the cotton gin, I think in about 1751, if I'm not mistaken. but my point is that the, the numbers of people who owned slaves were in the distinct minority. So this raises a question, doesn't it? What were all these people who didn't own slaves doing? Well, I'll tell you what they were doing. Again, this stuff is not hard to find. Struggling, struggling, because if you weren't wealthy enough to own slaves, and there were some very small people with small, smaller plots of property that might own one or two slaves, but even with those added in, the numbers are still very, very low of the people who owned slaves. So you had everybody else trying to eke out an existence as best they could, and they were struggling. this brings me to another point that needs to be made here. How if they were struggling and they were struggling because slavery put them in that position, because how do you compete with slave labor? I Mean, we got the same basic argument a little different, obviously, over illegal aliens coming into our country. Well, how in the world can you compete with somebody who can, who can live off much, much less, be paid much, much less? And so why would I hire you, an American, when you're expecting me to pay you 20 bucks an hour? And this illegal alien will, will take the minimum wage or less under the table? So basically your life is made more difficult because I've got this, this really, for all practical purposes, I've got this slave labor class that I could use. I don't have to hire you. Well, imagine what that was like when you actually had real slave labor. Not only did the slaves do the main source of labor and work in the south, which was agrarian, which was bringing in crops, so they did that. So they didn't need non slave owners. Americans of European ancestry weren't slave owners. They didn't need them for that work for the most part. But in addition to that, slave masters trained slaves to do, artisan work and to do skilled labor work. To be carpenters, to be brick masons, to be blacksmiths, to be repairers of wagons and machines. They could let them out and completely undermine the white skilled worker because they didn't have to pay the slave anything. Everything the slave paid came, everything the slave took in came right back to the slave master. So they could undercut any free laborer who was trying to earn a living. So getting farm work or plantation work or agrarian work was going to be hard. getting work as a skilled labor was going to be hard because in both cases you were competing with slave labor folks. That's how West Virginia was born. West Virginia was born as a free state because the people who founded West Virginia found that slavery completely undercut their ability to take care of themselves and their families. So, you know, the notion that somehow slavery was this universal institution that all the white people benefited from, it's simply not true. In fact, it is the exact opposite that the non wealthy American of European ancestry suffered as a result of slavery. Add to that that because slaves were worth $1,1500 apiece, when you had the influx of the Irish come in, they were always given the dirtiest, the most dangerous jobs, more importantly, the most dangerous jobs. Because the notion was an Irishman is worth nothing, but a slave is something I have put, a significant investment into. I don't want my slave killed. Doing work that's okay can be done by somebody else who, if they die, who cares? So false proposition number One, the Constitution of the United States defined black people as three fifths of a person. I know I got a little far afield on that, but let's deal with false proposition number two. America was built on slavery. Well, some of what I've just shared with you will tell you, already where I'm going with this. Not only was America not built on slavery, America was held back by slavery. That the economic engine of the United States of America was slowed down by the existence of slavery. Now, let me give you three pieces of evidence to prove the point. Number one, and I've already alluded to this. Number one, it was a drag on America because it undermined free labor. It skewed the market because slave labor undermines free labor. So what good does it do to develop skills? What good does it do to develop, some sort of artisan, ability where you're going to use it when you're competing with slaves who can do it for far less than you can? So the average worker had, to struggle against a perverse system that certainly wasn't good for the slave, but it wasn't good for the free laborer either. I mean, and think about this. If you, if you owned a plantation, if you were wealthy enough to own slaves and they were trained, you didn't need to bring it outside people to do your building work, to do your brick masonry work, to. To repair your fences, to. To. To. To, shoe your horses, to. To. To make machinery. You didn't. You didn't need to do any of that. You had skilled labor right there on the plantation to do all of that. Now here, the free laborers are out there looking to do this work, but they, but they're not needed. So that's number one. Number two, slavery devalued work. Booker T. Washington talks about this. But slavery undermined the dignity of human labor. Booker T. Washington famously said, quote, there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. Now, he wrote that in part because he found that former slaves after the end of slavery thought that anything that involved their working with their hands was somehow slave work. And he helped them to understand, no, it's not slave work. It's just work. The circumstances in which you were doing it weren't good, but that doesn't mean that work is not good. So it undermined, and not only among black folks, but it undermined that mentality among a lot of people. You know, I'm not a slave. I'm not doing that kind of labor. And it took A while to begin to get people away from this mindset that hard work somehow denigrated you to the status of a slave. And the third is this. Any wealth garnished from slavery, any wealth that slavery produced. And by the way, it only produced wealth for a small percentage of people, as I just pointed out, was completely wiped out by the Civil War. In 1860, before the Civil War, America was $65 million in debt. By the end of the Civil war, we were $2.7 billion in debt. That'd be $50 billion in today's dollars from 65 million prior to the Civil War to 2.7 billion, the equivalent of $50 billion today. After the Civil War, there were states that had to spend 20% of their budget trying to help people who lost arms, lost legs, were blinded. There's a lot of blindness that happened in Civil War as a result of shrapnel flying all over the place and knocking out people's eyes. And. And the rather, frankly, rudimentary medical skills that people had. They didn't realize that there is a syndrome. Whereas if. If. If one eye is, for some reason damaged the immune system of the body, and I don't understand this as a. Because I'm not a doctor or scientist, but the immune system of the body will attack the other eye as a foreign body. Somehow it gets triggered with the notion that there's something foreign in one eye and it will attack the other eye. And a lot of people in Civil War, because they had one eye damaged, they went completely blind. You had over 600,000 people injured in the Civil War, and all those people needed treatment. That went on for years trying to help people to overcome the ravages of the Civil War. That's just the medical side. The property that was destroyed during the Civil War, Sherman's march through the South, I mean, he burned Atlanta completely to the ground. In effect, imagine what happened to the values of property that were owned in these places that were decimated. If your property wasn't burned to the ground, what do you think it was worth after everything around it was burned to the ground? Nothing. Worth. Absolutely nothing. My calculation, my rough calculation is that the cost of recovery after the Civil War was a quarter of a trillion dollars. When you take everything into consideration, property damage, health treatment, you. You put it all together. It took. It took the South 100 years to come out of it, because, remember, you had these. These market perversions that were built in. They had to overcome that. And then it took the north even 20 years because you know, many Northern states went into debt. obviously many of their people were injured. The whole country took a long time to recover from the Civil War. And I can't find a single historian or economist that says the value that slavery added to the country, and I'm not talking now about what this did to human beings, because, again, I'm not denying the inhumanity of slavery, but I can't find a single economist who argues that the value that slavery added to this country came anywhere near offsetting the cost that it ultimately cost this nation a quarter of. Of a trillion dollars to overcome the Civil War. So this notion that somehow America was built on slavery, again, it's a lie. In fact, the reality is America was almost destroyed by slavery, not built by slavery. America had to overcome slavery. I mean, Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. But think about this. Eli Whitney was from Massachusetts. He wasn't from the south, because the south weren't. They weren't inventing, they weren't creating. And it's not that they weren't bright enough. They're capable enough, as capable and bright as anybody else. But when you have a culture that says, we've got other people to do all that, we got other people, we. We don't need to become more efficient because we got enough slaves, just keep, Keep working until the job's done. Eli Whitney comes along from a different culture and says, well, there's an easier way to get seeds out of cotton than having a slave spend the whole day. It would take a slave a whole. A whole day to pick seeds out of a pound of cotton. The cotton gin ended up doing £50 a day. But the guy who invented the cotton gin came from the north, where they were talking about machinery and factories and all of that, and the south was still agrarian. Finally, let me put slavery into its proper context. And then, I've got to end this.

From the moment slavery arrived on this continent, decent people fought against it

I've got a chapter of my book, on the subject of American history. If you haven't gotten my book, if you haven't read it, you know, this book took me years to write, and I was rereading some of it and realizing, boy, you know, when you stay away from something for a while and you go back and reread it and you realize there's not a single word you would change in it, you know, you did a pretty good job. So let me just share this with you, and then we'll close out. this is from page 174. the chapters entitled Rethinking American Slavery. There's not a single continent or inhabited island on earth where slavery has not existed in some form. It is a human reality having nothing to do with race in the modern sense of the word. The Arab slave trade was a booming business 700 years before Europeans started the transatlantic slave trade. Scholars estimate that Arabs sold over 20 million slaves, including 5 million Africans. Arabs also enslaved over a million Europeans captured by the Barbary pirates who were vassals of the Ottoman Empire. They captured enslaved men and women from shoreline villages in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Ireland, Iceland, the Netherlands, France and England. And until the need arose to justify the African slave trade and isolate African slaves from the moral sensibilities of Europeans, slavery was not a racial issue. Race is merely one of a long list of rationalizations for why certain people were subjugated. Religion, history, culture, geography and tribe have all been cited to normalize ownership of human beings. The British use slurs against the Irish, such as their barbarous, filthy, lazy, backward and animals to justify subjugating the Irish. Gerald of Wales, expressed typical British views in one of his writings. This is a filth about the Irish. This is a filthy people wallowing in vice. They indulge in incest, for example, in marrying or rather debauching the wives of their dead brothers. Now, these are Europeans talking about other Europeans. Archbishop Anselm, accused the Irish, saying, men exchange wives as publicly and freely as horses. So objective knowledge of history really is scarce these days. And it's easy for the left to slander America over slavery because people, frankly don't know very much. And either out of ignorance because it serves their Marxist agenda. The left doesn't acknowledge the worldwide context into which America was born. The 17th century world was a brutal place. Conquest and slavery were the norm, not the exception. Yet from the moment slavery arrived on this continent, decent people fought against it. The earliest abolitionists were Christians. They were compelling and uncompromising at the denunciation of slavery as evil and contrary to God's word. Our country is never given credit for the fact that many Americans, at risk of their own lives, work to remove slavery from our society. The disagreement was so sharp that the issue had to be left unresolved in order to hold the 13 colonies together. Both during the Declaration period and during the constitutional period, Thomas Jefferson and other siders wanted language in the Declaration denouncing slavery. Ben Franklin called slavery an atrocious debasement of human nature, a source of serious evils. Jon Jay said, to contend for our own liberty and to deny that blessing to others involves an Inconsistency not to be excused. Jon Adams exposed slavery, opposed slavery all his life, calling it a foul contagion in the human character and an evil of colossal magnitude. Even George Washington, who's often denounced as because he owned slaves, came to disdain the institution he inherited. He inherited, not started. He inherited. He said, there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of slavery. The first draft of the Declaration of Independence included an explicit denunciation of slavery. But Georgia and South Carolina, condemned, were opposed to that. And still the statement made it in all men are created equal and endowed by our Creator. And some of the founding fathers knew that they were referring to black men as well as white men. Look, here's the bottom line and I'm way over time, folks. Instead of taking the popular and, negative view of America and our history, we need to begin, I believe, with Acts 17:26 and 27, which says he has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their pre appointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings so that they should seek the Lord in the hope that they might grope for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. You know, that word nation is not the word basilia, which means kingdom or organized nation, state. It is the word ethnos, which means an ethnic group or tribe. And what the word is saying here is that every single one of us, regardless of our ancestry, came from the same blood. And if God organized this earth by setting the boundaries and the pre appointed times of our dwellings, that means that we are Americans by divine appointment, not by the circumstances under which our ancestors came here. And that being the case, we ought to be striving to be one nation under God, not a bunch of warring tribes. We ought to be striving to bring our country together because Jesus said, a kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation. We ought to be striving to make America a nation whose God is the Lord, because that is how we are blessed. Now, America wasn't built on slavery. America was built on two great ideas. That liberty and rights come from Almighty God, and that individual liberty is our birthright. And that individual liberty has produced the Internet and the smartphone and the laser and the assembly line, manufacturing and interchangeable machine parts and air conditioning and satellite communications and gps, and on and on it goes. That's what built America. Individual initiative in an atmosphere of liberty. And so my prayer for our country is that we will celebrate the 250th and all embrace the sentiment. My country Tis of thee Sweet land of liberty of the IC land where my fathers died. Land of the pilgrim's pride. From every mountainside let freedom rest. And that we would pray that last verse together as a prayer. Our fathers. God to Thee Author of Liberty to Thee we sing. Long may our land be bright with freedom's holy light. Protect us by Thy might Great God our King. As we prepare to celebrate our 250th anniversary, let's pray that America, if Jesus tarries, will give us another 250 years of unprecedented prosperity and hope and opportunity for us to fulfill our God given gifts and abilities and go to the highest place they'll take us. So in the meantime, let's stand up for this beloved land that God has given us. Stand up, step up, speak up. And refuse to back up because we, we cannot be defeated if we will not quit because we are on God's side. God bless everybody.