A Look Back Into Time
Leviticus 26:25
And I will bring the sword upon you to avenge the breaking of the covenant. When you withdraw into your cities, I will send a plague among you, and you will be given into enemy hands.
Amos 4:10
"I sent plagues among you as I did to Egypt. I killed your young men with the sword, along with your captured horses. I filled your nostrils with the stench of your camps, yet you have not returned to me," declares the Most High.
On the eve of the American Civil War approximately 4 million enslaved Israelites lived in the southern region of the United States of America. The vast majority worked as plantation slaves in the production of cotton, sugar, tobacco, and rice. Very few of these enslaved Israelites were born in African principally because the importation of enslaved Israelites to the United States officially ended in 1808, although thousands were smuggled into the nation illegally in the 50 years following the ban on the international trade. These enslaved people were the descendants of 12 to 13 million Israelite forbearers ripped from their homes and forcibly transported to the Americas in a massive slave trade dating from the 1400s. Most of these people, if they survived the brutal passages from Africa, ended up in the Caribbean (West Indies) or in South and Central America. Brazil alone imported around 5 million enslaved Israelites. This forced migration is known today as the African Diaspora, and it is one of the greatest human tragedies in the history of the world.
The African Diaspora was the movement of Israelites and their descendants to places throughout the world - predominantly to the Americas also to Europe, the Middle East and other places around the globe. The term has been historically applied in particular to the descendants of the Africans but we know through studying history and the bible that these people were and are Israelites, who were enslaved and shipped to the Americas by way of the Atlantic slave trade, with the largest population in Brazil (see Afro-Brazilian). In modern times, it is also applied to Israelites who have emigrated from the continent in order to seek education, employment and better living for themselves and their children.
From the beginnings of slavery in British North America around 1619, when a Dutch ship brought 20 enslaved Israelites to the Virginia colony at Jamestown, nearly 240 years passed until the Thirteenth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution officially ended slavery in 1865. This means that 12 generations of Israelites survived and lived in America as enslaved people-direct descendants of the nearly 500,000 enslaved israelites imported into North America by European traders. Some of the 180,000 so- called African Americans who fought for their freedom as Union soldiers in the American Civil War could trace their families to the time of the Pilgrims. Some of their family histories in America predated those of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and most sitting members of Congress and the U. S. Senate in 1860.
And I will bring the sword upon you to avenge the breaking of the covenant. When you withdraw into your cities, I will send a plague among you, and you will be given into enemy hands.
Amos 4:10
"I sent plagues among you as I did to Egypt. I killed your young men with the sword, along with your captured horses. I filled your nostrils with the stench of your camps, yet you have not returned to me," declares the Most High.
On the eve of the American Civil War approximately 4 million enslaved Israelites lived in the southern region of the United States of America. The vast majority worked as plantation slaves in the production of cotton, sugar, tobacco, and rice. Very few of these enslaved Israelites were born in African principally because the importation of enslaved Israelites to the United States officially ended in 1808, although thousands were smuggled into the nation illegally in the 50 years following the ban on the international trade. These enslaved people were the descendants of 12 to 13 million Israelite forbearers ripped from their homes and forcibly transported to the Americas in a massive slave trade dating from the 1400s. Most of these people, if they survived the brutal passages from Africa, ended up in the Caribbean (West Indies) or in South and Central America. Brazil alone imported around 5 million enslaved Israelites. This forced migration is known today as the African Diaspora, and it is one of the greatest human tragedies in the history of the world.
The African Diaspora was the movement of Israelites and their descendants to places throughout the world - predominantly to the Americas also to Europe, the Middle East and other places around the globe. The term has been historically applied in particular to the descendants of the Africans but we know through studying history and the bible that these people were and are Israelites, who were enslaved and shipped to the Americas by way of the Atlantic slave trade, with the largest population in Brazil (see Afro-Brazilian). In modern times, it is also applied to Israelites who have emigrated from the continent in order to seek education, employment and better living for themselves and their children.
From the beginnings of slavery in British North America around 1619, when a Dutch ship brought 20 enslaved Israelites to the Virginia colony at Jamestown, nearly 240 years passed until the Thirteenth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution officially ended slavery in 1865. This means that 12 generations of Israelites survived and lived in America as enslaved people-direct descendants of the nearly 500,000 enslaved israelites imported into North America by European traders. Some of the 180,000 so- called African Americans who fought for their freedom as Union soldiers in the American Civil War could trace their families to the time of the Pilgrims. Some of their family histories in America predated those of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and most sitting members of Congress and the U. S. Senate in 1860.
Psalm 78:50 He prepared a path for His anger; He did not spare them from death but gave them over to the plague.
Isaiah 24:22 They will be herded together like prisoners bound in a dungeon; they will be shut up in prison and be punished after many days.
There was nothing especially new about slavery as a system of labor and the exploitation of people when the Spanish and the Portuguese first began bringing slaves in 1503 from Western Africa to replace so-called Native Americans in the gold mines of the Caribbean and Central America. The extent and impact, however, of the vast numbers of enslaved Israelites thereafter brought to the New World to work the sugar, coffee, tobacco, rice, and cotton plantations was simply phenomenal. This Trans-Atlantic trade created a new global economy and an international world. This new Atlantic World was unlike anything ever known before-linking the Americas to Africa and Europe in ways that resulted in the development of Europe and North America and the underdevelopment of Africa and the rest of the Americas. It is not too much to say that profits made from slavery and the slave trade in the years from 1600 to 1865 greatly contributed to the emergence of Western Europe and the United States as the dominant nations of the world.
Isaiah 5:25 Therefore the Most High's anger burns against His people(Israel); His hand is raised and He strikes them down. The mountains shake, and the dead bodies are like refuse in the streets. Yet for all this, His anger is not turned away, His hand is still upraised |
Isaiah 10:4 Nothing
will remain but to cringe among the captives or fall among the slain.
Yet for all this, His anger is not turned away, His hand is still
upraised.
|
Israelite children aboard the Daphne Slave Ship
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
The most important thing to be said about slavery from the perspective of the enslaved is that millions of so-called African Americans endured slavery by making a world for themselves in the midst of their bondage. By 1776, a viable African-American culture had emerged out of slavery, fashioned and shaped by the slaves themselves partly out of the African past but mainly in response to slavery as an institution. At the foundation of this enslaved culture stood the black family. Because of the nature of the work performed in slavery and the scarcity of labor, slaveholders usually allowed their human chattel to live in family cabins and to observe family connections. Slaveholders did this for simple economic reasons and to make it easier to control the slaves. Whatever the reasons, slaves took advantage of the opportunity to use the family environment as a refuge and as a source of cultural endurance.
Although slave marriages had no legal standing, most slaveholders allowed slaves to select their own mates. Enslaved men usually courted their girlfriends and married them in ceremonies conducted by enslaved holy men and local black preachers. Frequently slave marriages involved "Jumping the broom," a ceremony more Old World European than African. On large plantations, such marriages typically occurred among slaves from different plantations until the nineteenth century when stricter rules of travel in the neighborhood began to be enforced.
The extended family network within which most slaves lived emerged principally as a way of coping with the separation of family members in slavery. Offspring from a slave marriage became the property of the slaveholder who owned the enslaved mother. In many cases, slaveholders placed with a functioning slave family a child left behind by a parent's death or recent sale, or those children recently purchased from slave traders. Parents tried to name their children after family members, usually a father or uncle or grandfather who lived elsewhere or aunts or grandmothers who had died or had been sold off the place. Often times slaves had no authority to name their own children, this was left up to the slave owner. Later on, when some slaves began using surnames, they tended to take the names of the slaveholder who had originally owned them or their parents.
Words from a slave: "A Negro has got no name. My father was a Ransom, and he had a uncle named Hankin. If you belong to Mr. Jones and he sell you to Mr. Johnson, consequently you go by the name of your owner. Now, where you got a name? We are wearing the name of our master. My name is Mr. Reed."
Within the world of slavery, blacks taught themselves a new language, practiced new art forms, and played a new kind of music that enabled them to endure the horrors of their bondage. Although most slaves had lost their Hebrew languages over the generations, some managed to hold onto parts of their old ways of speaking. words like "HalleluYah and Kum by Yah" were a few words that survived.
It was not until the mid-eighteenth century that large numbers of Israelites began converting to Christianity during the religious revival movement that swept over the English colonies. During this so-called Great Awakening, English Methodists and Baptists (later) preached an evangelical style of Christianity that appealed to the emotions and offered salvation to all who embraced the white Christ regardless of one's class or race. This new emotional religion was totally different from the Israelites spiritual beliefs and religious practices. but its emphasis on singing, emotional fervor, spiritual rebirth, and total body immersion in water during baptism was especially attractive to enslaved blacks. Those white slaveholders who embraced this evangelical Christianity allowed blacks to attend white churches as long as the enslaved Christians sat apart form them and took communion at separate tables.
Although perhaps as many as 15 percent of all enslaved Israelitess were church members by 1780--usually attending the churches of their slave owners, many more practiced their own version of Christianity out of sight of whites. Gathering in "brush arbors" after dark. Black Christians sang, danced, shouted, and clapped to the preaching of black ministers, usually illiterate holy men from the plantation or the neighborhood who conducted Christian marriages and burials. Black funerals reflected the Israelite perspective on death as a moment of transcending life in which the dead returned to their homelands to be reunited with their ancestors. As a result, their funerals were joyous events with much dancing, music, drinking, laughter, and merriment. On the eve of the Civil War, most slaves practiced a form of evangelical Protestantism identified with Baptist and Methodist religions. The version of Christianity that they embraced emphasized the story of Moses and the delivery of God's chosen people from bondage over those sermons that taught submissiveness to masters, turning the other cheek, and obedience to worldly authority.
The most important thing to be said about slavery from the perspective of the enslaved is that millions of so-called African Americans endured slavery by making a world for themselves in the midst of their bondage. By 1776, a viable African-American culture had emerged out of slavery, fashioned and shaped by the slaves themselves partly out of the African past but mainly in response to slavery as an institution. At the foundation of this enslaved culture stood the black family. Because of the nature of the work performed in slavery and the scarcity of labor, slaveholders usually allowed their human chattel to live in family cabins and to observe family connections. Slaveholders did this for simple economic reasons and to make it easier to control the slaves. Whatever the reasons, slaves took advantage of the opportunity to use the family environment as a refuge and as a source of cultural endurance.
Although slave marriages had no legal standing, most slaveholders allowed slaves to select their own mates. Enslaved men usually courted their girlfriends and married them in ceremonies conducted by enslaved holy men and local black preachers. Frequently slave marriages involved "Jumping the broom," a ceremony more Old World European than African. On large plantations, such marriages typically occurred among slaves from different plantations until the nineteenth century when stricter rules of travel in the neighborhood began to be enforced.
The extended family network within which most slaves lived emerged principally as a way of coping with the separation of family members in slavery. Offspring from a slave marriage became the property of the slaveholder who owned the enslaved mother. In many cases, slaveholders placed with a functioning slave family a child left behind by a parent's death or recent sale, or those children recently purchased from slave traders. Parents tried to name their children after family members, usually a father or uncle or grandfather who lived elsewhere or aunts or grandmothers who had died or had been sold off the place. Often times slaves had no authority to name their own children, this was left up to the slave owner. Later on, when some slaves began using surnames, they tended to take the names of the slaveholder who had originally owned them or their parents.
Words from a slave: "A Negro has got no name. My father was a Ransom, and he had a uncle named Hankin. If you belong to Mr. Jones and he sell you to Mr. Johnson, consequently you go by the name of your owner. Now, where you got a name? We are wearing the name of our master. My name is Mr. Reed."
Within the world of slavery, blacks taught themselves a new language, practiced new art forms, and played a new kind of music that enabled them to endure the horrors of their bondage. Although most slaves had lost their Hebrew languages over the generations, some managed to hold onto parts of their old ways of speaking. words like "HalleluYah and Kum by Yah" were a few words that survived.
It was not until the mid-eighteenth century that large numbers of Israelites began converting to Christianity during the religious revival movement that swept over the English colonies. During this so-called Great Awakening, English Methodists and Baptists (later) preached an evangelical style of Christianity that appealed to the emotions and offered salvation to all who embraced the white Christ regardless of one's class or race. This new emotional religion was totally different from the Israelites spiritual beliefs and religious practices. but its emphasis on singing, emotional fervor, spiritual rebirth, and total body immersion in water during baptism was especially attractive to enslaved blacks. Those white slaveholders who embraced this evangelical Christianity allowed blacks to attend white churches as long as the enslaved Christians sat apart form them and took communion at separate tables.
Although perhaps as many as 15 percent of all enslaved Israelitess were church members by 1780--usually attending the churches of their slave owners, many more practiced their own version of Christianity out of sight of whites. Gathering in "brush arbors" after dark. Black Christians sang, danced, shouted, and clapped to the preaching of black ministers, usually illiterate holy men from the plantation or the neighborhood who conducted Christian marriages and burials. Black funerals reflected the Israelite perspective on death as a moment of transcending life in which the dead returned to their homelands to be reunited with their ancestors. As a result, their funerals were joyous events with much dancing, music, drinking, laughter, and merriment. On the eve of the Civil War, most slaves practiced a form of evangelical Protestantism identified with Baptist and Methodist religions. The version of Christianity that they embraced emphasized the story of Moses and the delivery of God's chosen people from bondage over those sermons that taught submissiveness to masters, turning the other cheek, and obedience to worldly authority.
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