Sen. Tim Kaine claimed that the United States created the institution of slavery.
During Tuesday remarks on the Senate floor, the Virginia Democrat addressed the issue of accountability in police departments but later claimed that the U.S. created the institution of slavery.
“The first African Americans sent into the English colonies came to Point Comfort, Virginia, 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. The United States didn’t inherit slavery from anybody. We created it,” Kaine said.
“It got created by the Virginia General Assembly and the legislatures of other states. It got created by the court systems in colonial America,” he added. “We created it.”
The institution of slavery dates back over a thousand years before the birth of Jesus Christ and was a common practice in several ancient societies, including the Greeks and Egyptians. Political philosophers, including Aristotle and Plato, as well as Dominican friar and theologian St. Thomas Aquinas, also discussed the institution of slavery in their written works, at times integrating it within their worldviews.
European colonials in the 17th century commonly used African slaves in North America rather than poor, European indentured servants. Historians estimate approximately 6 million to 7 million enslaved people were taken to North America before the United States’s founding, allowing the institution to be preserved from European practice.
Prior to the Revolutionary War, Thomas Jefferson, who authored the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, vehemently condemned King George III over England’s participation in the slave trade within the declaration’s first draft.
“He has waged cruel War against human Nature itself, violating its most sacred Rights of Life and Liberty in the Persons of a distant People who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into Slavery in another Hemisphere,” Jefferson wrote. “This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain.”
As the Second Continental Congress debated the language of the declaration, however, it removed Jefferson’s passage on the slave trade, along with several other grievances, to obtain unanimous consent.
UPDATE: After publication, Kaine’s office reached out to the Washington Examiner with further comments from the senator to reiterate his position.
“There was no law mandating slavery on our shores when African slaves came ashore in 1619. Did slavery already exist in the world? Of course. But not in the laws of colonial America at the time,” said Kaine. “We could have been a nation completely without the institution. But colonial legislatures and courts, and eventually the U.S. legal system, created the institution on our shores and maintained slavery until the 13th Amendment. As I said, we didn’t inherit it. We chose to create it.”
