As more states and cities are submitting plans to pay trillions of dollars of tax money in reparations to the descendants of slaves, it may be important to understand the legacy of global slavery and its impact upon early American history. Students are encouraged to take the following self-test to assess their knowledge of this important topic. (Answers and reference sources available HERE.) Also, HERE.
Self-test on Slavery
Directions: place your answer in the appropriate blank. Answers follow.
___ 1. The Africans who were first sold to white English settlers in Virginia were
A. enslaved for life because they were not baptized Christians.
B. resold soon afterward as slaves to other English settlements in Maryland.
C. afforded the status of indentured servitude similar to that of other English contractual laborers.
___ 2 Which of the following statements is TRUE?
A. The thirteen English colonies embraced slavery with enthusiasm during the colonial and early national periods and never sought to curtail the importation of slaves from Africa until 1808.
B. People of color enslaved white Europeans for a longer period of time than white Europeans enslaved people of color.
C. Unlike African slaves, no whites were ever brought to the New World against the will.
___ 3. Which American patriot—perhaps the wealthiest man in the English colonies and the new American nation— influenced by both his Christian faith and the ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence, died in poverty and obscurity as a result of his determined efforts to free ALL of his 450 slaves?
A. Robert Carter III B. James Wilson C. James Overstreet
___ 4. The United States has formally fought how many anti-slavery wars?
A. Three B, Two C, One
___ 5. Which of the following statements is FALSE?
A. Both Muslims and Christians enslaved those they considered infidels in the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
B. Throughout history, Native American tribes practiced slavery.
C. White explorers and European military raids into the interior of African resulted in the enslavement of millions of Africans by several European powers.
D. Entire Mediterranean coastal regions of France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy were depopulated as a result of slave raids operating from Africa.
___ 6. The word “slave” owes its origin to
A. the vast number of white European Slavs who were enslaved by Muslims.
B. the Greek word, “slovis” – used to describe those who owed life service to their Greek masters.
C. the Latin word, slavica -- used to describe those who owed life service to their Roman masters.
___ 7. White Europeans were FIRST sent to Africa as slaves by
A. Ottoman Turks operating out of the eastern Mediterranean.
B. Vikings trading with Muslims in North Africa and in Eastern Europe.
C. Barbary State Muslim pirates preying upon European shipping.
___ 8. The current estimate of African’s forcibly taken to the New World was roughly
A. 40,000,000 to 50,000,000 slaves.
B. 25,000,000 to 30,000,000 slaves.
C. 11,000,000 to 12,000,000 slaves.
___ 9. The European nation that seized and transported the MOST African slaves to the New World was
A. Britain’s 13 American English colonies.
B. Portugal.
C. France.
___ 10. Thought by many to be the slave-mistress to Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings of Monticello was
A. a Black slave who was a relative of Jefferson’s own mother.
B. three-fourths white.
C. given her freedom by Jefferson upon his death.
___ 11. In what year did the U.S. Congress outlaw the importation of slaves into the country?
A. 1808 B. 1838 C. 1862
___ 12. What percentage of the total number of African slaves transported across the Atlantic Ocean were brought to North America?
A. 60% B. 20% D. 6%
___ 13. All of the following are true EXCEPT
A. African slaves held within what is now the United States enjoyed a much longer life expectancy than Caribbean or South American slaves.
B. When compared to conditions in what is now the United States, African slaves in the Caribbean faced a much more cruel and deadly existence.
C. South American slaves brought from Africa enjoyed the most benign labor conditions and enjoyed the longest life expectancy of any in the New World.
___ 14. African slavers made their longest raid upon white Europeans when they attacked and seized 400 slaves, mostly women and children, in 1627
A. along the Thames River in England.
B. from coastal towns in Iceland.
C. in an attack upon two coastal towns in Brittany, France.
___ 15. The infamous devshirma was
A. a common punishment inflicted upon African slaves in Maryland in the early seventeenth century by white Scotch-Irish masters.
B. the name given to Muslim slavers who raided from the Barbary Coast of Africa.
C. a “child tax” of white eastern Europeans by Ottoman Empire slavers who annually seized the choicest young girls and boys from their parents.
___ 16. What role did William Eaton play in attempting to free American slaves in 1805?
A. He and a handful of U.S. Marines led an attack upon the Muslim slavers in Tripoli, helping to secure the eventual release of American white slaves held in that African city.
B. He led an unsuccessful attempt to free African-American slaves in Charleston, S.C.
C. He defeated a combination of Native American tribes north of the Ohio River and thus secured the release of hundreds of American captives and slaves taken from frontier settlements.
___ 17. When did the U.S. Navy begin to patrol the coast of West Africa to stop the transportation of slaves to the New
World?
A. 1801 B. 1819 C. 1852
___ 18. Which statement is FALSE about the enslavement of Christian female slaves to Muslim powers in Africa, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East?
A. they were generally not seized in the many Islamic raids upon Christian towns upon Europe
B. their value was worth much more than male slaves
C. they were highly prized as concubines and sex-slaves to Muslim masters
___ 19. Which statement is FALSE concerning the enslavement of Europeans by Africans?
A. Europeans were sold to and enslaved primarily by Muslims in Africa who considered them infidels and whose slave status was protected by the Koran.
B. European whites have been subjected to slavery in Africa from the eighth to the nineteenth centuries.
C. As a general rule, white Europeans were NOT enslaved by Africans.
___ 20 White European males who were seized by raiders from Africa and the Ottoman Empire were prized as
A. eunuch slsves. C. galley slaves.
B. future soldiers. D. all of the above.
For the following, place a “+” in the blank before each number if the statement is TRUE and a “0” if it is FALSE.
___ 21. The mortality rate of white male Christian slaves to African and Ottoman masters far exceeded that of African male slaves in the British Thirteen Colonies and the American South.
___ 22. Janissaries were those white male Christians who were raised as elite Muslim soldiers for the Ottoman Empire who were then often used to further subjugate Christian Europe.
___ 23. Stephen Decatur became an early American naval hero when he was killed during a naval engagement off the coast of Africa in the early 1800s.
___ 24. The enslavement of Africans by white Europeans lasted far longer than the enslavement of Europeans by Africans.
___ 25. The death rate of the white male children seized and subjected to castration to become Muslim eunuchs is reported by historians to be as high as fifty percent.
___ 26. It is estimated that approximately 300,000 white Europeans were enslaved by the Barbary States of North Africa.
___ 27. Confederate general Robert E. Lee freed his household slaves before Union general Ulysses S. Grant.
___ 28. When Robert E. Lee offered the slaves of his father-in-law’s estate to go to Liberia at his expense to enjoy freedom in that African country, nearly half chose to emigrate there rather than remain in the United States.
___ 29. Europe was finally able to stop the enslavement of white Christians by Africans in 1816.
___ 30. Miguel Cervantes, known for writing the first Spanish novel, was held for years as a slave in Africa.
___ 31. Approximately 12,000 white Christen men were freed from galley slavery in one battle alone, that of Lepanto in 1571.
___ 32. While historians today estimate the number of Africans carried off into slavery reached 30,000 per year in the 1690s
and up to 85,000 per year a century later (1790), over 20,000 white Christian slaves were seized in just one raid into Eastern Europe in1769.
___ 33. Redemptioners were those German immigrants who could not afford passage to English America and thus allowed themselves and their children to sold to the highest bidder—usually breaking up the families—who paid their fare.
___ 34. Between 1718 and 1775, over 52,000 English convicts were forcibly sent to Britain’s American colonies when their death sentences for petty crimes were lessened to ‘deportation.’
___ 35. Historians today estimate that approximately 5 million white Europeans were enslaved by Africa’s Barbary States.
___ 36. Great Britain kept a large squadron of warships off the coasts of Africa to stop the trafficking of African slaves beginning in the year 1828.
___ 37. More Africans were forcibly brought to North America as slaves than white Europeans were forcibly taken to Africa as slaves.
___ 38. Both England and the United States took steps to end the enslavement and transportation of African slaves from their homelands before they took steps to finally end the enslavement and transportation of white slaves to Africa.
___ 39. Many Islamic countries in Africa and the Middle East did not officially abolish slavery until the last quarter of the twentieth century.
___ 40. By arriving in Jamestown, Virginia in 1619 instead of their original destination of Vera Cruz, Mexico, the “twenty or so” Africans were actually saved from a life of slavery by being given the same status as contracted white laborers of the time.
___ 41. (BONUS) A legacy from the Barbary Wars is today’s slaughter, kidnapping, and enslavement of Black Christians in Nigeria, Sudan, Chad and other African nations by Muslim slave raiders and jihadists.
