Ah, the internet...
Yes, look at this verified slave auction notice from 1848:
Seems pretty bad, right?
We can't put slavery behind us more than 150 years after 600,000 men died to end the practice because of this poster typed on un-aged paper with Times New Roman font that was invented in Britain in 1931!
Literal news articles were written about this tweet, and it got over 200,000 likes.
There is no record of a "O'Donald's Auction House," but the historic O'Donald House in Charleston, built in 1856 (nearly a decade after the date on this poster), is only famous for being the home of 20th-century novelist Josephine Pinckney.
Oh, and the Charleston address is this office building constructed in 1995:
Slave advertisements were pretty bad. They were, after all, marketing the sale of human beings.
But the fake example is clearly trying to rile up anger by making it seem as though slavers were regularly advertising "budding" girls for sale in 19th-century America.
While selling people as property was a practice employed by most people groups and every empire throughout history, America is unique in that she fought her most bloody war to end that practice (Civil War mortalities were comparable to both World Wars and all other American war casualties combined).
Slavery waned in Europe due to the dogged persistence of Christian abolitionists that made it economically disadvantageous to continue investing in the trade, especially during the Continent's war with Napoleon. Once the war was over, the need for chattel slavery in a place like Britain was displaced by the industrial revolution and the loss of the 13 Colonies, making it unnecessary to continue the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
In 2022, slavery is still the norm in most of the world, with more slaves now than any other point in human history (40+ million known).
State-sponsored slavery, such as China's brutal treatment of the Uyghurs, is the most abusive and coordinated of the slave trades today. Yet it's the least acknowledged by the same people who post Juneteenth tweets.
Maybe we should focus on rescuing those who are slaves right now instead of focusing endlessly over a practice that ended in the most prosperous and free nation on earth over 8 generations ago.
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