Fact check: The United States is not the only country to abolish slavery

The claim: The U.S. is the only country that ended slavery, and Black people were slave owners

Following months of protests regarding racial injustice in the U.S., critics of the Black Lives Matter movement have taken to social media to question the movement’s legitimacy.

They frequently suggest the group doesn’t know history and that BLM supporters deny that progress has been made.

One Facebook post claims, “Slavery used to be normal throughout the world. America was the ONLY country that ended it! Black people owned slaves too. White people were slaves too. How many of these morons from Black Lives Matter know that?!”

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When did the U.S. and other countries abolish slavery?

Contrary to what the post says, the U.S. is not the only country that ended slavery, nor was it the first to do so.

On Jan. 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. This declared “all persons held as slaves … shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” However, slavery was not formally abolished in the U.S. until 1865, after the ratification of the 13th Amendment.

The signature of President Abraham Lincoln on a rare, restored copy of the 13th Amendment that ended slavery.

Spain abolished slavery in 1811, while Sweden banned slave trading in 1813 and abolished slavery in 1847.

Slavery was abolished in Mexico in 1829, when Texas was still part of that country. The decision in part prompted slave holders to fight for the independence of Texas. Once the Republic of Texas was formed, slavery became legal again and remained legal when it became a U.S. state in 1845.

Britain passed its Slavery Abolition Act in 1833, which went into effect in August of 1834. The act freed more than 800,000 slaves in the Caribbean, South Africa and Canada.

More: Fact check: The Irish were indentured servants, not slaves

More: In historic move, North Carolina city approves reparations for Black residents

France banned slave trading in 1817, but the ban wasn’t effective until 1826. The country abolished slavery in 1848.

Slavery was abolished in Cuba in 1886 and in Brazil in 1888.

And in 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, stating, “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.”

Did Black people own slaves?

The Facebook post also claims, “Black people owned slaves too. White people were slaves too.”

According to a 2013 article written by Henry Louis Gates Jr. from The Root, “some free Black people in this country bought and sold other Black people, and did so at least since 1654, continuing to do so right through the Civil War.” Gates is director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

There has long been a debate among historians about the motives behind free Black people owning slaves, with some believing it may have been to protect family members.

John Hope Franklin, who was one of America’s most accomplished historians, wrote: “The majority of Negro owners of slaves had some personal interest in their property. There were instances, however, in which free Negroes had a real economic interest in the institution of slavery and held slaves in order to improve their economic status.”

It is unknown exactly how many Black people owned slaves, but the vast majority of slave owners in the United States were not Black.

The Root article offers this: “In 1830, the year most carefully studied by (historian) Carter G. Woodson, about 13.7 percent (319,599) of the black population was free. Of these, 3,776 free Negroes owned 12,907 slaves, out of a total of 2,009,043 slaves owned in the entire United States, so the numbers of slaves owned by black people over all was quite small by comparison with the number owned by white people.”

The claim about white people being slaves appears to stem from the long-standing myth that the first slaves in North America were white Irish people — which has been debunked by various outlets, including USA TODAY.

Historian Liam Hogan has spent years debunking the myth of Irish slavery. In 2018, he told Pacific Standard Magazine that in the British American Colonies, many Irish people were indentured servants — but the majority of them did so willingly. Indentured servitude required people to work uncompensated for a contracted period, which is different than slavery.

Our rating: Partly false

The claims in the post have been rated PARTLY FALSE. The U.S. was not the first nor only country to abolish slavery. While there is also no evidence to suggest that a large portion of slave owners were Black or that white people were enslaved in the United States, it is true that some free Black people did own slaves.