Slavery and Marines’ Hymn From the Halls of Montezuma / To the shores of Tripoli
America’s first major war outside the New World was fought because of white slavery.
North African pirates—who enslaved an estimated 1 to 1.3 million Europeans between 1500 and 1800 as part of the Barbary slave trade—had captured many American sailors by the late eighteenth century.
Rather than continuing to pay ransoms for their return, the U.S. Marines sailed to Tripoli (modern-day Libya) and made war on their captors.
This was immortalized in a lyric of the Marines’ Hymn From the Halls of Montezuma / To the shores of Tripoli—which makes it stranger that most Americans have never heard of the Barbary slave trade.
What I learned from teaching slavery to a group of college freshmen is that many (perhaps most) American kids graduate high school believing, falsely, that slavery happened only in America.
Their minds are not blown by rehearsing the brutal facts of American slavery. Their minds are blown to learn that other brutal slaveries also existed all over the world.
Coleman Hughes The Free Press 19 June 2025
https://www.thefp.com/p/american-students-arent-taught-about-slavery
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