Tim Kaine, the Democratic Senator from Virginia has caused a firestone over his recent comments about slavery.
During a speech on June 16 on the Senate floor Kaine said that the United States “created” slavery and “didn’t inherit slavery from anybody.”
At the time Kaine was speaking in favor of the Justice in Policing Act of 2020, which Kaine recently introduced with Senators Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, Yahoo reported. He urged his fellow senators to “dismantle the structures of racism that our federal, state, and local governments carefully erected and maintained over centuries.”
“The first African Americans sent into the English colonies came to Point Comfort 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,” Kaine went on to explain. “The United States didn’t inherit slavery from anybody. We created it. It got created by the Virginia General Assembly and the legislatures of other states. It got created by the court systems in colonial America that enforced fugitive slave laws.”
Immediately this got backlash form not only Republicans but from others who said his words were factually incorrect.
Errol Webber, a Black Republican running for Congress in California, tweeted: “Senator Tim Kaine proved his historical ignorance beyond any reasonable doubt today by claiming that the United States of America created the slavery. About 20 seconds of research would’ve proven that wrong, but The Democrats have a race war to incite! Facts be damned!”
Others praised Kaine. As Charlotte Clymer @cmclymer tweeted: “Actually, Tim Kaine is right. The United States was the first representative democracy with a constitution that codified slavery in a legal system. Slavery existed long before America, but the Founding Fathers had the audacity to declare the enslaved as 3/5 of a human being.”
John Haltiwanger@jchaltiwanger posted on Twitter: “Tim Kaine’s words are being widely taken out of context and misinterpreted. He was highlighting how the US codified slavery/maintained it over centuries. But dunking on people on Twitter apparently more important to many folks than having honest conversations about US history.”
And Justin L. HunteFlag @TheCompany tweeted, “There’s a ton of people correcting Tim Kaine b/c slavery existed before America.That’s irrelevant for the point he’s making. The founders had a choice to not enslave people. They still decided to do it without outside pressure.They also murdered untold numbers of natives.”
So Kaine tried to clarify his speech in a statement to National Review which was much longer than the prepared speech released by his office.
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“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,” Kaine explained to The National Review. “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.”
