Who Brought the Slaves to America?

Who Brought the Slaves to America? by Walter White is a polemical examination of the Atlantic slave trade that advances the author’s claim that Jewish merchants and financiers played a leading and deliberately obscured role in the development and operation of slavery in colonial America. Beginning with Columbus and the earliest European ventures in the Americas, White concentrates on Newport, Charleston, New York, the West Indies, and the African coast, describing the commercial network of ships, distilleries, merchants, agents, and slave markets that sustained the trade. Particular attention is given to Aaron Lopez and other Jewish merchants whom White identifies as participants in the trafficking of enslaved Africans, and the booklet describes the capture, sale, Middle Passage, brutal conditions aboard slave ships, auctions, and enormous profits associated with human trafficking. White presents shipping correspondence, lists of vessels and merchants, contemporary records, illustrations of slave ships and restraints, and references including Elizabeth Donnan’s Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America as documentation for his thesis. The historical discussion is incorporated into White’s broader antisemitic worldview, in which he attributes slavery and later political developments to collective Jewish influence, and the concluding material advocates voluntary African-American repatriation to Africa as a political response.