Blacks were not the only slaves here in America and even blacks owned slaves during that time and if you disagree then look it up and enjoy learning the truth. Also Slaves were sold by conquering Tribes in Africa to slave traders and a lot of the Slave traders dealt with Moors in certain regions.
True, Africans were not the only slaves and also true that slavery as a social institution has manifested independently on every continent. But as to the first part Africans made up the overwhelming majority of slavery in North and South America. Columbus had tried enslaving Native Americans when he got here and Cromwell sent tens of thousands of Irish captives but by
far the model that eventually took off and worked economically was the African transAtlantic slave trade run by European merchants. There's a reason for that.
When slavery developed through history as a social striation around the world, it had been about spoils of war between neighboring tribes --- tribe A defeats tribe B in war and as a result takes B's land, as well as its crops, its villages -- and its people. But tribe A and tribe B would have been neighbors and ethnically/geographically related. An African, or European, or Native American slave was "owned" by another African, European or Native American. But the idea of "harvesting" people from one continent and then transporting them across an ocean to a distant land which for them may as well have been another planet where they had no language in common, no culture in common, no religious tradition in common, not even their own body types, became a huge advantage for the slaveholder as a psychological tool.
A slave in Africa, if he escapes --- is IN Africa, his own land. He can fairly easily find familiar land, familiar people, familiar culture. An African slave escaping in the Americas is in a completely foreign world where he has no idea what's over the horizon, won't be able to communicate when he gets there and will have nothing to relate or attach to. And further, when he encounters other people his skin color immediately gives him away That was the enormous psychological tool, and it's why African slaves were forbidden education, forbidden religion and kept to a practical minimum on learning the European language and indulging in cultural exercise --- to keep them
vulnerable.
Metter of fact, when the Ku Klux Klan started dressing up in sheets and riding around it was continuing a long-established tradition of "night riders" or "slave patrols" that passed themselves off as "ghosts" to keep the African slaves in fear and superstition.
Literally MILLIONS of Africans were brought across the Atlantic to North, South, Central and Caribbean America-- no comparison to perhaps fifty thousand Irish sent by Cromwell -- who, when they arrived,
did have a common language with the outside,
did have religious and cultural traditions in common with their masters,
did have a race in common as well,
and were afforded a term to work off their "indentured servitude". So not only is there no comparison in the numbers, there's also no comparison to the status; "slavery" for an African prisoner was entirely different from "indentured servitude" for a European prisoner. The European had no language or cultural or religious barrier and his term was finite. And if he was released or escaped he didn't look on the outside any different from his captors' people. The African was dropped into a completely foreign world he had deliberately been given no tools to cope with, and his situation had
no end, even for his children. He was told he was inferior and that's just the way of things.
This transAtlantic slave trade is also where the concept of racism starts. In order to justify itself against its moral opponents especially in the Church, the trade had to convince the masses that these strange creatures from this strange continent were "not really humans anyway, so it's OK". Much like a farmer would own cattle. Religious clerics were engaged to sell that propaganda, even while other religious clerics disputed it. The powerful institution of Christianity was used both to rationalize slavery and to oppose it. But prior to all this the concept that one race would be somehow ranked as "inferior" to another based on skin color, was nonexistent.
So the African component of slavery in the Americas cannot possibly be minimized. While it's technically true they were not the only slaves, about the only legacy of the Irish is the lilt in contemporary Caribbean speech where most of them were sent (such as in Jamaica). The legacy on the Africans is far more pervasive, including the overwhelming psychological and cultural warfare waged on it.
Lincoln was not out to free the Slaves when he became President and had actually defended slave owners in the past, so this notion the GOP was the one that freed the slaves is cute because if you really dig into the real reason it was to punish the South for it insurrection and to take away it free labor force which made it an Economic reason and less about the right of freedom of the Slave.
That's basically accurate I think. Although it's erroneous to conflate the Lincoln and his government with a political party. It was the government, not a political party, that waged the war, which had at least some support from both parties. But the war itself was, as most wars are, based on economics and which side would have an economic advantage. That particular rivalry had been brewing for really as long as this country had existed, the proverbial "fourscore and seven years ago", and dated to long before the pressures of the Abolition movement became associated with it.
Both the widespread idea that "the Civil War was all about slavery" and the competing idea that "the Civil War was all about economics" miss the mark by oversimplifying and ignoring contexts. Just as similar ideas about Lincoln's motivations do. The underlying dynamics were complex and cannot possibly reduce to a single sentence or theme.
