By Edward Achorn

Last week, Tim Kaine made a ludicrous statement: “The United States didn’t inherit slavery from anybody. We created it.”

It is shocking to hear a U.S. senator, a former Virginia governor and a former major-party candidate for vice president spout such nonsense, particularly at a time when racial tensions have been ratcheted up, with rioters looting and burning neighborhoods.

Even a cursory reading of world history would reveal that America did not create the institution of slavery (though North America’s colonies permitted it to take hold here). Slavery goes back many thousands of years.

And Africans have not been the only victims. Virtually every human culture has embraced it, in huge numbers, notably including China and India. It existed in the Americas — practiced widely and with awful brutality by indigenous peoples — before Christopher Columbus arrived. In the ancient world (see the second century mosaic of Roman slave servants above), slavery was ubiquitous. Jews were famously enslaved in Egypt, and led from bondage by Moses.

Slavery exists around the world now, disgracefully tolerated. National Geographic estimates some 27 million people are still held in bondage.

As the great economist Thomas Sowell has noted (see his “The Real History of Slavery”), at least 1 million white people were enslaved by North African pirates between 1500 and 1800. The very word slave derives from Slav — white Europeans who were enslaved.

The monstrous African slave trade involved the sale of prisoners of war taken in tribal battles, greatly enriching some African leaders and tribes. I suspect few people know that only a small fraction of the black slaves sent to the New World went to North America.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., a professor in Harvard’s Department of African and African American Studies, explained:

“Between 1525 and 1866, in the entire history of the slave trade to the New World, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World. 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage, disembarking in North America, the Caribbean and South America.

“And how many of these 10.7 million Africans were shipped directly to North America? Only about 388,000. That’s right: a tiny percentage.”

Arab slave traders engaged in their brutal business of selling Africans for centuries before that. Some scholars believe African slaves died in greater numbers while being transported across the Sahara Desert than even during the Middle Passage to the New World. Those who survived were worked to death in the Ottoman Empire’s Sahara salt mines.

Here’s what was different about America: Western civilization is the first culture that seriously advanced moral arguments against slavery. America’s founders were among the first of those who denounced the institution, even though some of them owned slaves.

“Slavery was just not an issue, not even among intellectuals, much less among political leaders, until the 18^th century — and then it was an issue only in Western civilization,” Professor Sowell wrote in his book Ever Wonder Why?

“Among those who turned against slavery in the 18^th century were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry and other American leaders. You could research all of 18^th century Africa or Asia or the Middle East without finding any comparable rejection of slavery there. But who is singled out for scathing criticism today? American leaders of the 18^th century,” Mr. Sowell wrote.

It was an American — Abraham Lincoln — who said, “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” It was America that fought a horrific Civil War over slavery, one that claimed 750,000 American lives in bringing about slavery’s destruction.

And it was America that embraced Abraham Lincoln’s words at his Second Inauguration, the subject of my new book, Every Drop of Blood: “Fondly do we hope — fervently do we pray — that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”

Americans did not only accept that interpretation of the war, they erected a massive monument to Lincoln that features those words chiseled in stone, raised to the level of American scripture. Americans worked together, black and white, to fight racism and remove legal and other obstacles to the advancement of black Americans. Meanwhile, African Americans achieved success in every realm of American society.

Efforts to obliterate or distort this history are underway, such as The New York Times’ 1619 Project, which argues preposterously that America’s history is one of advancing bondage rather than freedom. Serious historians have debunked it, but schools are going forward with using it in classrooms. The ideological message seems to be spreading that America is “systemically racist” and uniquely bound to slavery.

In truth, this nation, though imperfect, is unique in its noble devotion to ideals of individual liberty; its restraints on government power, particularly through the Constitution’s Bill of Rights; and its advocacy of equal rights for all — the time bomb against slavery that the Founders implanted in the Declaration of Independence.

Endless disparagement of this country and its founding — requiring a grotesque rewriting of its history — seems to me to have a pernicious aim. It is designed to undermine Americans’ love for their country and its ideals, with the idea of overturning its system of self-government. Those attacking America downplay the history of totalitarian alternatives, which ought to have been thoroughly discredited by the 20^th century, with the murders of tens of millions of people by their own governments.

In the heat of this ideological firestorm, Americans are now being fired for speaking out against racial animosity and violence. I pray that reasoned and factual history will survive in a country that Lincoln aptly called “the last best hope of earth.”

(Read Edward Achorn’s books about American history.)