The Erasure of History and the Coming Reckoning

White America has always preferred myth over truth. Nowhere is this clearer than in the way it tells the story of slavery. Revisionists want to whitewash the horror — to remove the blood, the poison, the screams, the revolts — and replace it with a neat narrative of white benevolence. They tell schoolchildren that America “woke up” and freed enslaved Africans because it grew a conscience. That’s not just a lie, it’s an erasure.

Abraham Lincoln himself destroyed that myth in his own words. In 1862, he wrote to Horace Greeley: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it… and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it.” Lincoln was no abolitionist saint. He was a politician who viewed emancipation as a tactic of war, not an act of moral awakening. History has painted him as a savior, but the truth is the enslaved freed themselves.

For centuries, enslaved Africans fought a war on American soil that textbooks dare not name. They burned plantations, killed enslavers, and ran to freedom in waves. They fought through poison slipped into food, through fires set in the night, through broken tools and sabotaged work. Enslaved women, especially, turned kitchens into battlefields — seventy percent of recorded enslaver killings were by their hands. They were rootworkers, poisoners, conjurers, leaders of revolt. They invoked their gods, their spirits, their ancestors to strike fear into white hearts.

The same way Haitians struck terror into the hearts of their enslavers — with fire, blade, and the power of spirit — enslaved Africans in America struck fear into white society and the fragile world it had built on stolen labor. White Americans lived in constant dread. Behind every door, in every field, in every kitchen, was the possibility of rebellion. Every plantation was a battlefield. Every enslaved Black body carried the potential to undo the lie of white supremacy. It was not mercy that cracked slavery — it was fear. The same fear Haiti unleashed upon France, American Blacks unleashed upon the so-called masters of a so-called democracy.

📜 Real Accounts of Black Resistance

The Stono Rebellion (1739, South Carolina):

A group of Angolan-born enslaved men, some Catholic and militarily trained, launched an armed march toward freedom. They killed more than 20 whites, burned plantations, and rallied nearly 100 others. One colonist wrote in terror: “I was roused by the cry, ‘the Negroes are risen!’”

Poison in the Kitchen — Women’s Warfare (18th–19th Century):

Court records across the South detail enslaved women accused of poisoning their enslavers. One Charleston enslaver wrote: “I live in constant suspicion that those who cook my food may bring about my death.” Whether all accusations were true or not, the paranoia reveals a hidden war: women using knowledge of herbs, roots, and minerals to strike directly at white households.

Conjure Women & Spiritual Warfare:

Beyond poison, women wielded rootwork and curses as weapons. In a WPA interview, an elder recalled: “My mammy knowed roots that make de overseer sick. He beat her, but den he fall down same night.”

In Georgia, an enslaved woman was caught burying bottles filled with needles and hair under her enslaver’s doorstep — classic “goofering” meant to bring illness or ruin. Whites called it “witchcraft,” but for the enslaved it was warfare.

Zora Neale Hurston recorded that enslaved women made protective amulets for children and destructive charms for enslavers. One woman told her: “We wore de roots ‘round we necks, but sometime we plant ‘em in de white folks’ yard. Den dey troubles come.”

Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831, Virginia):

Turner testified to visions: “The Spirit spoke to me… saying the Serpent was loosened, and Christ had laid down the yoke I was to take it up and slay my enemies with their own weapons.” His uprising left Virginia trembling in panic.

The 1811 German Coast Uprising (Louisiana):

Nearly 500 enslaved Africans rose up with cane knives and axes, marching toward New Orleans. They burned houses and sugar mills. A planter wrote: “The whole coast is in arms… the Negroes are marching with banners.”

Harriet Tubman — the General & the Visionary (1863, South Carolina):

Tubman led the Combahee River Raid, freeing 700 enslaved people in one night. She declared: “I always told God, ‘I’m going to hold steady on You, and You’ve got to see me through.’” Guided by dreams and visions, she never lost a passenger. Her very body was a vessel of Spirit turned into war.

Harriet Jacobs — A Woman’s War (1861):

Jacobs described slavery’s unique brutality for women: “Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women.” Her resistance was refusal — refusing rape, refusing to bear children into bondage, hiding seven years in an attic rather than submit. Her survival was rebellion.

Everyday Spirit Work:

Thomas Jefferson admitted: “Superstition among them produces effects on their bodies which astonish us.” He feared Black conjure more than guns. White fear itself testifies to the enslaved’s hidden arsenal of spiritual warfare.

The Reckoning

But when these stories are erased, when they are sanitized out of history, it does more than rob Black descendants of truth. It cripples white descendants, too. Because they grow up blind to the real power they are up against. They imagine history as their story alone — conquest, victory, progress — never realizing that in the shadows, in the bloodlines of those they tried to break, there is an undefeated current of spiritual resistance.

This is why white supremacy keeps stumbling into its own destruction. The move back toward white Christian nationalism today is not strength — it is desperation. It is the same arrogance that led enslavers to believe they could hold Haiti forever, only to be destroyed by a revolution powered not just by guns but by Vodou, by lwa, by the spirits of Africa rising through the enslaved to crush empire.

America didn’t end slavery because of morality. It ended because it couldn’t stop the revolts, the poisonings, the escapes, the relentless warfare of the enslaved. It ended because Black people made slavery ungovernable. To erase that is to erase the single greatest truth of America’s origin story: that it was built on a war, and that war never ended.

And here is the danger for those who erase — they leave themselves unprepared. They think they are fighting only politics and laws. They don’t see that this is a spiritual war. They don’t know what it means to face ancestral forces, to face a people who carry in their blood the memory of fire, revolt, and victory. Erasure is not safety. It is blindness. And blind empires always fall.

By rewriting history, you resign yourself to repeating its mistakes — to inheriting the same failed beliefs and behaviors of your forefathers. But this time, there is no excuse for the failure.

~Ori Alchemy