IRISH: THE FORGOTTEN WHITE SLAVES

Setting The Record Straight ^ | 3/16/15 | Ronald Dwyer

[OneVike]

They came as slaves: human cargo transported on British ships bound for the Americas. They were shipped by the hundreds of thousands and included men, women, and even the youngest of children.

Whenever they rebelled or even disobeyed an order, they were punished in the harshest ways. Slave owners would hang their human property by their hands and set their hands or feet on fire as one form of punishment. Some were burned alive and had their heads placed on pikes in the marketplace as a warning to other captives.

We don’t really need to go through all of the gory details, do we? We know all too well the atrocities of the African slave trade.

But are we talking about African slavery? King James VI and Charles I also led a continued effort to enslave the Irish. Britain’s Oliver Cromwell furthered this practice of dehumanizing one’s next door neighbor.

The Irish slave trade began when James VI sold 30,000 Irish prisoners as slaves to the New World. His Proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies.

By the mid 1600s, the Irish were the main slaves sold to Antigua and Montserrat. At that time, 70% of the total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves.

Ireland quickly became the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants. The majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white.

From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English and another 300,000 were sold as slaves. Ireland’s population fell from about 1,500,000 to 600,000 in one single decade.

Families were ripped apart as the British did not allow Irish dads to take their wives and children with them across the Atlantic. This led to a helpless population of homeless women and children. Britain’s solution was to auction them off as well.

During the 1650s, over 100,000 Irish children between the ages of 10 and 14 were taken from their parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and New England. In this decade, 52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to Barbados and Virginia.

Another 30,000 Irish men and women were also transported and sold to the highest bidder. In 1656, Cromwell ordered that 2000 Irish children be taken to Jamaica and sold as slaves to English settlers.

Many people today will avoid calling the Irish slaves what they truly were: Slaves. They’ll come up with terms like “Indentured Servants” to describe what occurred to the Irish. However, in most cases from the 17th and 18th centuries, Irish slaves were nothing more than human cattle.

As an example, the African slave trade was just beginning during this same period. It is well recorded that African slaves, not tainted with the stain of the hated Catholic theology and more expensive to purchase, were often treated far better than their Irish counterparts.

African slaves were very expensive during the late 1600s (£50 Sterling). Irish slaves came cheap (no more than £5 Sterling). If a planter whipped, branded or beat an Irish slave to death, it was never a crime. A death was a monetary setback, but far cheaper than killing a more expensive African.

The English masters quickly began breeding the Irish women for both their own personal pleasure and for greater profit. Children of slaves were themselves slaves, which increased the size of the master’s free workforce.

Even if an Irish woman somehow obtained her freedom, her kids would remain slaves of her master. Thus, Irish mothers, even with this new found emancipation, would seldom abandon their children and would remain in servitude.

In time, the English thought of a better way to use these women to increase their market share: The settlers began to breed Irish women and girls (many as young as 12) with African men to produce slaves with a distinct complexion. These new “mulatto” slaves brought a higher price than Irish livestock and, likewise, enabled the settlers to save money rather than purchase new African slaves.

This practice of interbreeding Irish females with African men went on for several decades and was so widespread that, in 1681, legislation was passed “forbidding the practice of mating Irish slave women to African slave men for the purpose of producing slaves for sale.” In short, it was stopped only because it interfered with the profits of a large slave transport company.

England continued to ship tens of thousands of Irish slaves for more than a century. Records state that, after the 1798 Irish Rebellion, thousands of Irish slaves were sold to both America and Australia. There were horrible abuses of both African and Irish captives. One British ship even dumped 1,302 slaves into the Atlantic Ocean so that the crew would have plenty of food to eat.

There is little question the Irish experienced the horrors of slavery as much (if not more, in the 17th Century) as the Africans did. There is also little question that those brown, tanned faces you witness in your travels to the West Indies are very likely a combination of African and Irish ancestry.

In 1839, Britain finally decided on it’s own to end its participation in Satan’s highway to hell and stopped transporting slaves. While their decision did not stop pirates from doing what they desired, the new law slowly concluded this chapter of Irish misery.

But, if anyone, black or white, believes that slavery was only an African experience, then they’ve got it completely wrong. Irish slavery is a subject worth remembering, not erasing from our memories.

But, why is it so seldom discussed? Do the memories of hundreds of thousands of Irish victims not merit more than a mention from an unknown writer?

Or is their story to be the one that their English masters intended: To completely disappear as if it never happened.

None of the Irish victims ever made it back to their homeland to describe their ordeal. These are the lost slaves; the ones that time and biased history books conveniently forgot.

Interesting historical note: the last person killed at the Salem Witch Trials was Ann Glover. She and her husband had been shipped to Barbados as a slave in the 1650's. Her husband was killed there for refusing to renounce catholicism.

In the 1680's she was working as a housekeeper in Salem. After some of the children she was caring for got sick she was accused of being a witch.

At the trial they demanded she say the Lord's Prayer. She did so, but in Gaelic, because she didn't know English. She was then hung.  

[lizma2]

Not arguing but from what I read over the years, some were, some weren’t.

I’m just saying the label “indentured servent” was used to cover up the fact that the Irish and Scots were are first slaves in the colonies.

[wardaddy]

I’m with you

It’s more about Catholics as victims and

It’s beat up Cromwell day

I’m Irish too..ulster Scot

But that’s different

No comparison between Irish slave or servant trade and the Negro trade

Much as I loathe black victim hood and culture blight

[Pelham]

“It’s beat up Cromwell day”

That rat stole my ancestors’ estates!

but since I’ve got Scots, Scots-Irish and English blood as well I can choose any and all sides of this battle.

[karnage]

Today, the equivalent is abortion. America must awaken from her moral slumber and ban this hideous, murderous, barbarous practice of human sacrifice.

[Yo-Yo]

"But we don't what the Irish!"

[Deek]

We are Irish on my mom’s side. A segment being endentured from the 1600’s, but a lot of history lost due to young family members “orphaned” (I.e. Passed to other places to work).

[Mjreagan]

My father’s side came here to escape the famine. I suppose they were a bit ‘luckier’ at least for a time. I’m glad we both ended up here, I’m not very impressed with or fond of the politics of our ancestral home.

[Oberon]

Well, in the “English” civil war about 1% of the population of England died, in Scotland it was 3%, in Ireland it was something like 40%! And yet Ireland will feature as little more than a footnote in British history books discussing the English Civil War.

If you want to write the history books, you have to win the wars.

[fruser1]

Good reference.

I usually point to Jewish slaves of Egypt as the example of non-black slavery. This is better!

[oh8eleven]

Thanks to the Penal Laws, Irish Catholics were slaves in their own country as well ...

• He was forbidden to receive education.
• He was forbidden to enter a profession.
• He was forbidden to hold public office.
• He was forbidden to engage in trade or commerce.
• He was forbidden to live in a corporate town or within five miles thereof.
• He was forbidden to own a horse of greater value than five pounds.
• He was forbidden to own land.
• He was forbidden to lease land.
• He was forbidden to accept a mortgage on land in security for a loan.
• He was forbidden to vote.
• He was forbidden to keep any arms for his protection.
• He was forbidden to hold a life annuity.
• He was forbidden to buy land from a Protestant.
• He was forbidden to receive a gift of land from a Protestant.
• He was forbidden to inherit land from a Protestant.
• He was forbidden to inherit anything from a Protestant.
• He was forbidden to rent any land that was worth more than 30 shillings a year.
• He was forbidden to reap from his land any profit exceeding a third of the rent.
• He could not be guardian to a child.
• He could not, when dying, leave his infant children under Catholic guardianship.
• He could not attend Catholic worship.
• He was compelled by law to attend Protestant worship.
• He could not himself educate his child.
• He could not send his child to a Catholic teacher.
• He could not employ a Catholic teacher to come to his child.
• He could not send his child abroad to receive education.

[uncbob]

UNCONQUERED is a 1947 adventure film produced and directed by Cecil B. DeMille, released by Paramount Pictures, and starring Gary Cooper and Paulette Goddard.

Whites being sold as slaves is part of the background of the movie

It would never be made today

[BudgieRamone]

Song “John Riley” by a folk group called Grada describes this incident. It’s kind of a catchy tune.

[small farm girl]

Same story in my husband’s family of McKenny. Dumped in Maine somewhere in the 1600s.

[af_vet_1981]

It was a war on Catholics.

[inchworm]

Where’s my reparations?

[af_vet_1981]

Do you realize what that painting depicts an imaginary sale in the Roman Empire and has nothing to do with the British oppression of the Irish Catholics ?

Sale of a Slave Girl in Rome, 1884

By: Jean Leon Gerome

[GailA]

Yep, forgotten also are the plight of the Scots and Welsh at the hands of the English and their own Lords mostly Lowlanders close to the English border who cleared out hundreds of thousands who worked the land for generations so they could raise more profitable sheep. Many died in battle, sickness, and came to America as Indentured ‘servants’ or should I say slaves. Women were used as whores to their masters with the children then rejected by those masters who begot them on them.

Few remember William Wallace fight and death, or how The Bruce turned on his own people, only to find the English didn’t keep their word.

Look what the Roman’s did to enslave so many in their quest for world dominance.

My dad was a SPIC or WOP, second gen. American. Mom’s side was Scot, English, German and who knows what else.

[oh8eleven]

No reparations - just more hunger, disease and death.
The Irish were subjected to the Great Famine (1845-1859) which
forced almost a million to flee to America ... including my ggGrandparents.

Their suffering and ultimate act of courage escaping Ireland allowed me to live in the greatest country the world has ever known.
I've been grateful every day of my life.

[Albion Wilde]

This is basically stormfront junk history.

Oh, really? Set aside 50 minutes to watch this film, which shows the descendents of those captured Irish people now living in dire poverty in Barbados:

The Irish Sugar Slaves of Barbados

[Diapason]

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