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.  

[BenLurkin]

I want one. How much is the opening bid?

[silverleaf]

Bookmark ditto

[doorgunner69]

I am sure the Soros stooges at Snopes say it is all a myth, never happened.

[Army Air Corps]

They got the Southern Poverty Law Center to do that.

[Daffynition]

[Albion Wilde]

bump

[Irish Eyes]

Thanks for the post, very few people are aware of this part of history.

Irish :)

[PotatoHeadMick]

In fairness it is not just the US education system. Few people in the UK know about this either.

The way Irish history is taught in British schools is sort of a semi-apologetic, “we weren’t very nice in Ireland, but you know how it is those Irish are a crazy lot and there wasn’t much else we could do but let’s pass over it, bye-gones be by-gones and all that”, but the slave trade, the oppression of black people by the British Empire is examined in great detail and the guilt trip is imbued in British schoolchildren.

Try telling a British person who has been educated about the crimes of empire that every single crime committed by the British in their empire against blacks and Indians was first tried out against the Irish, the racism, the genocides, the expropriation, the denial of basic human rights, famine, slavery the lot, all were tried out first on the Irish and you’ll be regarded as a bit of a crank.

Now I am not a MOPEr (”MOPE” is used as a term of abuse to describe chip on the shoulder Irish people who regard themselves as the “most oppressed people,ever”). I do realise that the past was a different place and things were done routinely hundreds of years ago that would horrify us today, but the genuine ignorance among British people about the enormity of the crimes committed in Ireland can sometimes be a bit exasperating.

As an example the figure given above about the decline in the Irish population in the mid-seventeenth century. In British schoolbooks that period is referred to as the “English Civil War”. 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.

[bronxville]

https://mediachecker.wordpress.com/2014/04/01/irish-slavery/

[lizma2]

About 1 1/2 decades ago archeologists found skeletal remains under the basement floor in a very old home in Annapolis, MD. The body via an extensive autopsy showed it to be horrible mistreated when alive. It was said at time that it was thought to be a that of a slave and it was said to be Irish. I was shocked.

Went to Williamsburg shortly there after and start asking questions and sure enough, found out that the first wave of slaves to the colony were the Irish and the Scots. They said some were called indentured servants but they were still bound, treated like cattle and most were never freed.

Won’t argue that the DOE has dumb downed Americans but I went to school prior and had no idea what so ever this was our history.

[bronxville]

Yes, know Irish history and one knows what’s happening today. Ireland was the English laboratory for eight hundred years.

[looois]

My family roots are from Wales. Handed down to me story was that two brothers were kidnapped in Wales and brought to Virginia (late 17th century) to be indentured servants. The King later freed them and gave them a land grant. One of the brothers was my great (so many times) grandfather. So it wasn’t just the Irish and Scots.

[bronxville]

There’s a street in Drogheda called Scarlett Lane - named after the bloody work Oliver Cromwell did there...

[lizma2]

” and things were done routinely hundreds of years ago that would horrify us today,’

No. Sounds like ISIS today.

History ALWAYS repeats its self.

Because many people never learn from it.

[PotatoHeadMick]

There is a bit of a difference between the indentured workers and the slaves discussed above.

Indentured servants certainly had a hard time, they worked hard and were treated badly, but they weren’t slaves. They left their homes voluntarily, they owned their own bodies and could not be bought and sold, they were paid pittances until they paid off their indentures but they were paid, they had rights and could appeal to the courts, they could get married to the spouse of their choice and eventually own property.

They had a hard life but they were not slaves.

The people described above were slaves, pure and simple, they were captured and taken in chains to work as slaves and had zero rights, they were treated as animals and could be bought and sold or killed with impunity.

Indentured service and slavery were two very different things.

[jcon40]

Another little known piece of Irish American History was from the Mexican American War.

Supposedly resulted in the largest mass execution in American military history

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Patrick%27s_Battalion

[DesertRhino]

This is basically stormfront junk history.

[skr]

I’d read that African slaves in mines were insurable but that Irish slaves weren’t because they weren’t worth enough to bother.

[Eagles6]

Bttt

[doorgunner69]

This is basically stormfront junk history.

Not saying it is not, but on what do you base your claim?