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.  

[jcon40]

Just got around to listening to Grada - John Riley song.

Excellent ! Thx for the nudge...

Did some more reading on the red haired blue eyed Mexicas of today.

apparently many of the Irish stayed after the Mexican war and raised families. Also every year in Sept there are still celebrations in some towns for John Riley’s Brigade.

[PotatoHeadMick]

It is certainly putting forth a point of view forcefully but for you to dismiss it as propaganda you would have to prove it was factually inaccurate.

Are there points that have been made which are erroneous?

As for Cromwell, there is much to be said in his favour, the victory of parliament over the king was a major stepping point in the struggle for democracy over arbitrary rule around the world, including the US.

But as the man himself said, we must look at him warts and all. The execution of the king was legally dubious, but beyond that Cromwell’s rule was in simple fact a totalitarian military dictatorship. Having overthrown the king he merely set himself up as tyrant in his place.

When it comes to Ireland not even the most slavish of follower of Cromwell has ever done anything other than to simply concede that the man was a genocidal mass murderer, who treated the Irish as sub-humans to be killed or banished without mercy.

Well, it would be hard to do otherwise as Cromwell freely admitted that was exactly how he treated the Irish, and had no shame about doing so believing he was carrying out God’s work, although the point where Christ instructed his followers to murder and enslave helpless men, women and children seems not to be mentioned in any Bible I ever read.

[wardaddy]

I’ve seen no proof that hundreds of thousands of Irish were sent to the New World as chattel slavery

And I’d wager it’s fairly well assumed here I’m pretty much alt right sympathetic when it comes to white nationalism or whatever standing up for being a white traditionalist means today

There are writers like Derbyshire and Taylor and Sailor I agree with pretty much on this precise topic but not everything especially Taylor that we are under assault so I’m not disagreeing because I think it erodes the demigod nature of tropical Africans and their annointment as supreme victims of white enslavers

I just don’t buy it even though O Sullivan is one of the quads of my DNA helix

My views on Oliver is he was incredible militarily considering but I would have been a Royalist as a southerner ...likely

And he was awful to the Irish primarily due to his hatred of Rome

And beheading Sir Alec Guiness.....as unforgivable