Posted on 08/02/2017 2:39:28 PM PDT by Jan_Sobieski
Slavery in America, typically associated with blacks from Africa, was an enterprise that began with the shipping of more than 300,000 white Britons to the colonies. This little known history is fascinatingly recounted in White Cargo (New York University Press, 2007). Drawing on letters, diaries, ship manifests, court documents, and government archives, authors Don Jordan and Michael Walsh detail how thousands of whites endured the hardships of tobacco farming and lived and died in bondage in the New World.
Following the cultivation in 1613 of an acceptable tobacco crop in Virginia, the need for labor accelerated. Slavery was viewed as the cheapest and most expedient way of providing the necessary work force. Due to harsh working conditions, beatings, starvation, and disease, survival rates for slaves rarely exceeded two years. Thus, the high level of demand was sustained by a continuous flow of white slaves from England, Ireland, and Scotland from 1618 to 1775, who were imported to serve America's colonial masters.
These white slaves in the New World consisted of street children plucked from London's back alleys, prostitutes, and impoverished migrants searching for a brighter future and willing to sign up for indentured servitude. Convicts were also persuaded to avoid lengthy sentences and executions on their home soil by enslavement in the British colonies. The much maligned Irish, viewed as savages worthy of ethnic cleansing and despised for their rejection of Protestantism, also made up a portion of America's first slave population, as did Quakers, Cavaliers, Puritans, Jesuits, and others.
Around 1618 at the start of their colonial slave trade, the English began by seizing and shipping to Virginia impoverished children, even toddlers, from London slums...
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
The irony in the Pharisee's statement is that Israel (Judea, Samaria, and Galilee) were under occupation from Rome at the time they stated this!? They were not free as a nation, and they were not free spiritually. As I write this, there is a Google sponsored ad blitz on Youtube supporting the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI.org). It is Ironic that at a time when blacks have more opportunities than any time in history, this organization makes statements as though slavery still exists in America...
"I don't believe we are free in america"
"America's Legacy of Slavery, Lynching, and Segregation"
"We created this environment by being silent
Slavery didnt end in 1865...we haven't done anything to acknowledge it!
While no one denies that America had slavery, what is conspicuously absent is truth regarding color blind slavery. People of all races and skin colors were enslaved; blacks, whites, and all others together. Blacks, whites, and all others together must know the truth today; virtually all countries in the history of the world had some form of slavery at some point yet it was Great Britain and America that eradicated slavery in the world today (except in Muslim countries where blacks are still being enslaved)...
I want Reparations!!!!!!!!!!
How many times do I have to hear “America is haunted by slavery”? That, of course, only includes black slavery. It doesn’t take into account that almost every country in the world has practiced slavery, and others still do even today. Some of them are more brutal than ever existed here. Yet I’m supposed to worry about slavery 200 freaking years ago, and feel “haunted” by it. No one is a slave in the land of the free, get over it. Call me a racist if you want to. But that makes you a liar.
don’t know how accurate this is. It is interesting.
http://settingrecordstraight.blogspot.com/2015/03/irish-forgotten-white-slaves.html?m=1
You read my mind, Telepathic Intruder!
Yeah, they probably sucked close to 40% of their income out of them in taxes and forced them to contribute to a Ponzi scheme and set a mandate that forced them to buy crappy, overpriced health insurance.
Wait a minute....
Between this and the press gangs for the Royal Navy, a guy didn’t want to hang around English ports.
Agreed! DRAIN THE SWAMP!!! (say...isn’t foggy bottom a swamp, anyhow?)
“Black slaves received better treatment than Europeans.....”
That’s outright comedy.
“Black slaves received better treatment than Europeans.....”
That’s outright comedy.
It depends on what you mean by, comedy?
Great dose of reality history... Thank you.
Indentured servants didn’t have it too good.
Did black slaves also have a 2 year estimated life span once they reached the “new world” like the white slaves did?
This should shut up those who harp on black slavery once and for all time.
Every human being is a desendent of slaves. America did not invent slavery, nor was it the first to end it. But it was among the first. Great Britain abolished slavery in the British Empire in 1807. The United States took another another 55 years. Before Spain, Portugal, Egypt and many other had done so. White people ENDED slavery.
...except for the parts of the world where it is still practiced.
“Did black slaves also have a 2 year estimated life span once they reached the “new world” like the white slaves did?”
Would that be survival of the fittest?
Or you may want to review survival rates of African Slaves on sugar cane plantations.
“It depends on what you mean by, comedy?”
By comedy, I mean it is laughable to claim that European indentured servants had it more difficult than African slaves in the Americas.
Slavery in the U.S. was basically a relic of the British Empire. They may have banned it in their own country 55 years earlier than here, but only because it wasn’t so invested there. The newly formed U.S. government just didn’t have the power to ban slavery at that time, because the British had so institutionalized it. It finally took a civil war, and the bloodiest one in our history. I’ve heard some say that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery. But without the issue of slavery in the first place, the Civil War would not have happened.
How many times do I have to hear “America is haunted by slavery”? That, of course, only includes black slavery. It doesn’t take into account that almost every country in the world has practiced slavery, and others still do even today. Some of them are more brutal than ever existed here. Yet I’m supposed to worry about slavery 200 freaking years ago, and feel “haunted” by it. No one is a slave in the land of the free, get over it. Call me a racist if you want to. But that makes you a liar.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.