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 ...
Then you must not have read the rest of the article where it explained the financial reasons why Africans were treated better than the original European Slaves...
At around the same time, the Dutch also had white slavery in New York state.
Indentured servnts weren’t slaves. They served for seven years then were free. They wern’t considered property and their descendants weren’t bound in perpetutity.
Just what I was going to say, and my ancestors were Irish. Yo! I want my reparations! And I’m sick of taking it from the man! Yo, where is my affirmative action??
You are incorrect and obviously did not read the article either. Please read this historically accurate article before responding foolishly...
While it was a poorly written article using far too many words, I read it all and understand the financial aspects of buying and selling human beings. However, it is absurd to claim that African slaves were treated better than anyone.
Heck, the article touches on conditions for the European slaves in 1618. Blacks were held in slavery in this country until 1865.
From where I sit, perhaps just three miles down the street from here, sycophants of the Confederacy sold the children of black slaves to the highest bidder.
I have read no accounts of 19th century Europeans having their children sold off to the highest bidder down in the markets of New Orleans.
The British outlawed the slave TRADE in 1807. This just about coincided with the abolition of the slave trade in the US constitution (20 years after the constitution went into effect).
Slavery wasn't outlawed in the empire until 1833.
“Did black slaves also have a 2 year estimated life span once they reached the “new world” like the white slaves did?”
Very True! They don’t teach a lot of detail in schools today. Case in point, having traveled our Country and visited many Museums while working as a road tech for over 3 decades.
Here’s one you won’t hear in a modern classroom.
Often times, .... when the Irish were brought to the Property of residence, the Property Owners could take nothing for granted. Irish slaves had to be instructed as to the correct way to use a Staircase. At first, - sometimes the slave would try to go up the stairs using / all their arms and legs. Similar to the way a dog might go up and down the stairs. These people never saw a staircase before. The Property owners would have to take the time, and teach them how to use the stairs, and keep upright while traversing the steps.
Yeah, it’s all there in the diaries and journals that have been preserved over the years. There are a lot of interesting details out there, ...... at least there used to be.
Read up on the very first legal chattel slave in the British North American colonies and get back to me. His name was John Casor. He was an indentured servant sued by his master for his labor, for life.
White people need to bitch and moan more.
Was that a yes or a no? I’m trying to figure out if whites or blacks had it worse as slaves since both were used.
Did black slave have a 2 year average lifespan as slaves in the new world like white slaves did?
What’s not well known is that the often forcible removal of Children from their families and moved to the British colonies such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand etc, continued right up until the mid 20th century. These children would be aquire (bought) and put on farms to work until they were grown. No pay, nobody looked in to see what the living conditions were like and on and on. They we known as home children
It’s very un-PC to note that African slaves were regarded as exotic and something of a status symbol in the early colonial era, and, as well, they were property for life with obligation to provide food and shelter. In general they received less harsh treatment than indentured servants from the British Isles and Ireland, who were not property, they were bound out for a term and so they were worked very hard to get the most out of them. Then, there’s the genetic resistance to mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria, that killed off indentured servants rather rapidly, whereas Africans tend to have some heritable resistance due to a gene mutation, the same mutation that leads to Sickle Cell Anemia. As always, it’s a far more complicated story than the ideologues are willing to admit, but to wrap it up the historically correct answer rather than the politically correct one is that Africans had a better survival rate, which is why they came to be preferred.
I highly recommend “The Fatal Shore”, a book about Australia Penal colony.
Other than that some indentured servants served longer, nothing in the article contradicts what I posted. Of course many died before their time was up, and conditions were brutal. Many free settlers died of starvation and disease also. Still that’s not the same as having your children and their children made property in perpetuity.
Many Irish were enslaved. German Hessian soldiers were drafted in Germany and sold to England to fight the Colonists.
The only way that is REMOTELY true is the fact that someone who paid for a slave would be quite careful to beat them within an inch of death but not kill them as it meant a lost investment, while conscripts were free.
But even with that sliver of truth the statement is still laughably false.
At this moment, I can see where that canal once existed.
In an hour, I will be down where sugar cane plantations once existed.
Both were bacj breaking work and the yellow fever and malaria did not give a damn what color you were.
I beg to differ regarding malaria.
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