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 ...
Slavery is horrible. Trying to represent one form or another as worse is kind of missing the point.
Slavery was, and actually still is. It’s a legal status among men that has existed throughout recorded history. Historically, it’s actually been regarded as humane, compared to the competing practice of slaughtering conquered peoples wholesale.
So, some perspective is in order. Would I want to be a slave? Hell no. Was it a walk in the park for those enslaved? Hell no.
Better than you and your family being wiped from the face of the earth, however.
again read the article before you comment you’re making assumptions based on your understanding without reading the article that dispute your assumptions about how indentured servitude worked in reality
There is a logic to this.
if you have two slaves..
one you own in perpetuity (40 + years) and
0ne you own only temporarily (7 years)
which are you going to use up first?
since you only have the temporary one for 7 years but the permanent one for a longer time
you basically want to use up the short timer first ...you use up (work harder) the one that has the shorter time of being a slave to you
You “use up” the one to whom you have no further obligation if unable to work, and you “use up” the one whose inevitable, accelerated decline if he or she lives is none of your concern.
It’s important to remember people didn’t live very long compared to today. A seven year indenture is a significant chunk of one’s life. Also master-servant relations were govern by a very strict one way legal code. Indentures could be extended for violations of behavior with little to no appeal.
it’s no different than something you own versus something your rent ...like a car
people always abused a rental car harder
than they’re a car that they own
because the car they own going to have last for a longer time then the car they only have temporary
I did read the article. What you say may be true, but I maintain it still isn’t the same as chatel slavery. People in England were sent to debtors prison for not paying debts. “Free” people turned to crime because they had no other option than starvation. Press gangs scooped up “free” Englishmen for the Navy and Army. Brutal times.
True. All manner of trivial “infractions” led to extended term of indenture, like for instance getting pregnant if female, fathering a child if male.
You “use up” the one to whom you have no further obligation if unable to work, and you “use up” the one whose inevitable, accelerated decline if he or she lives is none of your concern.
that’s one of the points of the article that basically the indentured service were invariably never given what was promised after they were freed or even freed
Slaves, as well as owners, were every color. Black owners are also “forgotten.”
I do not disagree with your basic premise, but don't underestimate the world-wide impact of the French Revolution on the demise of slavery.
When the Declaration of Independence was signed, slavery was legal in all of the original 13 states. By 1804, every state north of the Mason Dixon line had either abolished or passed laws for the extinction of slavery. Every nation in Europe that had been under Napoleon's control (which is every nation in Europe other than Russia, the UK and the Ottoman Empire) saw slavery and serfdom exterminated.
In the UK, Irish Catholics were emancipated in 1825 and Blacks in 1833. Even Russia emancipated its serfs in 1861. By 1861 the only places controlled by Western Powers where slavery remained were the Southern states, Britain's slave empire in India, and Brazil.
My Catholic Irish ancestors were sent from Ulster to the Livingston plantation just south of Rensselaer in 1720...
Every male 10 and up in the family was indentured until they were 21...
and then theres my 7 year old ancestor who was made a slave till age 21 in MASS Colony in 1633 to pay for her father’s crimes...
he was free and deported to New York Colony years before she was free...
It is and was not a uniquely American institution where only Whites held Blacks in bondage.
Some of the the largest slave owners in the south were Black and lived in NOLA.
During some years of Cromwell's pillage of Ireland more Irish were sent to the Carribean as slaves than Africans.
Native Americans held other Native Americans.
The Cherokee were especially resistant to freeing their Black slaves after the war.
Let's not forget the Aztecs.
The Mexicans felt that the Native Americans made better slaves than Africans but they had a tendency to escape.
The mohammadens were some of the most prolific slave raiders and sent many Europeans into slavery.
At the time of the founding of the US there were more White Europeans and Americans enslaved in North Africa and the ME than there were Africans enslaved in US territory.
Thank you. That was the info I was looking for.
Bottom line is the black slaves had it easy compared to the white slaves who tended to die within two years but if they did live they went on to be free after paying their indentured servitude debt whereas the black slaves, at least until they were freed after the civil war that cost 600k American lives with countless more maimed, were slaves for life.
Pound for pound; it sure sounds like it was better to be a black slave than a white one during this era. I can’t even imagine “owning” a slave these days but that was a different era with different norms and sadly slavery still exists in some parts of the world today.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3574078/posts?page=28#28
Bookmarking this info; maybe they did that with stairs because up to that point they only had seen & used ladders?
I would never say that any slave had it easy. Depending upon the nature of their owner, some led lives that were not entirely unpleasant, particularly house servants, but saying they had it easy is really misleading to the point of being wrong. But, more were comparatively well-treated than were severely abused and whipped, though, that’s a politically motivated exaggeration in the opposite direction. Indentured servants on the other hand were pretty much just throwaways, use and discard, churn and burn. They paid their transport in order to get their headrights which meant expanding their plantations. The indentured were to get part of those headrights as well but often did not.
Most african slaves were shipped to Spanish mining and agriculture operations in South America. They died quickly from the brutality of the Spanish.
The slavery was different in America: quite a bit less brutal. A 2 year lifespan for a slave in South America I can believe. Less so for America.
A lot of slaves in America were used in manufacturing, not necessarily in agriculture.
You are correct about black slavery lasting much longer.
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