The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America

American Thinker ^ | July 28, 2017 | Janet Levy

[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...

[Boomer]

That’s why I used the words ‘compared to’. I can’t imagine any slave had it “easy” per se. Some easier physically than others, yes, but certainly not easy.

I guess the point to be made is when certain black celebrities squawk about reparations; we can say the white slaves had it worse so howabout we call it a draw and forget about any reparations.

I’m glad to see AG Sessions going after Affirmative Action. I’m a victim of that racist law which is nothing more than reverse racism. If racism is bad then it’s bad both ways. It should have never been made into a law to push white guys like me off jobs so quotas could be met. Grrrr. I still get steamed when I think about the income lost because of that insidious law.

[gundog]

Two years of life expectancy probably doesn’t leave a lot of time for having a family. African slaves were expensive. It only stands to reason that they would be bred like livestock, however distasteful that may be.

[TheNext]

Please don’t whip me Massah!

Keep working, China slave, American Blacks really want their smart phones.

[T-Bone Texan]

“Black slaves received better treatment than Europeans.....”

"... That’s outright comedy...

No, it's outright fact, in many cases. If you knew history you would not make such comments.