The Forgotten Slaves: Whites in Servitude in Early America and Industrial Britain

Two years ago, Prime Minister Paul Keating of Australia refused to show "proper respect" to Britain's Queen Elizabeth II during her state visit. In response, Terry Dicks, a Conservative member of the British Parliament said, "It's a country of ex-convicts, so we should not be surprised by the rudeness of their prime minister."

A slur such as this would be considered unthinkable if it were uttered against any other class or race of people except the descendants of White slavery. Dicks' remark is not only offensive, it is ignorant and false. Most of Australia's "convicts" were shipped into servitude for such "crimes" as stealing seven yards of lace, cutting trees on an aristocrat's estate or poaching sheep to feed a starving family.

The arrogant disregard for the holocaust visited upon the poor and working class Whites of Britain by the aristocracy continues in our time because the history of that epoch has been almost completely extirpated from our collective memory.

When White servitude is acknowledged as having existed in America, it is almost always termed as temporary "indentured servitude" or part of the convict trade, which, after the Revolution of 1776, centered on Australia instead of America. The "convicts" transported to America under the 1723 Waltham Act, perhaps numbered 100,000.

The indentured servants who served a tidy little period of 4 to 7 years polishing the master's silver and china and then taking their place in colonial high society, were a minuscule fraction of the great unsung hundreds of thousands of White slaves who were worked to death in this country from the early l7th century onward.

Up to one-half of all the arrivals in the American colonies were Whites slaves and they were America's first slaves. These Whites were slaves for life, long before Blacks ever were. This slavery was even hereditary. White children born to White slaves were enslaved too.

Whites were auctioned on the block with children sold and separated from their parents and wives sold and separated from their husbands. Free Black property owners strutted the streets of northern and southern American cities while White slaves were worked to death in the sugar mills of Barbados and Jamaica and the plantations of Virginia.

The Establishment has created the misnomer of "indentured servitude" to explain away and minimize the fact of White slavery. But bound Whites in early America called themselves slaves. Nine-tenths of the White slavery in America was conducted without indentures of any kind but according to the so-called "custom of the country," as it was known, which was lifetime slavery administered by the White slave merchants themselves.

In George Sandys laws for Virginia, Whites were enslaved "forever." The service of Whites bound to Berkeley's Hundred was deemed "perpetual." These accounts have been policed out of the much touted "standard reference works" such as Abbott Emerson Smith's laughable whitewash, Colonists in Bondage.

I challenge any researcher to study 17th century colonial America, sifting the documents, the jargon and the statutes on both sides of the Atlantic and one will discover that White slavery was a far more extensive operation than Black enslavement. It is when we come to the 18th century that one begins to encounter more "servitude" on the basis of a contract of indenture. But even in that period there was kidnapping of Anglo-Saxons into slavery as well as convict slavery.

In 1855, Frederic Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who designed New York's Central Park, was in Alabama on a pleasure trip and saw bales of cotton being thrown from a considerable height into a cargo ship's hold. The men tossing the bales somewhat recklessly into the hold were Negroes, the men in the hold were Irish.

Olmsted inquired about this to a shipworker. "Oh," said the worker, "the niggers are worth too much to be risked here; if the Paddies are knocked overboard or get their backs broke, nobody loses anything."

Before British slavers traveled to Africa's western coast to buy Black slaves from African chieftains, they sold their own White working class kindred ("the surplus poor" as they were known) from the streets and towns of England, into slavery. Tens of thousands of these White slaves were kidnapped children. In fact the very origin of the word kidnapped is kid-nabbed, the stealing of White children for enslavement.

According to the English Dictionary of the Underworld, under the heading kidnapper is the following definition: "A stealer of human beings, esp. of children; originally for exportation to the plantations of North America."

The center of the trade in child-slaves was in the port cities of Britain and Scotland:

"Press gangs in the hire of local merchants roamed the streets, seizing 'by force such boys as seemed proper subjects for the slave trade.' Children were driven in flocks through the town and confined for shipment in barns...So flagrant was the practice that people in the countryside about Aberdeen avoided bringing children into the city for fear they might be stolen; and so widespread was the collusion of merchants, shippers, suppliers and even magistrates that the man who exposed it was forced to recant and run out of town." (Van der Zee, Bound Over, p. 210).

White slaves transported to the colonies suffered a staggering loss of life in the 17th and 18th century. During the voyage to America it was customary to keep the White slaves below deck for the entire nine to twelve week journey. A White slave would be confined to a hole not more than sixteen feet long, chained with 50 other men to a board, with padlocked collars around their necks. The weeks of confinement below deck in the ship's stifling hold often resulted in outbreaks of contagious disease which would sweep through the "cargo" of White "freight" chained in the bowels of the ship.

Ships carrying White slaves to America often lost half their slaves to death. According to historian Sharon V. Salinger, "Scattered data reveal that the mortality for [White] servants at certain times equaled that for [Black] slaves in the 'middle passage,' and during other periods actually exceeded the death rate for [Black] slaves." Salinger reports a death rate of ten to twenty percent over the entire 18th century for Black slaves on board ships enroute to America compared with a death rate of 25% for White slaves enroute to America.

" White slaves transported to the colonies suffered a staggering loss of life in the 17th and l8th century.
During the voyage to America it was customary to keep the White slaves below deck for the entire nine to twelve week journey. A White slave would be confined to a hole not more than sixteen feet long, chained with 50 other men to a board, with padlocked collars around their necks.

The weeks of confinement below deck in the ship's stifling hold often resulted in outbreaks of contagious disease which would sweep through the "cargo" of White "freight" chained in the bowels of the ship.

Ships carrying White slaves to America often lost half their slaves to death.

According to historian Sharon v. Salinger, "Scattered data reveal that the mortality for White servants at certain times equaled that for Black slaves in the 'middle passage,' and during other periods actually exceeded the death rate for Black slaves." (Salinger, Sharon V., 'To Serve Well And Faithfully: Labor and Indenttured Servants in Pennsylvania, 1682-1800'. p.91.)

"A death rate of ten to twenty percent over the entire 18th century for Black slaves on board ships enroute to America compared with a death rate of 25% for White slaves enroute to America" (Salinger, Sharon V., 'To Serve Well And Faithfully: Labor and Indenttured Servants in Pennsylvania, 1682-1800'. p. 92).

Foster R. Dulles writing in Labor in America: A History, p. 6, states that whether convicts, children 'spirited' from the countryside or political prisoners, White slaves "experienced discomforts and sufferings on their voyage across the Atlantic that paralleled the cruel hardships undergone by negro slaves on the notorious Middle Passage."

Dulles says the Whites were "indiscriminately herded aboard the 'white guineamen,' often as many as 300 passengers on little vessels of not more than 200 tons burden--overcrowded, unsanitary... The mortality rate was sometimes as high as 50% and young children seldom survived the horrors of a voyage which might last anywhere from seven to twelve weeks."

Independent investigator A.B. Ellis in the 'Argosy' writes concerning the transport of White slaves, "The human cargo, many of whom were still tormented by unhealed wounds, could not all lie down at once without lying on each other. They were never suffered to go on deck. The hatchway was constantly watched by sentinels armed with hangers and blunder busses. In the dungeons below all was darkness, stench, lamentation, disease and death."

Marcus Jernegan describes the greed of the shipmasters which led to horrendous loss of life for White slaves transported to America:
"The voyage over often repeated the horrors of the famous 'middle passage' of slavery fame. An average cargo was three hundred, but the shipmaster, for greater profit, would sometimes crowd as many as six hundred into a small vessel.. .The mortality under such circumstances was tremendous, sometimes more than half...Mittelberger (an eyewitness} says he saw thirty-two children thrown into the ocean during one voyage." (Jernegan, Marcus W., 'Laboring and Dependent Classes in America, 1607-1783', pp. 50-51 ).

Stating that...The mercantile firms, as importers of White servants, were not too careful about their treatment, as the more important purpose of the transaction was to get ships over to South Carolina which could carry local produce back to Europe. Consequently the Irish--as well as others--suffered greatly."

"It was almost as if the British merchants had redirected their vessels from the African coast to the Irish coast, with the white servants coming over in much the same fashion as the African slaves." (Warren B. Smith, p. 42).

A study of the middle passage of White slaves was included in a Parliamentary Petition of 1659. It reported that "White slaves were locked below deck for two weeks while the slaveship was still in port. Once under way, they were all the way locked up under decks amongst horses. They were chained from their legs to their necks."

"Transports, traveled in double irons, were whipped and beaten." (Ekirch, Roger A., 'Bound For America', 1718-1775' p.101 ).

Of the White slaves bound for Maryland from London aboard the slaveship Justitia, at the mercy of the savage Capt. Barnet Bond, nearly one-third of the Whites died: "The very worst excesses were revealed during the voyage of the Justitia in 1743. Under the command of Barnet Bond...Bond set stringent water rations. Despite ample reserves of water on board, he allotted each transport only one pint a day. Some started to drink their own urine." (Ekirch, Roger A., 'Bound For America', 1718-1775', p.102).

Once the slaveships left British shores, "profit rather than penal policy shaped the character of transportation" and what happened to enslaved Whites overseas "Mattered little. As soon as they were safely consigned to merchants, authorities ,assumed no responsibility for their welfare." (Ekirch, Roger A., 'Bound For America', 1718-1775' p. 3).

"White slaves aboard ship were treated worse than dogs or swine and are kept much more uncleanly than those animals are." (Shaw, Charles, 'When I Was A Child' p. 35).

A witness who saw a White slave aboard a ship owned by the slaver John Stewart, reported: "All the states of horror I ever had an idea of are much short of what I saw this man in; chained to a board in a hole not above sixteen feet long, more than fifty with him; a collar and padlock about his neck, and chained to five of the most dreadful creatures I ever looked on."

Another observer watching the auction of a hundred White slaves in Williamsburg, Virginia remarked, "I never seen such passels of poor wretches in my life. Some almost naked." (Ekirch, Roger A., 'Bound For America', 1718-1775' , pp. 100 and 122).

One White woman slave, Elizabeth Dudgeon, had dared to talk back to a guard. She was trussed up to a ship's grating and mercilessly whipped. One of the ship's officers relished watching her lashed: "The corporal did not play with her, but laid it home, which I was very glad to see...she has long been fishing for it, which she has at last got to her heart's content." ('Journal of Ralph Clark', entry of July 3, 1787).

In order to realize the maximum profit from the trade in White slaves, the captains of the White Guineamen crammed their ships with as many poor Whites as possible, certain that even with the most callous disregard for the lives of the Whites the financial gain would still make the trip worth the effort. A loss of 20% of their White "cargo" was regarded as acceptable. But sometimes losses were much higher.

Out of 350 White slaves on a ship bound for the colonies in 1638 only 80 arrived alive. "We have thrown over board two and three in a day for many dayes together" wrote Thomas Rous, a survivor of the trip. A ship carrying White slaves in 1685, the Betty of London, left England with 100 White slaves and arrived in the colonies with 49 left.
A number of factors contributed to the higher death rates for White slaves than Blacks. Although the goal of maximum profits motivated both trades, it cost more to obtain Blacks from Africa than it did to capture Whites in Europe. White slaves were not cared for as well as Blacks because the Whites were cheaply obtained and were viewed as expendable.

"The African slave trade was not fully established in the early 17th century. The price of African slaves was prohibitively high and the English were neither familiar with nor committed to black slavery as a basic institution" (Beckles, Hilary 'White Servitude', p. 3).

Ship Captains involved in the White slave trade obtained White slaves with penal status either free of charge or were subsidized to take them, and for all other categories of White slaves, they paid at most a small sum to an agent to procure them, forefeiting only the cost of their keep on board ship if they died.

Moreover, traders in Black slaves operated ships designed solely for the purpose of carrying human cargo with the intent of creating conditions whereby as many Black slaves as possible would reach America alive. White slave ships were cargo ships with no special provisions for passengers.
In addition, transportation rules decreed that, in cases where White slaves were sold in advance to individual planters in America, if the White slave survived the voyage beyond the halfway point in the journey, the planter in America--not the captain of the slave ship-- would be responsible for the costs of the White slaves' provisions whether or not the slave survived the trip. Captains of the slaveships became infamous for providing sufficient food for only the first half of the trip and then virtually starving their White captives until they arrived in America.

" Jammed into filthy holds, manacled, starved and abused, they suffered and died during the crossings in gross numbers. Thousands were children under 12, snatched off the streets." (Kendall, p. 1 ).

"The transportation became a profitable enterprise. Traders delivered thousands of bound laborers to Pennsylvania and exhibited a callous disregard for their cargoes" (Salinger, Sharon V., 'To Serve Well And Faithfully: Labor and Indenttured Servants in Pennsylvania, 1682-1800'p. 88).

As a result, White slaves on board these ships suffered a high rate of disease.

"Transportation of White slaves remained a branch of commerce wedded to carrying human cargoes at minimal expense. Sizable numbers never reached American shores from disease, and mistreatment." (Ekirch, Roger A., 'Bound For America', 1718-1775', p. 108).

The number of diseased White slaves arriving was high enough for Pennsylvania officials to recommend a quarantine law for them. Thus a new torment was to be endured for White slaves who "Were often stopped just short of the New World, with land in sight, and forced to remain quarantined on board ships in which they had just spent a horrifying ten to twelve weeks" (Salinger, Sharon V., 'To Serve Well And Faithfully: Labor and Indenttured Servants in Pennsylvania, 1682-1800' p. 89).

In 1738 Dr. Thomas Graeme reported to the colonial Council of Pennsylvania that if two ships crammed with White slaves were allowed to land, "It might prove Dangerous to the health of the Inhabitants of this Province." ("Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania," Colonial Records, 4:306).

Ships filled with diseased White slaves landed anyway. In 1750 an island was established for their quarantine, Fisher Island, at the mouth of Schuylkill River. But the establishment of the quarantine area did nothing to protect the health of the White slaves and the island was more typical of Devil's Island than a place of recuperation.
In 1764 a clergyman, Pastor Helmuth, visited Fisher island and described it as "a land of the living dead, a vault full of living corpses."

"Before 1650, however, the greater victims of man's inhumanity were the mass of white Christian servants who suffered at the hands of callous, white Christian masters. For the time being, with all of their troubles, the blacks had it better." (Bridenbaugh, Roberta , 'No Peace Beyond the Line: The English in the Caribbean, 1624-1690', p. 120).

"Sold to a master in Merion, near Philadelphia, David Evans was put to work 'hewing and uprooting trees'--land clearing, the most arduous of colonial labor, work that was spared black slaves because they were too valuable." (Van Der Zee, John, 'Bound Over: Indentured Servitude and the American Conscience', p. 138).

"Negroes are, therefore, almost in every instance, under more comfortable circumstances than the miserable European, over whom the rigid planter exercises an inflexible rigidity. They are strained to the utmost to perform their allotted labor. They frequently try to escape, but very few are successful, and when apprehended, are committed to close confinement, advertised, and delivered to their respective masters. The unhappy culprit is doomed to a severe chastisement; and a prolongation of servitude is decreed. Those who survive, seldom establish their residence." (William Eddis, 'Letters From America', [published in 1792] Letter VI).

In the British West Indies the torture visited upon White slaves by their masters was routine. Masters hung White slaves by their hands and set their hands on fire as a means of punishment. To end this barbarity, Colonel William Brayne wrote to English authorities in 1656 urging the importation of negro slaves on the grounds that, "...as the planters would have to pay much for them, they would have an interest in preserving their lives, which was wanting in the case of Whites." many of whom, he charged, were killed by overwork and cruel treatment. "

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