Posted on 12/16/2006 6:01:23 PM PST by scouse
by Michael A. Hoffman II ©Copyright 1999. All Rights Reserved
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.
QUITE A LONG READ.....CAN BE READ AT URL GIVEN.
Bttt.
You are so right, and how sad is that! Slavery has nothing to do with race or color, it has everything to do with greed.
William conquered England,but not Scotland,Wales or Ireland.
Britain/UK/GB remember equals those four nations...
A timely correction. Thanks, scotman!
Free Blacks did not "strut" anywhere in this country during the 18th century. They certainly didn't in front of whites.
If the writer gets something this basic wrong how much truth can the rest of the article have?
"There was also a lot of white slavery/servitude after the civil war." Where did this gem come from?
The relative value of the slaves in fact did result in Irish being used for dangerous jobs. They were not slaves however.
Slaves are not allowed to "work off" debt. There was no escape. Your family history sounds a bit dubious at best.
Moll was no innocent victim. She was a criminal and readily admitted it.
Not being politically correct is not the reason this is not taught. Not being TRUE is the reason.
Not my family my wife's ancestors. They didn't "work off" debt and I never implied that they did.
Again their travel was entirely paid for, they were not "in debt" to anyone. They were headed to Philly but Andrew Tarbett a shady ship captain conspired with Alexander Spotswood to pocket the money and sale them into slavery in Virginia.
When the criminal endeavor was found out the people that were left alive were set free.
What you are describing is fraud leading to indentured servitude not slavery.
They had no debt to pay off or time. They were simply slaves.
Alexander Spotswood had some land to develop and these people were the beasts of burden that were used for that purpose.
What in the definition of "slave" is not consistent with these people?
Slavery has a definition and legal sanction. Kidnapped people are not legally slaves or people held under fraudulent pretenses. Remember in those days there were debtors prisons and people very jailed for defaulting on debt.
As to practical difference to any in that condition there is none. De facto they were slaves but de jure they were not merely victims of crimes.
That makes sense to me now.
I was thinking more in the general sense of anyone who's liberty is revoked through no consequence of their own actions but through the criminal endeavors of another.
But legally a slave was a very specific thing and I guess these people were something else.
Yeah. If slavery were only the result of violence that would be bad but when it is legally sanctioned and supported that is even worse.
You could simply google it and find out the truth, but you're not interested in that or how many things I cite, so why bother????
I have a copy of "Fatal Shore" some escaped convicts in Austrailia resorted to cannibalism.
I don't consider Crackpot.com as a source for history.
In 1972 I was living out of a backpack, and wandering about, a ditz, and ignorant about most things. But during the few weeks I was in Australia, I was struck by the competive attitude towards Americans, and a sort of glorying in their convict past. I have wondered how much that shapes Australians, similarly to the American cowboy.
I worry about things like that, along with: Can flies fly backwards?
Some of my best friends are Australian. It's an amazing country. Truly, some of the bravest soldiers in the world, and America's friend.
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