Posted on 07/28/2017 11:32:41 AM PDT by Kaslin
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Realize two things
1. This happened. It is how my bride’s family came here.
2. It is been removed from history. No one can talk about it academically. It is a career vaporizing move to talk about it.
Reparations!
That’s because Britain is not on Satan’s radar screen. America is.
The Lying Left is Satan’s tool to try to destroy America, but God is eternally greater than Satan and will help America and bring her to an expected blessed destination before Jesus returns for his saints.
My paternal ancestor and source of my surname came to America in 1616, but was not a slave.
My English ancestor (George Soule) came over to Plymouth (yes his name is on the rock)as an indentured servant ... essentially a slave ... so where are my reparations
Only blacks.
i never heard of a death rate equivalent to 2 year lifespan for slaves in colonies.
I am skeptical.
Slaves were expensive it wasn’t in the owners interest to beat or work them to death
These slaves were not expensive, they were free.
i learned about indentured servitude in the 70s... as a way for the lower classes to earn their way to the new world...
Slavery has been going on for thousands of years. Not just since the 17th century.
Often they had to pay for their own transport.
So if they didn’t “generate enough value”, they could be held longer.
Many ran over the hill and went west and south.
I’ve had this debate with several people before.
Just FYI: The Leftist response to this is: the ancestors of white slaves do not continue to suffer prejudice, economic privation and oppression to this day, so supposed white slavery, and black slavery, can not be compared equally. There was no “Jim Crow” against former white slaves. It is simply white whining.
In Maryland, 4 out of 5 of the colonists during the 17th Century were indentured servants. Most of those who finished their indenture would return home. To encourage them to stay, grants of food, tools, and clothing were offered.
Indentured servitude was commonplace in the middle Colonies as a way to pay for one’s passage.
The ships would dock; those who could pay could disembark.
Those who could not pay had to remain on ship with rotten food and squalid water until someone one shore would “buy” their service for seven years for their passage.
If a family member died less than half way across the Atlantic no passage was owed. But if s/he died 1 day beyond the half way point full passage was owed.
Britain shipped plenty of whites to Australia as well... But Britain ‘royals’ just cannot self support without enslaving somebody... Now they have turned over their duty to imports that now will rule over them... My ancestors (Scots) were part of the American Revolution back as far as I can trace 1750...
And apparently there were some Germans in that mix as well... but they came of their own free will.
More stormfront type thinking here. A person entering a contract to work, with release at the end, in exchange for passage isn’t slavery.
The Irish weren’t slaves.
Sure sounds like fake news to me. I am reading the book City of Dreams which is about immigration to NYC from the time of the Dutch until nearly the current period.
There is a significant discussion about indentured servants who came across from Ireland, England, Scotland, Germany, etc. In fact the author identifies specific individuals of whom there is a record.
Indentured servants were expensive, and the sponsor ran the significant risk of having the servant break his/her contract and skip town. That was quite common, at least in the northeast.
Many of these indentured servants fulfilled their contracts, were provided with decent living quarters and clothes, and then when their contracted time was up moved on to become quite successful.
Also, the comment that slaves lived an average of 2 years seems hard to believe. Slaves were not a cheap investment, and I think that their owners had motivation to protect their investment.
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