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 ...
Go to certain areas and see if that is true.
Blue bloods in the east don’t like the lower classes. Never had.
“I never heard of a death rate equivalent to 2 year lifespan for [indentured servants] in colonies.”
In Maryland, during the first year in the colony, 30% of the new settlers would die; this was called ‘the Seasoning.’ After 10 years, roughly 70 % would have died. The southern colonies were not a healthy place for Europeans. New England had a less lethal climate.
There were many Germans in the mix.
They had been sold air castles about the opportunities of the new world; but no one warned them that every little fiefdom along the Rhine would exact a per passenger toll on their way to the Atlantic.
By the time they reached the Atlantic port many were broke.
This is a misuse of the word slavery. Indentured servitude was not slavery:
1. It was normally a voluntary action, the servant agreed to pay off the cost of his/her sea passage to the colony by working for a fixed time (no more than 7 years), after which he was free and clear of his debt.
2. Few prospective immigrants had the funds to pay for the ocean trip and used this somewhat like a credit card. Exchanging ones labor for money to pay off a debt is still common, tho the terms of the exchange have changed somewhat.
3. The convict who came to Georgia (mostly), or later Australia, were serving a sentence following a criminal trial. He was probably better off than going to jail, tho I suspect that most had no say in the matter.
LOL! Yes., This will put an end to that real quick.
My (step) dad’s family came across the pond.... William Bradford, specifically. Of course, further on down the generational line on my mom’s side, we balanced the Puritan leaning out with a little West Texas roughness, being blood related to Judge Roy Bean.
Makes for some interesting dynamics, let me tell you!
I have no ‘information’ regarding the status of my German ancestors, only that it appears they landed in Charlestown, SC, way back when. As well as some of my Scottish ancestry.
Not that I doubt your info...
My information comes from a small book “Middleburger’s Journey to Pennsylvania”.
It had been available through the York History Center
https://www.yorkhistorycenter.org/
Jim Goad has written a great deal about the history of white slavery in America (check out his book “The Redneck Manifesto”), all of which fell on deaf ears in the world of journalism because these facts would rob Blacks of their claim to unique victimhood.
Whenever liberals say that slavery of US blacks was a uniquely evil page in history, just remind them that during the Middle Ages, most people were peasants or serfs who were for all intents an purposes slaves of some noble lord, and that in colonial times indentured servitude applied to whites just as it applied to any other race.
Scots were sent to North Carolina as slaves after Cullodan to work in the pits. Thus the name Tarheel.
Also Scots who fought for Charles II against Cromwell at the Battles of Dunbar (1650) and Worcester (1651). Prisoners shipped to New England, Virginia, Caribbean islands as indentured servants
If they went voluntarily, you might be right. Many were involuntarily transported. And the "indenture" system did not give their masters any incentive to keep them alive to reach the end of their indenture:
They were promised land after a period of servitude, but most worked unpaid for up to15 years with few ever owning any land. Mortality rates were high. Of the 1,200 who arrived in 1619, more than two thirds perished in the first year from disease, working to death, or Indian raid killings. In Maryland, out of 5,000 indentured servants who entered the colony between 1670 and 1680, 1,250 died in bondage, 1,300 gained their right to freedom, and only 241 ever became landowners.
I once knew a man, a physician, whose family was proud of being descended from one of George Washington’s indentured servants who was a poor young Scot. The ancestor worked out his 7 years, became free, and went out into the world where he was unable to make a living. Because he had been well treated by George, he went back to indentured servitude under George, worked off another 7 years and,in his second opportunity as a free man, was able to get on his feet and marry and live to have many descendants. It is also the case than many black slaves in the South, when tobacco was the dominant crop,took advantage of manumission laws and became free. After 1804, with the rise of King Cotton, all the manumission laws were repealed and slavery became more vicious although there were free blacks still and even a few who themselves owned slaves. Francis Scott Key, who has been recently so attacked as a racist, freed the greater percentage of his slaves and enabled one of the freed slaves to serve him as the paid manager of his Frederick County farm.
We’re all indentured servants, our children and grandchildren too, thanks to the national debt.
If you look up historical records, it shows as “Terms of Indenturement”. Plymouth colony descendant here...
“as they were viewed as valuable, lifelong property “
I’m not sure if you are implying if that made their slavery somehow “better”. Somehow I doubt those people felt special.
Where do you think the term plantation came from? Who do you think serfs were?
This wasn't so much the case in the continental tobacco colonies, which were less profitable, and the cost of an imported slave (with the additional travel) was proportionately higher.
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