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 ...
Except for those sold by Cromwell as slaves. After the Battle of the Boyne, I believe, Cromwell sold 50,000 Irishmen as slaves. The only whites ever shipped as slaves to Caribbean.
I think I read that Scots captured after Culloden and during the Highland Clearances were also taken to the West Indies and sold as slaves.
Yes, I am skeptical of that claim. At any rate, indentured servitude is significantly different from generational slavery.
Whereas Australia embraces it as part of their heritage. Transportation as punishment for crime built their nation.
You have some notable and prominent kinfolk. I am not the genealogist in my extended family, but I have read about some of the findings of their research. The first of my family here was a guy named Bartholomew Weathersbee in a place called Elizabeth City, NC. The name spelling for our wing of the family was changed, I think in the late 1700s, to “Weathersby”.
I don’t recall precisely, but one of Bartholomew’s three sons, or one of his grandsons, supposedly married a grand-daughter of Pocohontas. That came from one of Bartholmew’s other two sons that was not in my line. Interesting that the family was in close proximity to people you read about in the history books, but not much to do with the info. I am twelfth generation American on my Dad’s side, which in the estimation of some makes me evil. I don’t much care what those kinds of people think.
Oliver Cromwell sent the Irish to be slaves in Virginia and the Caribbean. In the Caribbean the Irish and African slaves were mated because the offspring were considered the most beautiful in the world- - and they brought big dollars.
I only recently learned about Native Americans who were taken as slaves to Europe .
So criminals doing 10 years in prison are not criminals because their prison sentence has an expiration date ?
The Irish had no standing under the King's Law.
Also, if one is forced to put an X on a piece of paper under threat of death it is, nowadays anyhow, not a valid contract.
Many of those sent were orphans whose parents had been killed by the English and were shipped without consent.
If the owner doesn't release the indentured or they die before their term is up what is the difference.
A book on this. To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland, by Sean O’Callaghan
The ship was captured by a French privateer and the Jacobites freed.
After doublechecking my claim about the Irish, that also appears incorrect. They, too, were sent as indentured servants, though in far greater numbers: here
Good point. The ancestors of white slaves are still working on the plantation to support it.
Interesting number...
The author states that 300,000 whites were brought to Virginia under some form of labor bondage.
From memory, most historians estimate that just 500,000 Africans were imported to North America before slave sales were halted, in 1808, again from memory.
I recently read a book review that claimed that 75% of the world’s population were slaves, serfs, or under labor bondage in 1800!
The vast majority of deaths from the West African slave trade came from the journey inland to the ports. East African slave trade was just as brutal.
Doesn’t justify European treatment of slaves, but ought to illuminate the facts that 1) human slavery was the historical norm and transcended cultures and races; and 2) without the American Founding having pronounced the principles of individual liberty and equality under God, slavery would have persisted much longer than it did/ does.
Your paternal ancestor beat my paternal ancestors here by 22 years. They came over with Lincoln’s ancestors.
Not all of us have forgotten.
My fathers side of the the family was brought to America as indentured servants.
According to our family history the Welsh side (Welsh = criminal in England at the time) of our family was brought to this country to work the fields.
As it happened they took off for the West Virginia hills as soon as the overseer’s back was turned.
Most of them still live in Mingo County.
Again, close to folks you read about in the history books. That sort of thing is fascinating to me. You wonder how many Freepers have family members that had close brushes with history makers. Heck, I think we have some current history makers posting here on FR. It is an honor to be associated with them . . . whomever they might be . . . so long as they are not “leakers”.
Cromwell was pretty brutal in his treatment of the Irish, but the battle of the Boyne was more than 30 years after his death.
Hah. Thanks for the correction.
I've got Irish ancestors who were Royalists and who had their lands stolen by Cromwell. My guess is that they settled on the Eastern Shore of Maryland sometime after 1650- their unusual family name appears on some early land records, but there's no other record of them until they appear in North Carolina after the Revolution.
I don't know of any who arrived as indentured servants, but there's a lot of ancestors back in that colonial era that I know little about.
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