The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America

American Thinker.com ^ | July 28, 2017 | Janet Levy

[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.

[Pelham]

Dunno anything about the history of German settlement in SC but New Bern, NC was founded in 1710 by Germans and Swiss.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

The numbers are not surprising because most people indentured or free died inside of five years. The work was hard, food was scarce, medical care minimal to non-existent and you were living in a war zone. The indentured were often in a weakened state when they arrive so they were more vulnerable but it was only a matter of degree.

The ones that survived, thrived.

[Pelham]

” You wonder how many Freepers have family members that had close brushes with history makers. “

Have an ancestor who was in the first House of Burgesses.. arrived in 1609 so he could have known most of the characters we read about in early Virginia history.

Another who was in a business deal with a Thomas Jefferson.. the grandfather of the one we know... a four person partnership that ended with them suing each other, the only reason that I know about it.

A NC ancestor named Robert Lee (no relation to the Virginia Lees that I know of) who lived in the county along the Yadkin River where Daniel Boone also lived at that time.

Another ancestor who was an officer in the Revolution... I think in the 2nd Virginia Regiment... it appears that he left Valley Forge to be a militia officer instead. Was at Yorktown. Could well have well have known people whose names we all know.

Oddly enough while I have a dozen or so ancestors who fought in the Revolution, the great majority as militia, I have only one close ancestor who fought in the Civil War. And he was the elder brother of my great grandfather. A private in the 13th Mississippi, part of Longstreet’s division, he was killed at Gettysburg during Barksdale’s charge. There is at least one freeper who I know has a connection to Barksdale.

On my mother’s side an ancestor who was an “entrepreneur” working with one Jean Lafitte (pirates). He showed up at the Battle of New Orleans with Lafitte as part of the cannon crew- sometimes it pays to have heavily armed pirates on your side.

[Pelham]

You likely know of Bernard Bailyn's book The Barbarous Years

"Now comes “The Barbarous Years,” the next installment. It circles back to a period that most Americans don’t hear much about in school: the chaotic decades from the establishment of Jamestown (England’s first permanent colony in the Americas) in 1607 up to King Philip’s War (the vicious conflict that effectively expelled Indians from New England) in 1675-76. Bailyn’s goal is to show how a jumble of migrants, “low and high born,” sought “to recreate, if not to improve, in this remote and, to them, barbarous environment, the life they had known before.” As the title indicates, the story is as grim as it is fascinating: a group portrait in tones of greed, desperation and brutality."

[RipSawyer]

We studied indentured servitude in history classes back when they actually taught history in schools. We were taught in those history and civics classes that to be a natural born citizen of the USA meant being born on the soil of parents who were BOTH citizens. Unfortunately, much of what was taught then has been thrown out and anyone who still recalls it is accused of being a liar or crazy.

[RipSawyer]

“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.”

Neither do the “ancestors” of black slaves and actually not even the DESCENDANTS of black slaves. Any remaining preference in hiring, college admissions etc. goes to NONwhites. Economic privation and oppression? Give me a break, we just suffered eight years of oppression by a black so-called president.

[RipSawyer]

There are no “ancestors” of any kind of slaves still working anywhere.

[ro_dreaming]

I quit caring what people think of me 8n boot camp. I (a Caucasian) was told with 3 black guys we had sickle cell anemia or trait, and they tested me 3 times.... all positive.

The more you know!

[Just mythoughts]

There may have been a ‘port’ in NC, but none of my research shows up as being a port of entry... I can find Charlestown, SC as being a major port of entry in the early days..

Salisberry, Rowan, North Carolina is the claimed place in 1765 that this woman was born.

[Pelham]

Salisbury is inland, backcountry, and it was on The Great Wagon Road that extended from Pennsylvania to Georgia. The Great Wagon Road was the main settlement route for the backcountry.

German Palantines and Scots Irish were the two dominant cultures settling the backcountry.

There’s a good chance that your German NC ancestors traveled to Salisbury after first landing at the port of Philadelphia.

[Fred Nerks]

...And how many of these 10.7 million Africans were shipped directly to North America? Only about 388,000. That’s right: a tiny percentage.

How Many Slaves Landed in the U.S.? by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

FROM YOUR LINK

[mountn man]

EXACTLY what I was hoping someone would see.

[teeman8r]

You’re crazy.

[RipSawyer]

Actually no, I’m not crazy, that is what was taught, all to the contrary is of more recent origin. You may not agree with it but that is what was taught.

[teeman8r]

i was taught the same... things will not end well for the millenial snowflakes.

[RatRipper]

Amazing! Your clan seemed to be in the thick of a lot of things that were key points in our history.

It angers me so much when when radical leftists try to persuade us to “sell” our noble national birthright of freedom, bought and paid for with the blood of our forefathers,just for the pittance of a few shallow socialist programs that are doomed to fail, and guaranteed to take away our liberty. A few of these leftists are just stupid; far to many are evil.

[Jan_Sobieski]

Read the article...many were taken without their consent to be indentured slaves. Have you read, “Kidnapped”, by Robert Louis Stevenson? This whole story is based on a young Laird who is usurped by his uncle and sold as an indentured servant in the Carolinas.