-Caveat Lector-
They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites
in Early America by Michael A. Hoffman II, 1991 In Print Paperback, 0086 pages, Order
#00501 $5.00 (Anti Albion books)
Expanded edition of the author's challenging book. In addition to the obvious use to
which this book is being put in pro-White circles to counter Black claims for quotas
and reparations, the question of the conspiracy's real motives through Establishment
History in suppressing and minimizing white slavery through the ages and, in
particular, in colonial America, is very effectively raised. Will the New World Order
be truly "multi-cultural" with the eventual amalgamation and obliteration of the races
or are Whites, and Colored too, being subtly encouraged to view remain separate
through a laughable false history which depicts Whites as the only real slavers and
Blacks and Native Americans as the only real slaves in the interests of maintaining a
"divide and conquer" system? This falsehood obviously intensifies Black rage against
the entire White Race instead of the tiny ruling class (including Jews) which
benefitted from slavery and continues to rule the world. Whites, on the other hand,
are encouraged to blieve the false notion that they are and always have been a
specially privileged elite. This leads them to unconsciously serve as the bodyguard of
the conspiracy against the assaults of enraged "minorities". This system of
manipulation may continue to work even after Whites are no longer the majority in
America!
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Viking Slavers
In the ninth century the Vikings sold tens of thousands of
Whites to the Arabs of Spain. According to Michael Wood's book In Search of the Dark
Ages: "An Arab traveler of the time who came to Spain remarked on the great numbers
of European slaves in harems and in the militia. The palace of the Emir of Cordoba in
particular had many White girls...Of these unfortunate people the Vikings were
undoubtedly a major source of supply...The Arabs in Spain saw the long-term potential
of this trade, and as early as the 840s sent a diplomatic mission to Scandinavia to
put it on an organized basis."
"The most westerly component of the early medieval slave trade in Europe was
the British Isles. In the eleventh century the Vikings were active slave traders in
Ireland...From Ireland the Vikings took the slaves to be sold in Muslim Spain and
Scandinavia, and even to be transported into Russia; some may have been taken as far
as Constantinople and the Muslim Middle East..." (William Phillips, p. 63).
"The Norwegian slave trader was an important enough figure to appear in the
12th century tale of Tristan...lcelandic literature also provides numerous references
to raiding in Ireland as a source for slaves...
"Norwegian Vikings made slave raids not only against the Irish and Scots (who
are often called Irish in Norse sources) but also against Norse settlers in Ireland or
the Scottish Isles or even in Norway itself...Slave trading was a major commercial
activity of the Viking Age...(Ruth Mazo Karras, Slavery and Society in Medieval
Scandinavia, p. 49). The children of White slaves in Iceland were routinely murdered
en masse (Karras, p. 52).
White Slavery in Early America
David Brion Davis writing in the New York Review of Books, Oct. 11, 1990, p.
37 states:
"As late as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, continuing shipments of
white slaves, some of them Christians, flowed from the booming slave markets on the
northern Black Sea coast into Italy, Spain, Egypt and the Mediterranean islands...From
Barbados to Virginia, colonists...showed few scruples about reducing their less
fortunate countrymen to a status little different from that of chattel slaves...The
prevalence and suffering of white slaves, serfs and indentured servants in the early
modern period suggests that there was nothing inevitable about limiting plantation
slavery to people of African origin."
L. Ruchames in "The Sources of Racial Thought in Colonial America," states
that "the slave trade worked in both directions, with white merchandise as well as
black." (Journal of Negro History, no. 52, pp. 251-273).
In 1659 the English parliament debated the practice of selling British Whites
into slavery in the New World. In the debate the Whites were referred to not as
"indentured servants" but as "slaves" whose "enslavement" threatened the liberties of
all Englishmen. (Thomas Burton, Parliamentary Diary: 7656-59, vol. 4, pp. 253-274).
Foster R. Dulles in Labor in America quotes an early document describing White
children in colonial servitude as "crying and mourning for redemption from their
slavery."
Dr. Hilary McD. Beckles of the University of Hull, England,writes regarding
White slave labor, "...indenture contracts were alienable...the ownership of which
could easily be transferred, like that of any other commodity...as with slaves,
ownership changed without their participation in the dialogue concerning transfer."
Beckles refers to "indentured servitude" as "White proto-slavery" (The Americas, vol.
41, no. 2, p. 21).
In the Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series; America and West lndies of
1701, we read of a protest over the"encouragement to the spiriting away of Englishmen
without their consent and selling them for slaves, which hath been a practice very
frequent and known by the name of kidnapping."
In the British West Indies, plantation slavery was instituted as early as 1627. In
Barbados by the 1640s there were an estimated 25,000 slaves, of whom 21,700 were White.
("Some Observations on the Island of Barbados," Calendar of State Papers,
Colonia! Series, p. 528). It is worth noting that valuable White sIaves were worked to
death in Barbados, there were Caribbean Indians brought from Guiana to help propagate
native foodstuffs who were well-treated and received as free persons by the wealthy
planters.
Of the fact that the wealth of Barbados was founded on the backs of White
slave labor there can be no doubt. White slave laborers from Britain and Ireland were
the mainstay of the sugar colony. Until the mid-1640s there were few Blacks in
Barbados. George Downing wrote to John Winthrop, the colonial governor of
Massachusetts in 1645, that planters who wanted to make a fortune in the British West
Indies must procure White slave labor "out of England" if they wanted to succeed.
(Elizabeth Donnan, Documents illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to
America, pp.125-126).
"...white indentured servants were employed and treated, incidentally, exactly
like slaves..."(Morley Ayearst,The British West Indies, p. 19).
The disciplinary and revenue laws of early Virginia (circa 1631-1645) did not
discriminate Negroes in bondage from Whites in bondage. (William Hcning [editor],
Statutes at Large of Virginia, vol. I, pp. 174, 198, 200, 243, 306. For records of
wills in which "Lands, goods & chattels, cattle, moneys, negroes, English servants,
horses, sheep and household stuff" were all sold together see the Lancaster County
Records in Virginia Colonial Abstracts, Beverly Fleet, editor).
"The many gradations of unfreedom among Whites made it
difficult to draw fast lines between any idealized free White worker and a pitied or
scorned servile Black worker...in labor-short seventeenth and eighteenth-century
America the work of slaves and that of White servants were virtually interchangeable
in most areas." (David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness; Race and the Making of the
American Working C/ass, p. 25).
In the Massachusetts Court of Assistants, whose records date to 1633, we find
a 1638 description of a White man, one Gyles Player, as having been "delivered up for
a slave."
The Englishman William Eddis, after observing White slaves in America in the
1770s wrote, "Generally speaking, they groan beneath a worse than Egyptian bondage"
(Letters from Lay historian Cal. A.B. Ellis, writing in the British newspaper Argosy
(May 6, 1893): "Few, but readers of old colonial State papers and records, are aware
that between the years 1649-1690 a lively trade was carried on between England and the
plantations, as the colonies were then called, in political prisoners...where they
were sold by auction to the colonists for various terms of years, sometimes for life
as slaves."
Sir George Sandys' 1618 plan for Virginia referred to bound Whites assigned to
the treasurer's office to "belong to said office for ever." The service of Whites
bound to Berkeley's Hundred was deemed "perpetual." (Lewis Cecil Gray, History of
Agriculture in the Southern United States to 7860, voI. I, pp. 316, 318).
Certainly the enslaved Whites themselves recognized their condition with
painful clarity. As one White man, named Abram, who was accused of trying to agitate a
rebellion stated to his fellows, "Wherefore should wee stay here and beslaves?"
The Quack Walker case in Massachusetts in 1783 which ruled that slavery was
contrary to the state Constitution, was applied equally to Blacks and Whites in
Massachusetts.
Patrick F. Moran in his Historical Sketch of the IAmerica, London, 1792).
Governor Sharpe of the Maryland colony compared the property interest of the planters
in their White slaves, with the estate of an English farmer consisting of a "Multitude
of Cattle."
In a statement smuggled out of the New World and published in London, Whites
in bondage did not call themselves "indentured servants." In their writing they
referred to themselves as "England's slaves" and England's "merchandise." (Marcellus
Rivers and Oxenbridge Foyle, England's Slavery, 1659).
Eyewitnesses like Pere Labat who visited the West Indian slave plantations of
the 17th century which were built and manned by White slaves labeled them "White
slaves" and nothing less (Memoirs of Pere Labat, 7693-1705, p. 125).
Even Blacks referred to the White forced laborers in then colonies as "white slaves."
(Colonial Office,' Public Records Office, London, 1667, no. 170)
Sof-Weed Factor, or, a Voyage to Maryland, a pamphlet circulated in 1708,
articulates the plight of tens of thousands of pathetic young White girls kidnapped
from England and enslaved in colonial America, lamenting that:
In better Times e'er to this Land
I was unhappily Trepan'd;
Not then a slave...
But things are changed...Kidnap'd and Fool'd..."
The height of academic and media fraud is revealed in the monopolistic trademark
status the official controllers of education and mass communications have successfully
established between the definition of the word "slave" and the negro, while labeling
descriptions of the historic experience of Whites in slavery a fallacy. Yet the very
word "slave," which the establishment's consensus school of history pretends cannot
legitimately be applied to Whites, is derived from the word Slav. According to the
Oxford English Dictionary, the word slave is another name for the White people of
eastern Europe, the Slavs. (Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, p.
2,858).
In other words, slave has always been a term for and a definition of a servile
condition of White people. Yet we are told by the professorcrats that it is not
correct to refer to Whites as slaves but only as servants, even though the very root
of the word is derived from the historical fact of White slavery. ( 1 )
A Holocaust Against The White Poor
White slavery and bondage in British colonial America cannot be fully understood
without also understanding how British Whites came to be dehumanized in their homeland
across the ocean
The desperate condition of the poor Whites of Britain was most obvious in the
cities. The English slums of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries were pits of White
suffering. London's St. Giles was known locally as "Rat's Castle." A policeman who
worked the area used metaphors from the insect world to describe the conditions of the
poor Whites there, referring to them as "vermin haunted heaps of rags." Opening the
door to a tiny shack the policeman discovered:
"Ten, twenty, thirty--who can count them? Men, women, children, for the most
part naked, heaped upon the floor like maggots in a cheese...a spectral rising,
unshrouded, from a grave of rags." ("On Duty with Inspector Field," in Household
Words, June 14, 1851, pp. 265-267).
,Herman Melville, in his autobiographical account of his first Voyage as a sailor,
described the same living death in the English port city of Liverpool in 1839:
i"...I generally passed through a narrow street called 'Lancelot's-way...once passing
through this place...I heard a feeble wail...lt seemed the low, hopeless, endless wail
of someone forever lost.
"At last I advanced to an opening...to deep tiers of cellars
beneath a crumbling old warehouse; and there, some fifteen feet below the walk,
crouching in nameless squalor, with her head bowed over, was the figure of what had
been a woman.
"Her blue arms folded to her livid bosom two shrunken things like children
that leaned toward her, one on each side. At first, I knew not whether they were alive
or dead...They were dumb and next to dead with want. How they had crawled into that
den, I could not tell; but there they had crawled to die.
"...I tried to lift the woman's head; but feeble as she was, she seemed bent
upon holding it down. Observing her arms clasped
upon her bosom, and that something seemed hidden under the rags there, a thought
crossed my mind which impelled me forcibly to withdraw her hands for a moment when I
caught glimpse of a meager little babe, the lower part of its body thrust into an old
bonnet. t"Its face was dazzling white, even in its squalor; but the closed eyes looked
like balls of indigo. It must have been dead some hours...I stood looking down on
them, while my whole soul Iswelled within me; and I asked myself, what right had any
body in the wide world to smile and be glad when sights like this or otherwise
disabled for life. They were abandoned and
received no compensation of any kind. Many died of their injuries.
"Among factory children themselves many suffered from scrofula, incipient
consumption visible by the enlarged neck glands and white swellings of the joints. At
best children who survived into adolescence outgrew the disease, though the
deformities themselves persisted; in some cases, however, limbs had to be amputated
and at worst children worked until they died." (Cruickshank, p. 30).
"...young children are allowed to clean the machinery,
actually while it is in motion; and consequently the fingers, hands and arms are
frequently destroyed in a moment. I have seen the whole of the arm, from the tip of
the fingers to above the elbow, chopped into mince-meat, the cog-wheels cutting
through the skin, muscles and in some places, through the bone...in one instance every
limb but one was broken......"
(William Dodd, The factory System //lustrated, pp. 21-22).
"Accidents were often due to...children being set to clean machinery while it
was still in motion. The loss of two or three fingers was not exceptional. There were
more serious accidents...such as that reported by a Stockport doctor in 1840 of a girl
caught by the hair and scalped from the nose to the back of the head. The manufacturer
gave her five shillings. She died in the workhouse." (Cruickshank, p. 51).
19th century factory worker William Dodd stated, "Petition
after petition has been sent to the two houses of Parliament, to
the prime minister, and to the Queen, concerning this unfortunate class of British
subjects, but without effect. Had they only been black instead of white, their case
would have been taken into consideration long ago."
The Rev. Charles Edwards Lester, the great-grandson of the Puritan theologian
Jonathan Edwards, and later the American Consul in Italy, stated that if he had a
choice between having his children born negro slaves in the South or poor people in
England, he would choose the former: "I would sooner see the children of my love born
to the heritage of Southern slavery than to see them subjected to the blighting
bondage of the poor English operative's life."
(Lester, The Glory and the Shame of England, vol. 1, p. viii).
"John Randolph of Roanoke, traveling in England and Ireland with his black
manservant Johnny, wrote to a friend back home: 'Much as I was prepared to see misery
in the south of Ireland, I was utterly shocked at the condition of the poor peasantry
between Limmerick and Dublin. Why sir, John never felt so proud of being a Virginia
slave. He looked with horror upon the mud hovels and miserable food of the white
slaves, and I had no fear of his running away." (Cunliffe, p. 6).
Lest Americans imagine that such practices never darkened
our shores, readers are referred to the documentary literature on White child labor in
American factories, especially
Markham, Lindsey and Creel's Children in Bondage; Ruth
Holland's Mill Child and Lewis Hine's, Photographs of Chiid Labor.
By 1801, Samuel Slater's factory, one of the first built in
America, employed over a hundred children. The oldest was ten, the youngest was four.
Theophilus Fisk, a Connecticut publisher and Jackson
Democrat is ranked as one of the major leaders of the early U.S. labor movement. Fisk
denounced wealthy White campaigners for negro rights and in 1836 gave what has been
described as a "fierce anti-abolitionist speech" in South Carolina. Fisk's anger
derived from his observation that White slavery had been ignored. Fisk "found that
America's slaves had 'pale faces' and as abolitionism grew in Boston, called for an
end to indulging sympathies for Blacks in the South and for 'immediate emancipation of
the White (factory) slaves of the North." (Roediger, p. 75).
Charles Douglass, president of the New England Association
of Farmers, Mechanics and Other Working Men, described the four thousand White
children and women at work in the factories of Lowell, Massachusetts in the 1860s as
"dragging out a life of slavery and wretchedness...These establishments (New England's
factories) are the present abode of wretchedness, disease and misery,.,"
Ruth Holland, commenting on the participation of New England
factory owners in the cause of abolitionism and rights for negroes in the south,
observed, "It's a little difficult to believe that northern mill owners, who were
mercilessly abusing (White) children for profit, felt such pure moral indignation at
(negro) slavery." (Mill Child, p. 28).
Human Brooms
Thousands of White children in Great Britain were forced to
work as human brooms inside chimney flues and led miserable lives and died horrid
deaths. The condition of these chimney-sweepers reveals perhaps more than other form
of White
slavery, the attitude of the ruling class toward the most defenseless and oppressed
segment of the "surplus" White poor.
Chimney-sweeping had been practiced as a trade as far back
as the Tudor era, but "the custom of forcing young boys to sweep flues with brushes
and scrapers probably did not become general until the 18th century." British cities
in the Georgian era were festooned with forests of rooftop brick and mortar. Several
flues were usually installed in each of the chimneys of a Georgian mansion to satisfy
the 18th century demand for more comfortable indoor heating-- a fireplace in nearly
every room being the new yardstick of comfort.
As the number of flues increased, their size decreased, the
average being approximately ten by fourteen inches. Children were essential for their
maintenance. The very architecture of Georgian England now reflected the throwaway
status of the White pauper child. Like the White children enslaved in the factories,
they had been recruited from the workhouses as "pauper apprentices":
"Parish officials...tried to get rid of pauper children as soon
as they were old enough by apprenticing them to any master who would take them." These
included the masters of chimney-sweeps for whom thin, malnourished boys as young as
four were considered ideal for their facility for entering narrow smoke channels.
An 18th century eyewitness to the system of child chimney- sweeps, Jonas
Hanway, stated that it was "equal to any of the miseries which human nature seems
capable of supporting...and if the evil is suffered to reign any longer, it must level
us with nations whom we call barbarians, if it does not ultimately draw down on us the
vengeance of heaven."
(improving the Lot of the Chimney Sweeps, p. xxx).
Chimney sweeping "was often little more than thinly-disguised slavery."
(Inglis, p. 30).
It was not uncommon to send the children up the chimneys while they were still
on fire, or to place flaming straw in the grate, beneath a child who had entered the
chimney but refused to go all the way up. Skeletal deformities and crippling were
common, as were fatal accidents. An eyewitness account tells of a boy called to a job
that needed to be done in haste. The child entered the flue but quickly came out
again, saying it was too hot:
"The master told him to make as much haste as he could. He was a long time
going up...heard him cry out he was hung to a nail; heard him crying and sobbing, very
much; very near nine o'clock, having been up about twenty minutes; never heard
anymore...Upon asking the boy's master...(he) sent another boy up after him; he went
as far as he could reach his toes; the child said he could not pull him down, 'He
won't come down, master,' who said, 'Damn him...
"The builder who extricated the boy said it was very difficult, as he was so
wedged in, and the flue was so exceedingly hot. The flue was fourteen inches by
twelve...That and the soot, and the heat, the builder testified, must have caused the
boy's death by suffocation." (Inglis, pp. 136-l 37).
Those boys who escaped death often contracted cancer: "...in 1775...Percival
Pott observed an overwhelming number of young chimney sweeps suffering from scrotal
cancer. He believed that the horrendous disease in these malnourished boys, kept thin
by their employers to fit down the chimneys, was caused by their constant exposure to
soot...but the English government took more than fifty years to pass laws to protect
them." (Marc Lappe, Chemical Deception, quoted in E Magazine, Sept.-Oct., 1991, p. 55).
In handbills and advertisements the masters of chimney- sweeps would boast
that they were in possession of "small boys" for the best work inside flues. "Little
boys for small flues" was a popular advertising slogan.
Priory, "so that climbing-boys might have the pleasure of sweeping them" and
she the pleasure of observing the children's "sport" (George L. Phillips, p. 31).
The lives of poor White children continued to be sacrificed even when
machine-cleaning became feasible without alterations of any kind being made to flues.
In 1828 Joseph Glass improved the design of a chimney-cleaning machine invented
earlier by George Smart. The new modifications rendered the cleaning of every flue by
means of the contrivance an inexpensive and efficient means of foregoing child labor
for the purpose. The device was mostly ignored by the masters of sweeps and homeowners
alike because English boys cost even less than the affordable cleaning-machine:
"...the cost of Glass' machine with a ball and brush amounted
to ú4; yet sweeps preferred boys whom they could easily obtain in almshouses or on the
streets; they made the boys beg their food, so the upkeep was almost nothing. Whereas
the machine was liable to wear and tear, the child was forced to work, often when he
was ill; moreover the machine required the combined efforts of a master and
journeyman; the child swept the chimney unaided." (George L. Phillips, p. 34).
"Is it possible," asked the reformer J.C. Hudson, "that women, whose
love of infants is said to be so strong, can persist in employing little children for
this purpose?" The answer was yes.
Samuel Roberts, in an 1834 essay on the boys used as chimney-sweeps, addressed
his indignation toward the upper-class British females who met in their
sumptuously-appointed parlors to weep with tender-hearted solicitude over the latest
accounts from America of oppression to negroes, while in the next room, scarred and
burned five year-old English boys enslaved as human brooms, were being forced up the
lady's chimney without a thought for their welfare:
"There is a race of human beings in this country, the Chimney Sweepers'
Climbing Boys...which...is more oppressed than the negroes in either the West Indian
islands, or in North America...These objects are all young and helpless. Their
employment is ten-fold more horrible than that of any attaching to the (negro)
slaves...A far greater number of them are crippled, and rendered deformed for life. A
far greater
proportion of them die in consequence of hard usage, while the horrible deaths from
suffocation, burning, and other accidents, are in this case, beyond measure more
numerous. And all this at home, within our knowledge, before our eyes...in our very
houses...How many of these poor infants...arrive at years of maturity?...of those who
die young, who knows (or cares?) anything about them? The death of any of your
favorite dogs would be more lamented..." (An Address to British Females, pp. 11-17).
Breaking the Chains of Illusion
Historian Oscar Handlin writes that in colonial America,
White "servants could be bartered for a profit, sold to the highest bidder for the
unpaid debts of their masters, and otherwise transferred like movable goods or
chattels...ln every
civic, social and legal attribute, these victims of the turbulent displacements of the
16th and 17th centuries were set apart. Despised by every other order, without
apparent means of rising to a more favored place, these men and their children, and
their children's children seemed mired in a hard, degraded
life...The condition of the first Negroes in the continental English colonies must be
viewed within the perspective of these conceptions and realities of (White)
servitude... ("Origins of the Southern Labor System," William and Mary Quarter/y,
April, 1950, p. 202).
The history of enslavement in America as portrayed in the
tunnel vision of the corporate media has focused exclusively on the enslavement of
negroes. The impression is given that only Whites bear responsibility for enslaving
negroes and only negroes were slaves. In fact negroes in Africa as well as American
Indian tribes such as the Cherokee engaged in extensive enslavement of negroes. The
Cherokee Indians owned large plantations on which they worked their negro slaves in
gangs (R. Halliburton, Jr., Red over Black: Black Slavery among the Cherokee Indians,
p. 20).
White slaves were actually owned by negroes and Indians in
the South to such an extent that the Virginia Assembly passed the following law in
1670: "It is enacted that noe negro or Indian though baptized and enjoyned their owne
ffreedome shall
be capable of any such purchase of christians..." (Statutes of the Virginia Assembly,
Vol. 2, pp. 280-81).
Negroes also owned other negroes in America (Charleston County Probate Court
Records, 1754-1758, p. 406).
While Whites languished in chains Blacks were free men in Virginia throughout
the 17th century (Willie Lee Rose, A Documentary History of Slavery in North America,
p. 15; John Henderson Russell, Free Negro in Virginia, 7 679-186.5, p.23; Bruce
Levine, et al., Who Built America?, vol. I, p. 52).
In 1717, it was proposed that a qualification for election to
the South Carolina Assembly was to be "the ownership of one white man." (Journals of
the Commons House of Assembly of the Province of South Carolina: 7692-1775, volume 5,
pp. 294-295).
Negroes voted in the Carolina counties of Berkeley and Craven
in 1706 "and their votes were taken." (Levine, p. 63).
Blacks were toting guns or other weapons and going about armed in the service
of wealthy landowners at the same time that tens of thousands of enslaved White men
were forbidden
arms. In 1678 one thousand negroes were armed by the planters and formed into a
fighting militia for protection against the French (Carl and Roberta Bridenbaugh, No
Peace Bevond the Line: The En&h in the Caribbean, 7 624-7690;pp: 359-360).
In Carolina in 1704, 1707, 1712, 1738 and 1741 bills
were passed authorizing armed negro militias in the service of the planters. In 1742
certificates were presented to the Black militiamen for services rendered. (Warren B.
Smith, White Servitude in Colonial South Carolina, p. 98).
During the American Revolution, Lord Dunmore, the Royal Governor of Virginia
appointed by the King, sought to win Virginia back for the British Crown with Black
troops recruited in America, to be called the Ethiopian Regiment. Parties of Blacks in
the South were armed by the British with
guns, clubs and swords with the order to use them against rebellious American
patriots. (Ronald Hoffman, "The Disaffected in the Revolutionary South," The American
Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism, pp.281-282).
"By the first of December (1775) nearly three hundred Blacks in uniform, with
the words 'Liberty to Slaves' inscribed across their breasts, were members of Lord
Dunmore's Ethiopian Regiment...On the ninth of December at the Battle of Great
Bridge--the Lexington of the South--the British force of six hundred, nearly half
Black, was thrown back by Woodford's (all-White, American) Second Virginia Regiment...
"In April, 1782, General Nathanael Greene informed
Washington that the British had armed and put into uniform at least seven hundred
Blacks. The Ethiopian Regiment was not the only Black unit. That same spring two
members of a Black British cavalry troop, about a hundred strong, were killed in a
skirmish (with patriots) at Dorchester, Virginia. Evacuating Boston, the royal army
sailed to Halifax with a 'Company of Negroes.'...lt is possible that tens of thousands
of (Black) slaves in South Carolina and Georgia went over to the British...(Sidney
Kaplan, The B/a&Presence in the Era of the American Revolution, 1770-1800, pp. 32, 61
and 67).
During the War of 1812, the British ranks included approximately three hundred
armed American negroes, who were used in combat against American forces. Some of these
negroes helped the British burn the White House in 1814 (Roediger, p. 44).'
No wonder that Frederic Douglass would declare to a White audience on
Independence Day, nine years before the Civil War,
"This Fourth of July is yours, not mine."
The British aristocracy's penchant for arming negroes and Indians for combat
against White Americans has largely been forgotten today, even though it was one of
the factors which led the colonists to go to war against King George, and was cited as
such in the Declaration of Independence. The patriots' outrage at Indian atrocities
and anger at Dunmore's manumission of
kiss their hind parts for o tha care." (Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's
Unfinished Revolution, 7 863-
7877, pp. 11 and 13).
Poor Whites had to be drafted into the Confederate army. As in the North,
where resistance to conscription was widespread, many Southern Whites saw the conflict
as "a rich man's war and a poor man's fight." Indeed, any slaveholder owning 20 or
more Black slaves was exempt from military combat.
From 1609 until the early 1800% between one-half and two thirds of all the
White colonists who came to the New World came as slaves. Of the passengers on the
Mayflower, twelve were White slaves (John Van der Zee, Bound Over, p. 93). White
slaves cleared the forests, drained the swamps, built the
roads. They worked and died in greater numbers than anyone else.
Both psychologically and materially Whites in modern times are called upon to
bear burdens of guilt and monetary reparation for negro slavery. This position is
based entirely on enforced ignorance and the deliberate suppression of the record of
White slavery in North America. Hundreds of thousands of Whites had been enslaved
during the colonial era in America while millions of others were too poor to afford
even a mule, much less a Black slave.
Slave reparations and guilty feelings are due--if one subscribes to such a
thing as retroactive collective guilt--from the descendants of the minority of wealthy
Whites who owned negro slaves and who, in the South at least, were themselves
generally reduced to penury in the aftermath of the Civil War. Reparations would also
have to be paid by the descendants of the Cherokee and other American Indian tribes
who owned Black slaves and by the heirs of Black tribal leaders in Africa who sold
them into slavery. (3)
Reparations must also be paid, if the logic of the situation is to be
consistent, to the modern-day White descendants of the White slaves of early America.
The whole discussion of negro slavery, Southern racism and the Civil War as
currently framed by the Establishment agenda, necessarily must exclude any examination
of the fact of White slavery, especially in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the
condition of free White poor in the 19th century forced to compete against negro slave
labor in the South.
Whites Were the First Slaves in America
The enslavement of Whites extended throughout the American
colonies and White slave labor was a crucial factor in the economic development of the
colonies. Gradually it developed into a fixed system every bit as rigid and codified
as negro slavery was to become. In fact, negro slavery was efficiently established in
colonial America because Black slaves were
governed, organized and controlled by the structures and organization that were first
used to enslave and control Whites. Black slaves were "late comers fitted into a
system already developed." (Ulrich B. Phillips, Life and Labor in the O/d South, pp.
2526).
White slavery was the historic base upon which negro slavery was constructed.
"..the important structures, labor ideologies and social relations necessary for
slavery already had been established within indentured servitude...white
servitude...in many ways came remarkably close to the 'ideal type' of chattel slavery
which later became associated with the African experience" (Hilary McD. Beckles, White
Servitude , pp. 6-7 and 71). "The practice developed and tolerated in the kidnapping
of Whites laid the foundation for the kidnapping of Negroes." (Eric Williams, From
Columbus to Castro, p. 103).
The official papers of the White slave trade refer to adult White slaves as
"freight" and White child slaves were termed "half-freight." Like any other commodity
on the shipping inventories, White human beings were seen strictly in terms of market
economics by merchants.
The American colonies prospered through the use of White slaves which Virginia
planter John Pory delcared in 1619 were "our principal1 wealth."
"The white servant, a semi-slave, was more important in the
17th century than even the negro slave, in respect to both numbers and economic
significance." (Marcus W. Jernegan, Laboring and Dependent C/asses in Colonial
America, p. 45).
Where mainstream history books or films touch on White slavery it is referred
to with the deceptively mild-sounding
title of "indentured servitude," the implication being that the
enslavement of Whites was not as terrible or ail-encompassing as negro "slavery" but
constituted instead a more benign bondage, that of "servitude."
Yet the terms servant and slave were often used interchangeably to refer to
people whose status was clearly that of permanent, lifetime enslavement. "An Account
of the English Sugar Plantacons" (sic) in the British Museum (Stowe manuscript)
written circa 1660-1685, refers to Black and White slaves as "servants": "...the
Colonyes were plentifully supllied with Negro and Christian servants which are the
nerves and sinews of a plantacon..." (Christian was a euphemism for White).
"In the North American colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries and
subsequently in the United States, servant was the usual designation for a slave"
(Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, p. 2,739).
The use of the word servant to describe a slave would have
been very prevalent among a Bible-literate people like colonial Americans. In all
English translations of the Bible available at the time, from Wycliffe's to the 161 1
King James
version, the word slave as it appeared in the original Biblical languages was
translated as servant. For example, the King James Version of Genesis 9:25 is
rendered: "Cursed be Canaan, a servant of servants shall he be." The intended meaning
here is clearly that of slave and there is little doubt that in the mind of early
Americans the word servant was synonymous with slave (cf. Genesis 9:25 in the New
International Version Bible).
In original documents of the White merchants who transported negroes from
Africa the Blacks were called servants:"...one notes that the Company of Royal
Adventurers referred to their cargo as 'Negers,' 'Negro-Servants,' 'Servants...from
Africa..." (Handlin, p. 205).
The documentary record debunks the propaganda that slavery was strictly a
racist operation, part of a conspiracy of White supremacy, because: 1. Whites as well
as Blacks were enslaved. 2. In the 17th century slaves of both races were called
servants. 3. The colonial merchants of 17th century America had no qualms about
enslaving their own White kindred. Oscar Handlin:
"Through the first three-quarters of the 17th century, the Negroes, even in
the South, were not numerous...They came into a society in which a large part of the
(White) population was to some degree unfree...The Negroes lack of freedom was not
unusual. These (Black) newcomers, like so many others, were accepted, bought and held,
as kinds of servants...
"It was in this sense that Negro servants were sometimes called slaves...For
that matter, it also applied to white Englishmen...ln New England and New York too
there had early been an intense desire for cheap unfree hands, for 'bond slavery,
villeinage or Captivity,' whether it be white, Negro or Indian..." (Handlin, pp.
202-203, 204, 218).
"The early laws against runaways, against drunkenness, against carrying arms
or trading without permission had applied penalties as heavy as death to all servants,
Negroes and
Whites" (Handlin, p. 214).
A survey of the various ad hoc codes and regulations devised
in the 17th century for the governing of those in bondage reveals no special cateqory
for Black slaves. (Hening, vol. I,
pp. 226, 258, 540)._
"Durina Liqon's time in Barbados (1647-1 650), white indentured female
servants worked in the field gangs alongside
the small but rapidly growing number of enslaved black women. In this formative stage
of the Sugar Revolution, planters did not attempt to formulate a division of labor
along racial lines. White indentured servants...were not perceived by their masters as
worthy of special treatment in the labor regime." (Beckles, Natural Rebels, p. 29).
"...whiteness and independence were not firmly connected. Nor was Blackness
yet fully linked with servitude." (Roediger, p. 27).
The contemporary academic consensus on slavery in America represents history
by retroactive fiat, decreeing that conclusions about the entire epoch fit the
characterizations of its final stage, the 19th century Southern plantation system.
(4)
17th century colonial slavery and 19th century American slavery are not a
seamless garment. Historians who pretend otherwise have to maintain several fallacies,
the chief among
these being the supposition that when White "servants" constituted the majority of
servile laborers in the colonial period, they worked in privileged or even luxurious
conditions which were forbidden to Blacks.
In truth, White slaves were often restricted to doing the dirty, backbreaking
field work while Blacks and even Indians were taken into the plantation mansion houses
to work as domestics:
"Contemporaries were aware that the popular stereotyping of
(White) female indentured servants as whores, sluts and debauched wenches, discouraged
their use in elite planter
households. Many pioneer planters preferred to employ Amerindian women in their
households...With
the...establishment of an elitist social culture, there was a tendency to reject
(White) indentured servants as
domestics...Black women...represented a more attractive option and, as a result, were
widely employed as domestics in the second half of the 17th century. In 1675 for
example, John Blake, who had recently arrived on the island (of Barbados), informed
his brother in Ireland that his white indentured servant was a 'slut' and he would
like to be rid of her...(in favor of a 'neger wench')." (Beckles, Natural Rebels, pp.
56- 57).
In the 17th century White slaves were cheaper to acquire than Negroes and
therefore were often mistreated to a greater extent.
Having paid a bigger price for the Negro, "the planters treated the black
better than they did their 'Christian' white servant. Even the Negroes recognized this
and did not hesitate to show their contempt for those white men who, they could see,
were worse off than themselves..." (Bridenbaugh, p. 1 18).
It was White slaves who built America from its very beginnings and made up the
overwhelming majority of slave-laborers in the colonies in the 17th century. Negro
slaves seldom had to do the kind of virtually lethal work the White slaves of America
did in the formative years of settlement. "The frontier demands for heavy manual
labor, such as felling trees, soil clearance, and general infrastructural development,
had
been satisfied primarily by white indentured servants between 1627 and 1643."
(Beckles, Natural Rebeis, p. 8).
The merchant class of early America was an equal opportunity enslaver and
viewed with enthusiasm the bondage of all poor people within their grasp, including
their own White kinsmen. There was a precedent for this in the English legal concept of
villeinage, a form of medieval White slavery in England.
"...as late as 1669 those who thought of large-scale agriculture assumed it
would be manned not by Negroes but by servile Whites under a condition of villeinage.
John Locke's constitutions for South Carolina envisaged an hereditary group of servile
'leetmmen'; and Lord Shaftsbury's signory on Locke Island in 1674 actually attempted
to put the scheme into practice." (Handlin, p. 207).
The Random House Dictionary of the English Language defines servitude as
"slavery or bondage of any kind." The dictionary defines "bondage" as "being bound by
or subjected to external control." It defines "slavery" as "ownership of a person or
persons by another or others."
Hundreds of thousands of Whites in colonial America were owned outright by
their masters and died in slavery. They had no control over their own lives and were
auctioned on the block and examined like livestock exactly like Black slaves, with the
exception that these Whites were enslaved by their own race. White slaves "found
themselves powerless as individuals, without honor or respect and driven into
commodity production not by any inner sense of moral duty but by the outer stimulus of
the whip." (Beckles, White Servitude, p. 5).
Upon arrival in America, White slaves were "put up for sale by the ship
captains or merchants...Families were often separated under these circumstances when
wives and offspring were auctioned off to the highest bidder." (Foster R. Dulles,
Labor in America: A History, p. 7).
"Eleanor Bradbury, sold with her three sons to a Maryland owner, was separated
from her husband, who was bought by a man in Pennsylvania." (Van der Zee, p. 165).
White people who were passed over for purchase at the point of entry were
taken into the back country by "soul drivers" who herded them along "like cattle to a
Smithfield market" andthen put them up for auction at public fairs. "Prospective
buyers felt their muscles, checked their teeth...like cattle..."
(Sharon Salinger, To Serve We// and Faithfully, Labor and indentured Servants in
Pennsylvania, 1682-1800, p. 97). "...indentured servants were sold at auction,
sometimes after being stripped naked." (Roediger, p. 30). "We were...exposed to sale
in public fairs as so many brute beasts." (Ekirch, p. 129).
"Contemporary accounts likened them to livestock auctions. '(They) are brought
in here,' a person noted, 'and sold in the same manner as horses or cows in our market
or fair.
(William) Green recalled: 'They search us there as the dealers in horses do those
animals in this country, by looking at our teeth, viewing our limbs..." (William
Green, Sufferings of William Green, p. 6 and Ekirch, p. 123).
"They are frequently hurried in droves, under the custody of severe brutal
drivers into the Back Country to be disposed of as servants." (Jernegan, p. 225).
Those Whites for whom no buyer could be found even after marketing them inland
were returned to the slavetrader to be sold for a pittance. These Whites were
officially referred to as "refuse" and "lumps": "Unloading large numbers wholesale,
called 'lumping,' was generally a last resort that yielded smaller rewards." White
slaver James "Cheston wrote to his partners, 'The servants go off slower than I
expected...1 shall try them a few days longer in the retail way and then lump the
remainder.
"Large-scale purchasers generally retailed servants farther inland....'They
drive them through the country like a parcel of sheep until they can sell them to
advantage," wrote White slave John Harrower.
The Virginia Company arranged with the City of London to have 100 poor White
children "out of the swarms that swarme in the place" sent to Virginia in 1619 for
sale to the wealthy planters of the colony to be used as slave labor. The Privy
Council of London authorized the Virginia Company to "imprison, punish and dispose of
any of those children upon any disorder by them committed, as cause shall require."
(Emphasis supplied).
The trade in White slaves was a natural one for English merchants who imported
sugar and tobacco from the colonies. Whites kidnapped in Britain could be exchanged
directly for this produce. The trade in White slaves was basically a return haul
operation.
The operations of Captain Henry Brayne were typical. In November of 1670,
Capt. Brayne was ordered to sail from Carolina with a consignment of timber for sale
in the West Indies. From there he was to set sail for London with a load of sugar
purchased with the profits from the sale of the timber. In England he was to sell the
sugar and fill his ship with from 200 to 300 White slaves to be sold in Carolina.
The notion of a "contract" and of the legal status of the White in "servitude"
became a fiction as a result of the exigencies of the occasion. In 1623 George Sandys,
the treasurer of Virginia, was forced to sell the only remaining eleven White slaves
of his Company for lack of provisions to support them. Seven of these White people
were sold for 150 pounds of tobacco.
The slave-status of Whites held in colonial bondage can also be seen by
studying the disposition of the estates of the wealthy Whites. Whites in bondage were
rated as inventories and disposed of by will and by deed along with the rest of the
property. They were bought, sold, bartered, gambled away,
mortgaged, weighed on scales like farm animals and taxed as property.
Richard Ligon, a contemporary eyewitness to White slavery, in his 1657 A True
and Exact History tells of a White slave, a woman, who was being traded by her master
for a pig. Both the pig and the White woman were weighed on a scale. "The price was
set for a groat a pound for the hog's flesh and six pence for the woman's flesh..."
(p. 59).
In general, Whites were not treated with the relative dignity the term
"indentured servants" connotes, but as degraded chattel--part of the personal estate
of the master and on a par with his farm animals.
The term "indentured servitude" therefore is nothing more than a
propagandistic softening of the historic experience of enslaved White people in order
to make a false distinction between their sufferings and those of negro slaves.
This is not to deny the existence of a fortunate class of Whites who could in fact be
called "indentured servants" according to the modern conception of the term, who
worked under privileged conditions of limited bondage for a specific period of time,
primarily as apprentices. These lucky few were given religious instruction and could
sue in a court of law. They were employed in return for their transportation to
America and room and board during their period of service.
But certain historians pretend that this apprentice system-- the privileged
form of bound labor--was representative of the entire experience of White bondage in
America. In actuality, the indentured apprentice system represented the condition of
only a tiny segment of the Whites in bondage in early America.
"Strictly speaking, the term indented servant should apply only to those
persons who had bound themselves voluntarily to service but it is generally used for
all classes of bond servants." (Oliver P. Chitwood, A History of Colonial America,
p. 341).
Richard B. Morris in Government and Labor in Early America notes that, "In the
colonies, however, apprenticeship was merely a highly specialized and favored form of
bound labor. The more comprehensive colonial institution included all persons bound to
labor for periods of years as determined either by agreement or by law, both minors
and adults, and Indians and Negroes as well as whites" (p. 310).
In a reversal of our contemporary ideas about White "indenture" and Black
"slavery," many Blacks in colonial America were often temporary bondsmen freed after a
period of time. Peter Hancock arranged for a negro servant named Asha to serve for
twelve months, thenceforth to be a free person. (Bridenbaugh, pp. 120-l 21). Black
indentured servants in the 18th century even had an "education clause" in their
contracts:
"...free negro boys bound out as apprentices were sometimes given the benefit
of an educational clause in the indenture. Two such cases occur in the Princess Anne
County Records; one in
1719, to learn the trade of tanner, the master to 'teach him to read,' and the other,
in 1727, to learn the trade of gunsmith, the master to teach him 'to read the Bible
distinctly." (Jernegan, p. 162).
Newspaper and court records in South Carolina cite "a free
negro fellow named Johnny Holmes...lately an indented servant with Nicholas Trott..."
and "a negro man commonly called Jack Cutler--he is a free negro having faithfully
served out his time with me four years according to the contract agreed upon..."
(Warren 6. Smith, p. 106).
David W. Galenson is the author of an Orwellian suppression of the horrors and
conditions of White slavery entitled White Servitude in Colonial America. He states
concerning White slaves, "European men and women could exercise choice both in
deciding whether to migrate to the colonies and in choosing possible destinations."
This is positively misleading. At the bare minimum, hundreds of thousands of
White slaves were kidnapped off the streets and roads of Great Britain in the course
of more than one hundred and fifty years and sold to captains of slaveships in London
known as "White Guineamen."
Ten thousand Whites were kidnapped from England in the year 1670 alone (Edward
Channing, History of the United States, vol. 2, p. 369). The very word "kidnapper" was
first coined in Britain in the 1600s to describe those who captured and sold White
children into slavery ("kid-nabbers").
Another whitewash is the heralded "classic work" on the
subject, Abbot Emerson Smith's Colonists in Bondage which is one long coverup of the
extent of the kidnapping, the denial of the existence of White slavery and numerous
other apologies for the establishment including a coverup of the deportation and
enslavement of the Irish people. But the record proves
otherwise. (For more on Abbot Emerson Smith's errors cf. Warren B. Smith, White
Servitude in Colonial South Carolina,
p. ix).
Irish Slaves
"Cromwell's conquest of Ireland in the middle of the seventeenth century made
slaves as well as subjects of the Irish people. Over a hundred thousand men, women and
children were seized by the English troops and shipped to the West Indies, where they
were sold into slavery..." (George Novack, "Slavery in Colonial America," America's
Revolutionary Heritage, p.142).
On Sept. 11, 1655 came the following decree from the Puritan Protectorate by
Henry Cromwell in London:
"Concerning the younge (Irish) women, although we must use force in takinge
them up, yet it beinge so much for their owne goode, and likely to be of soe great
advantage to the publique, it is not in the least doubted, that you may have such
number of them as you thinke fitt to make use uppon this account." The "account" was
enslavement and transportation to the colonies.
A week later Henry Cromwell ordered that 1,500 Irish boys aged 12 to 14 also
be shipped into slavery with the Irish girls in the steaming tropics of Jamaica and
Barbados in circumstances which killed off White adult slaves by the thousands due to
the rigors of field work in that climate and the savage brutality of their overseers,
In October the Council of State approved the plan.
Altogether more than one hundred thousand Irish were shipped to the West
Indies where they died in slavery in horrible conditions. Children weren't the only
victims. Even eighty year old Irish women were deported to the West Indies and
enslaved (D.M.R. Esson, The Curse of Cromwell: A History of the /ronside Conquest of
Ireland, 7649-53, p. 176).
Irish religious leaders were herded into "internment camps throughout Ireland,
and were then moved progressively to the ports for shipment overseas like cattle."
(D.M.R. Esson, p. 159). By the time Cromwell's men had finished with the Irish people,
only one-sixth of the Irish population remained on their lands. (Esson, p. 168).
Protestant Slaves
Cromwell did not only enslave Catholics. Poor White Protestants on the English
mainland fared no better. In February, 1656 he ordered his soldiers to find 1,200 poor
English women for enslavement and deportation to the colonies. In March he repeated
the order but increased the quota to "2,000 young women of England." In the same year,
Cromwell's Council of State ordered all the homeless poor of Scotland, male and
female, transported to Jamaica for enslavement (Eric Williams, p. 101).
Of course, Cromwell and the Puritan ruling class were not the
only ones involved in the enslavement of Whites. During the Restoration reign of King
Charles II, the monarch with Catholic sympathizers who had been Cromwell's arch-enemy,
the king enslaved large groups of poor Presbyterians and Scottish Covenanters and
deported them to the plantations in turn.
Legislation sponsored by King Charles II in 1686, intended to ensure the
enslavement of Protestant rebels in the Caribbean colonies, was so harsh that one
observer noted, "The condition of these Rebels was by this Act made as bad, if not
worse than the Negroes." (Richard Hall, Acts Passed in the /s/and of Barbados, p. 484).
"By far the largest number and certainly the most important group of white
indentured servants were the poor Protestants from Europe." (Warren B. Smith, p. 44).
Legal Basis and Definitions
In the late 16th century the English parliament empowered
magistrates to enslave the British poor, "beyond the seas." In
161 5 James I gave similar authorization. The operation was formalized with the
passage of the Transportation Act of 17 18, the preamble of which declared "...that
its purpose was both to deter criminals and to supply the colonies with labor. Since
'in many of His Majesty's colonies and plantations in America there is a great want of
servants..." (A.G.L. Shaw, Convicts and the Colonies, p. 25).
One of the earliest advocates of the enslavement of indigent Whites for labor
in Nova Britannia was the Elizabethan preacher and geographer Richard Hakluyt, who
advised the Crown that poor Whites should be "condemned for certain years in the
western parts" (of the New World) where they would
"be raised again, and do their country good service' by performing such useful chores
as felling timber, mining precious minerals and raising sugar cane." (Richard Hakluyt,
A Discourse Concerning Western Planting [Deanne edition], p. 37; A. Roger Ekirch,
Bound for America, p. 7).
Hakluyt was among the first to label the new British poor, "criminals" and to
urge their utilization as slave laborers in America, a process which would later
become known under the euphemism, "transportation." (A.L. Rowse, The Elizabethans and
America, p. 46).
Confronted with the labor shortage typical in early America, the colony of New
York petitioned for White slaves from England in 1693. The Quakers of Philadelphia
also sought them. (Shaw, pp. 32-34).
There were four categories of status for White people in colonial America:
White freemen, White freemen who owned property, White apprentices (also called
"indentured servants," "redemptioners" and "free-willers") and White slaves.
The attempt by Abbot Emerson Smith, Galenson and many others to deny the
existence and brutal treatment of White slaves by pretending they were mostly just
"indentured servants" learning a trade, regulated according to venerable, medieval
Guild traditions of apprenticeship, runs completely counter to the documentary record.
"...the planters did not conceive of their (White) servants
socially and emotionally as integral parts of the family or household, but instead
viewed them as an alien
commodity...Having abandoned the moral responsibility aspect of pre-capitalist
ideology, masters enforced an often violent social domination of (White) servants by
the manipulation of oppressive legal codes...transform(ing)...indentured servitude,
with its pre-industrial, moral, paternalistic superstructure, into a market system of
brutal servitude...maintained by the systematic application of legally sanctioned
force and violence." (Beckles, White Servitude, pp. xiv and 5).
Informal British and colonial custom validated the kidnapping of working-class
British Whites and their enslavement in the colonies under such euphemisms as
"Servitude according to the Custom," which upheld the force of "verbal contracts"
which shipmasters and press-gangs claimed existed between them and the wretched Whites
they kidnapped off the streets of England and sold into colonial slavery.
These justifications for White slavery arose in law determined by penal codes.
In other words, White slavery was permitted and perpetuated on the claim that all who
were thus enslaved were criminals. No proof for this claim was needed because the fact
of one's enslavement "proved" the fact of one's "criminality." The history of White
slavery in the New World can be found within the history of the enforcement of the
penal codes in Britain and America.
The "convicts," once in America, "...encountered widespread exploitation.
Tobacco planters...felt few qualms about putting freeborn Englishmen to hard labor or,
if need be, shackling them in chains. Neither the status of convicts as servants nor
their living conditions were altogether different from those of slaves, and
opportunities for achieving a settled social life were arguably worse." (Ekirch, pp.
3-4).
"Punctilious' gentlemen 'disdain that Englishmen should be slaves on English
land,' a correspondent in the Gentleman's Magazine pointed out, 'and rather choose
America for the theatre of our shame." (Ekirch, p. 21).
The claim of the aristocracy that these "convicts" were mainly dangerous
criminals and felons guilty of heinous I crimes, was largely a function of the
propaganda that attended the enterprise of White slavery in the early American era:
"...the great bulk of offenses were committed, not by professional thieves, but by the
needy poor..." due to what one witness, the clergyman Francis Hare, described as "the
extreme misery and poverty great numbers are reduced to." (Ekirch, p. 13).
Slaves were made of poor White "criminals" who had poached a deer, stolen a
loaf of bread or had been convicted of destroying shrubbery in an aristocrat's garden.
In 1655 four teenagers were whipped through the streets of Edinburgh, Scotland, burned
behind the ears and "barbadosed" into slavery in the colonies for interrupting a
minister, James Scott, while he was preaching in church. (Calendar of State Papers,
Colonial Series, America and West Indies, volume 5).
Under British law in the 17th and 18th centuries, "felonies" punishable by
death included stealing or vandalizing gates, fruits, canal-banks and hop-binds. Other
capital crimes included breaking down the head of a fish-pond, 'whereby fish may be
lost,' cutting down trees in an avenue or garden, sending threatening letters, selling
cotton with forged stamps and committing "sacrilege." (Shaw, pp. 26-27). Crimes
punishable by transportation into slave labor in America included: stealing ore from
lead mines, fishing in enclosed
ponds, bigamy, and solemnizing a marriage in secret (Shaw, p. 27).+
A "felon" was a pregnant, starving woman who stole a bowl of soup; a 12 year
old boy who had picked someone's pocket, or a young father like Thomas Atwood with a
wife, child and mother to support, sentenced to slavery in America because he had
stolen a sheep to satisfy the "cries of his family for bread at a time when he had it
not to give them" (Ekirch, pp. 27-28, 50, 67).
They would be separated from their parents, children or spouse and
"transported" to the colonies, often for life.
Catherine Davis, a pregnant seamstress, was convicted in a London court of
stealing seven yards of lace. She was separated from her husband, sentenced to slavery
and placed aboard the convict ship forward. She gave birth on board. Her baby was dead
within two weeks, its mother bound for Maryland. (Ekirch, p. 11 1).
Awaiting a slave ship in a Cambridge, England jail, the "convict" Mary
Featherstone, charged with theft, gave birth to a baby boy. He was taken from her and
she was transported to slavery in His Majesty's Plantations in America. (Ekirch, p,68).
"Laboring men often suffered abusive treatment in the colonies, but
transported felons made especially easy prey. Marked with the stamp of infamy...'Worse
than negroes,' in fact, was the verdict of a Jamaican governor...many convicts were
already viewed in much the same way as slaves...convict servants...toiled under
debased conditions not altogether different from black slavery...Some observers, in
fact, held that convicts suffered harsher treatment...'Like horses you must slave, and
like galley-slaves will you be used" (Ekirch, pp. 140, 15 1, 156, 160).
The "convict" label was so ubiquitous that it prompted Samuel Johnson's remark
on Americans: "Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be content with anything
we allow them short of hanging."
But even an exclusive focus on the indentured servant or "apprentice" class
cannot conceal the fact of White slavery because very often the distinctions between
the two blurred:
"Large companies did not deal solely in convicts. Some participated in the
indentured servant trade, so that servants and convicts were at times transported on
the same ships...Eddis claimed that planters 'too generally conceive an opinion that
the difference is merely nominal between the indented servant and the convicted
felon'...another believed that they (indentured
servants) 'are obliged to serve like slaves or convicts, and are on the same
footing'...such observations do afford tantalizing evidence that some (White) servants
were gradually becoming associated, in the public mind, with convicts, and, further,
that many convicts were already viewed in much the same way as slaves." (Ekirch, pp.
75 and 156).
Through a process of subterfuge and entrapment, White apprentices were
regularly transformed into White slaves, as we shall see.
There tended to be one law for the rich and another for the poor. Eldons confession
that he had been a great poacher was greeted with laughter. Working class english
children were transported to slavery for stealing apples from a tree for which the
high born had no fear.
White slaves were owned not only by individual aristocrats and rich planters
but by the colonial government itself or its governor. White slaves included not just
paupers but such "wicked villaines" as "vagrants, beggars, disorderly and other
dissolute persons" as well as White children from the counties and towns of Britain
who were stolen from their parents though no Harriet Beecher Stowe rose to prominence
in chronicling the anguish and hardship of these enslaved White children.
White Political Prisoners Sold into Slavery
A large number of the White slaves arriving in America
described as "convicts" were actually political prisoners. Of the Scottish troops
captured at the battle of Worcester more than 600 hundred were shipped to Virginia as
slaves in 1651. The rebels of 1666 were sent as slaves to the colonies as were the
Monmouth rebels of 1685 and the Jacobites of the rising of 1715.
"It is now commonly accepted that the African slave trade could not have
operated for over three centuries without the active participation of some African
states and political leaders. The human merchandise was obtained largely as a result
of political conflicts between neighboring states and tribes.
"Less well known are the ways in which...(White slave laborers were
obtained)...from the British Isles for the West Indies plantations in the seventeenth
century. The English state ruthlessly rounded up victims of political conflict and
prisoners of war at places like Dunbar, Worcester, Salisbury
and, during territorial expansionism, in Ireland, for sale to West Indian merchants.
In this respect English governments and African political leaders were responding to
the same market forces." (Beckles, White Servitude, p. 52).
The Crown put tens of thousands of political dissidents in slavery, some being
shipped to New England while others were deported to the plantations of the West
Indies and worked to death in the island's boiler houses, mills and sugar cane fields.
Cromwell sold the White survivors of the massacre at Drogheda to slave-traders in the
Barbados "and thereafter it became his fixed policy to 'barbadoes' his opponents"
(Eric Williams, p. 101).
By 1655, half of the total White population of Barbados consisted of political
prisoners sold into slavery (Jill Sheppard, The 'Redlegs' of Barbados, p. 18).
Establishment historians claim that only Blacks were slaves because Whites
were released after a term of seven or ten years of servitude. But the history of the
enslavement of Britain's political prisoners disproves this notion. Plantation owners
saw it as their profitable and patriotic duty to extend the servitude of the political
prisoners on the plantations far beyond the supposed ten or twenty year limit.
British political prisoners were shipped into slavery in America for life, not
seven or fourteen years: "...those who survived the voyage worked out their lives in
bondage on the plantations of America." (John Prebble, Glencoe, p. 65).
"After the battle of Worcester in 1652 the first mention is made of Royalists
having been brought out to Barbados and sold as slaves...they had been taken prisoner
at Exeter and Ilchester...From there they were driven straight to Plymouth, put on a
ship where they remained below deck, sleeping amongst the horses. On arrival in
Barbados they were sold as chattel and employed in grinding the mills, attending to
the furnaces and digging in the hot sun--whipped at the whipping post as rogues, and
sleeping in sties worse than pigs." (Ronald Tree, A History of Barbados, p. 35).
This was no "temporary bondage." Of 1300 Cavaliers enslaved in 1652 in
Barbados almost all of them died in slavery. (Bridenbaugh, pp. 110-l 11; Heinrich von
Uchteritz, Kurze Reise, pp. 3-10).
The enslavement of White political prisoners in the West Indies was debated in
the English Parliament on March 25, 1659. The practice was allowed to continue and was
still in operation as late 1746 when Scottish Highland infantrymen and French and
Irish regulars of the Jacobite army were transported into slavery in Barbados after
the battle of Culloden. (Sheppard, p. 3).
Slave Hunting in Britain
Whites convicted of no crime whatever were made slaves by
being captured by press-gangs in Britain and shipped into slavery in colonial America.
These slave raids (also known as "spiriting"), began under the reign of King Charles
I, continued during the Commonwealth period and throughout the reign of Charles II. It
was an organized system of kidnapping English, Welsh and Scottish workers, young and
old, and transporting them to the American colonies to be sold, with the profits split
between the press-gangs and the shipmaster to whom the captured Whites were assigned
in chains.
These slave hunting gangs were viewed with covert approval by the British
aristocracy who feared the overpopulation of the White underclass. Confiscatory levels
of taxation and the enclosure laws had driven British small farmers and village
dwellers off the land and into the cities where they gathered and "loitered," a threat
to the order and comfort of the propertied classes.
17th and 18th century economists advocated the enslavement of poor Whites
because they saw them as the cheapest and most effective way to develop the colonies
in the New World and expand the British empire. It was claimed that by making slave
laborers out of poor Whites they were saved from being otherwise, "chargeable and
unprofitable to the Realm."
As the plantation system expanded in the southern American colonies, planters
demanded the legalization of the practice of kidnapping poor Whites. As it stood, laws
were on the books forbidding kidnapping, but these were for show and were enforced
with very infrequent, token arrests of "spirits." The planters' need for White slave
labor expanded to such an extent that they tired of having to operate in a quasi-legal
manner.
In response in February, 1652 it was enacted that:
"...it may be lawful for...two or more justices of the peace within any
county, citty or towne corporate belonging to this commonwealth to from tyme to tyme
by warrant...cause to be
apprehended, seized on and detained all and every person or persons that shall be
found begging and vagrant...in any towne, parish or place to be conveyed into the port
of London, or unto any other port...from where such person or persons may be
shipped...into any forraign collonie or plantation..." (Egerton
manuscript, British Museum).
Parliamentary legislation of 1664 allowed for the capture of White children
who were rounded up and shipped out in chains. Judges received 50% of the profits from
the sale of the White youths with another percentage going to the king.
With these laws, it was open season on the poor of Great
Britain as well as anyone the rich despised. In 1682 four White men from Devon,
England were enslaved and transported to the
colonies. The judges had indicted the four for "wandring." From 1662 to 1665, the
judges of Edinburgh, Scotland ordered the enslavement and shipment to the colonies of
a large number of "rogues" and "others who made life unpleasant for the British upper
classes" (Register for the Privy Council of Scotland, third series, vol. 1, p. 181;
vol. 2, p. 101).
Scottish royalty had tenant farmers to whom they owed
money, kidnapped and sold to slavers under the pretense that they had been ordered for
transportation to the colonies as convict slave-laborers. 'It has been whispered,
Edward Burt affirmed, "their crimes were only asking their dues..." (Edward Burt,
Letters from a Gentleman, vol. I, pp. 54-55).
In 1739, "Under the orders of two lairds on the Isle of Skye, Sir Alexander
MacDonald and Norman MacLeod, over 100 men, women and children were kidnapped one
evening from their homes on Skye and several neighboring islands.
As one of the victims later recounted, they were 'all guarded and
delivered...and a good deal of them were at the same time bound and tied.' The plan
was to ship the prisoners to either New England or Pennsylvania, where they would be
sold as servants, but when the vessel stopped to take on supplies at Donaghadie, in
Northern Ireland, they escaped across the surrounding countryside...neither MacDonald
or MacLeod was ever prosecuted." (Ekirch, p. 32). In Charles County court in Maryland
in 1690 it was agreed that the "indentures" under which seven White slaves were being
held were "kidnapper's indentures" and therefore technically invalid. However, the
court ruled that the White slaves should continue to be held in slavery to their
various colonial masters based on the so-called "custom of the country."
The ladies of the royal court and the mayor of Bristol, England were not
beneath profiting from the lucrative traffic in poor White people. Every pretense was
used to decoy the victims aboard ships lying in the Thames. The kidnapping of poor
Whites became a major industry in such English port cities as London, Plymouth,
Southampton and Dover and in Scotland at Aberdeen where the kidnapping of White
children and their sale into slavery "had become an industry."
being held for shipment to the "Plantations." Jamieson hurried to Aberdeen and
frantically searched the docks and ships for his boy. He found him on shore among a
circle of about sixty other boys, guarded by Bonny John's slavers who brandished horse
whips. When the boys walked outside the circle they were whipped. Jamieson called to
his son to come to him. The boy tried to run to his father. Father and son were beaten
to the ground by the slavers.
Jamieson sought a writ from the Scottish courts but was informed "that it
would be vain for him to apply to the magistrates to get his son liberate; because
some of the magistrates had a hand in those doings." Jamieson never saw his son alive
again, "having never heard of him since he was carried away."
The testimony from Jamieson and from many others helped Peter Williamson to
prevail. The Aberdeen merchants were ordered by the Edinburgh Court of Sessions to pay
him f 100. Williamson was personally vindicated and his book was printed in a new
edition. The kidnapping continued, however.
The enslavement of White children from Great Britain later became the subject
of a much better known book, Robert Louis
Stevenson's Kidnapped, which was based on the real-life case of James Annesley whose
uncle, the Earl of Anglesey, had arranged for him to be seized and sold into slavery
in America, in order to remove any challenge to the Earl's inheritance of his
brother's estates.
Annesley was savagely whipped and brutally mistreated in
America and it appeared he would die in chains. He was eventually re-sold to another
master who accepted his story that he was an English lord and the heir to the Anglesey
barony.
Annesley managed to make his way back to Scotland where he
wrote a book, Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman, Returned from Thirteen Years'
Slavery in America, which years later came to the attention of Robert Louis Stevenson.
Unfortunately this rare case involving the enslavement of a member of the English
nobility attracted attention only because it involved royalty. The far more common
plight of hundreds of thousands of poor British children who had languished and died
in slavery in the colonies was ignored and awareness of the history of their ordeal
remained unchanged in the wake of the publication of Stevenson's classic.
The head of one kidnapping ring, John Stewart, sold at least 500 White youths
per year into slavery in the colonies. Stewart's thugs were paid twenty-five shillings
for Whites they procured by force--usually a knock in the head with a blunt
instrument--or fraud. Stewart sold the Whites to the masters of the "White Guineaman"
slave ships for forty shillings each.
One eyewitness to the mass kidnapping of poor Whites estimated that 10,000
were sold into slavery every year from throughout Great Britain (information in a
pamphlet by M. Godwyn, London, 1680).
White Losses in the Middle Passage were Higher than that of Blacks
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, p.91 .) 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 (Salinger, p.
92).
J,Foster R. Dulles writing in Labor in America: A History, p, states that whether
convicts, children 'spirited' from the countryside or political prisoners, White
slaves "experienced discomforts and sufferings on their voyage across the Atlanticthat
paralleled the cruel hardships undergone by negro slaves on the notorious Middle'
Passage."
Dulles says the Whites were "indiscriminately herded aboard the 'white
guineamen,' often as many as 300 passengers on little vessels of not more than 200
tons burden--overcrowded, unsanitary...The mortality rate was sometimes as high as 50%
and young children seldom survived the horrors of a voyage which might last anywhere
from seven to twelve weeks."
independent investigator A.B. Ellis in the Argosy writes concerning the
transport of White slaves, "The human cargo, many of whom were still tormented by
unhealed wounds, could not all lie down at once without lying on each other. They were
never suffered to go on deck. The hatchway was constantly watched by sentinels armed
with hangers and blunder busses. In the dungeons below all was darkness, stench,
lamentation, disease and death."
Marcus Jernegan describes the greed of the shipmasters which led to horrendous
loss of life for White slaves transported to America:
"The voyage over often repeated the horrors of the famous 'middle passage' of
slavery fame. An average cargo was three hundred, but the shipmaster, for greater
profit, would sometimes crowd as many as six hundred into a small vessel...The
mortality under such circumstances was tremendous, sometimes more than
half...Mittelberger (an eyewitness) says he saw thirty-two children thrown into the
ocean during one voyage. (Jernegan, pp. 50-5 1).
"The mercantile firms, as importers of (White) servants, were not too careful
about their treatment, as the more important purpose of the transaction was to get
ships over to South Carolina which could carry local produce back to Europe.
Consequently the Irish--as well as others--suffered greatly...
"It was almost as if the British merchants had redirected their vessels from
the African coast to the Irish coast, with the white servants coming over in much the
same fashion as the African slaves." (Warren B. Smith, p. 42).
A study of the middle passage of White slaves was included in a Parliamentary
Petition of 1659. It reported that White slaves were locked below deck for two weeks
while the slaveship was still in port. Once under way, they were "all the way locked
up under decks...amongst horses." They were chained from their legs to their necks.
"...transports...travel in double irons...were whipped and
beaten...captains such as Edward Brockett of the Rappahannock
Merchant, were totally unfit." (Ekirch, p. 101). Of the White slaves bound for
Maryland from London aboard the slaveship Justitia, at the mercy of the savage Capt.
Barnet Bond, nearly one-third of the Whites died: "The very worst excesses were
revealed during the voyage of the Justitia in 1743. Under the command of Barnet
Bond...Bond set stringent water rations, Despite ample reserves of water on board, he
allotted each transport only one pint a day. Some started to drink their own urine..."
(Ekirch, p. 102).
The former partner of Andrew Reid of the White slave trading firm of Reid &
Armour wrote that Reid was "a person against whom every species of complaint was
made." Profits continued to flow in spite of the deaths of what the White slave-trade
firm of Stevenson, Randolph & Cheston referred to as "the goods." The traffic in these
"goods...properly managed will in a few years make us very genteel fortunes. The sales
of the convicts run up amazingly in a little time." (William Stevenson to James
Cheston, Sept. 12, 1768 and Dec. 30, 1769, Cheston-Galloway PapersMaryland Historical
Society).
Once the slaveships left British shores, "profit rather than penal policy
shaped the character of transportation" and what happened to enslaved Whites overseas
"mattered little. As soon as they were safely consigned to merchants, authorities
assumed no responsibility for their welfare." (Ekirch, p. 3). White slaves aboard ship
were treated "worse than dogs or swine and are kept much more uncleanly than those
animals are..." (Shaw, p. 35).
A witness who saw a White slave aboard a ship owned by the slaver John
Stewart, reported: "All the states of horror I ever had an idea of are much short of
what I saw this man in; chained to a board in a hole not above sixteen feet long, more
than fifty with him; a collar and padlock about his neck, and chained to five of the
most dreadful creatures I ever looked on." Another observer watching the auction of a
hundred White slaves in Williamsburg, Virginia remarked, "I never seen such passels of
poor wretches in my life. Some almost naked..." (Ekirch, pp. 100 and 122).
One White woman slave bound for Australia, Elizabeth Dudgeon, had dared to
talk back to a guard. She was trussed up to a ship's grating and mercilessly whipped.
One of the ship's officers relished watching her lashed: "The corporal did not play
with her, but laid it home, which I was very glad to see...she has long been fishing
for it, which she has at last got to her heart's content." (Journal of Ralph Clark,
entry of July 3, 1787).
,
In order to realize the maximum profit from the trade in White slaves, the
captains of the White Guineamen crammed their ships with as many poor Whites as
possible, certain that even with the most callous disregard for the lives of the
Whites the financial gain would still make the trip worth the effort. A loss of 20% of
their White "cargo" was regarded as acceptable. But sometimes losses were much higher.
Out of 350 White slaves on a ship bound for the colonies in 1638 only 80
arrived alive. "We have thrown over board two and three in a day for many dayes
together" wrote Thomas Rous, a survivor of the trip. A ship carrying White slaves in
1685, the Betty of London. left England with 100 White slaves and arrived in the
colonies with 49 left.
A number of factors contributed to the higher death rates for White slaves
than Blacks. Although the goal of maximum profits motivated both trades, it cost more
to obtain Blacks from Africa than it did to capture Whites in Europe. White slaves
were not cared for as well as Blacks because the Whites were cheaply obtained and were
viewed as expendable.
"The African slave trade was not fully established in the early 17th
century...The price of African slaves was prohibitively high and the English were
neither familiar with nor committed to black slavery as a basic institution" (Beckles,
White
Servitude, p. 3).
Ship Captains involved in the White slave trade obtained White slaves with
penal status either free of charge or were subsidized to take them, and for all other
categories of White slaves, they paid at most a small sum to an agent to procure them,
forefeiting only the cost of their keep on board ship if they died.+
Moreover, traders in Black slaves operated ships designed solely for the
purpose of carrying human cargo with the intent of creating conditions whereby as many
Black slaves as possible would reach America alive. White slave ships were cargo ships
with no special provisions for passengers.
In addition, transportation rules decreed that, in cases where White slaves
were sold in advance to individual planters in America, if the White slave survived
the voyage beyond the halfway point in the journey, the planter in America--not the
captain of the slave ship-- would be responsible for the costs of the White slaves'
provisions whether or not the slave survived the trip. Captains of the slaveships
became infamous for providing sufficient food for only the first half of the trip and
then virtually starving their White captives until they arrived in America.
"Jammed into filthy holds, manacled, starved and abused, they suffered and
died during the crossings in gross numbers. Thousands were children under 12, snatched
off the streets..." (Kendall, p. 1).
"...the transportation...became a profitable enterprise.
Traders delivered thousands of bound laborers to Pennsylvania and exhibited a callous
disregard for their...cargoes" (Salinger,
p. 88). As a result, White slaves on board these ships suffered a high rate of disease.
".__transportation(of White slaves)
remained a branch of commerce wedded to carrying human cargoes at minimal
expense...sizable numbers never reached American shores...from disease,
mistreatment...(Ekirch, p. 108).
*" The greater part of the convict trade was conccnlrated in the hands of a
few merchant companics...In London. which offered Ihc special lure of the Treasury
subsidy, several rirms captured fhc market for the bulk of Ihc century...Andrew Reid,
a friend of ibc Secretary of the Trwsury, wils placed on ihc ~ovcmmcnl's
payroll...Reid had several partners. including James and Andrew Armour of London and
John Stewart. 3 Scotsman. During the 1750s. Srewart and the Armours held the Treasury
contracL. There&x Slcwarl was joined by Icllow Scot Duncan
Campbell...Other London mcrchnnts. though not government bcncficiaries, trafficked in
convicts on 3 smaller scale. There (acre) thirty-four identifiablc London [inns
involved in the trade to Maryland from 1746 Lo 1775..." [Ekirch. pp. 73.741.
The number of diseased White slaves arriving was high enough for Pennsylvania
officials to recommend a quarantine law for them. Thus a new torment was to be endured
for White slaves who "were often stopped just short of the New World, with land in
sight, and forced to remain quarantined on board ships in which they had just spent a
horrifying ten to twelve weeks" (Salinger, p. 89).
In 1738 Dr. Thomas Graeme reported to the colonial Council of Pennsylvania
that if two ships crammed with White slaves were allowed to land, "it might prove
Dangerous to the health of the Inhabitants of this Province." ("Minutes of the
Provincial Council of Pennsylvania," Colonial Records, 4:306).
Ships filled with diseased White slaves landed anyway. In 1750 an island was
established for their quarantine, Fisher Island, at the mouth of Schuylkill River. But
the establishment of the quarantine area did nothing to protect the health of the
White slaves and the island was more typical of Devil's Island than a place of
recuperation. In 1764 a clergyman, Pastor Helmuth, visited Fisher island and described
it as "a land of the living dead, a vault full of living corpses."
White Slaves Treated Worse than Blacks
"Before 1650, however, the greater victims of man's inhumanity were the mass
of white Christian servants who suffered at the hands of callous, white Christian
masters. For the time being, with all of their troubles, the blacks had it better."
(Bridenbaugh, p. 120).
"Sold to a master in Merion, near Philadelphia, David Evans was put to work
'hewing and uprooting trees'--land clearing, the most arduous of colonial labor, work
that was spared black slaves because they were too valuable." (Van der Zee, p. 138).
"Negroes...are, therefore, almost in every instance, under more comfortable
circumstances than the miserable European, over whom the rigid planter exercises.an
inflexible rigidity. They are strained to the utmost to perform their allotted
labor...they frequently try to escape, but very few are successful...and...when
apprehended, are committed to close confinement, advertised, and delivered to their
respective
masters...The unhappy culprit is doomed to a severe chastisement; and a prolongation
of servitude is decreed...Those who survive...seldom establish their residence..."
(William Eddis, Letters From America, [published in 17921 Letter VI).
In the British West Indies the torture visited upon White slaves by their
masters was routine. Masters hung White slaves by their hands and set their hands a
fire as a means of punishment. To end this barbarity, Colonel William Brayne wrote to
English authorities in 1656 urging the importation of negro slaves on the grounds
that, "as the planters would have to pay much for them, they would have an interest in
preserving their lives, which was wanting in the case of (Whites)..." many of whom, he
charged, were killed by overwork and cruel treatment.
Indentures: An Organized Racket
Even privileged 17th and 18th century "apprentices" often
became slaves in the end (i.e. unpaid, forced laborers for life) based on contractual
trickery, judicial malfeasance and usury employed against them during their supposedly
limited term as indentured servants.
Such an apprentice would be enticed to borrow sums of
money, sign a contract with impossible provisions guaranteeing his or her violation of
the contractual terms and other unscrupulous means of extending both the period of
servitude as well as broadening the scope of the servant's obligations. By these means
an apprentice could be transformed into a slave for life.
Free White people were sometimes induced to sign "indentures" and place
themselves in voluntary "temporary" slavery with the promise of obtaining farm acreage
at the end of their term of indenture. An American colony typically offered 50 acres
to such persons.
This was actually little more than an organized racket. The alleged "servant"
had his or her land grant entrusted to the landowner for whom they labored, with the
understanding that title would pass to the servant at the end of his term of labor.
But he could forfeit his rights to this promised land on the slightest pretext of his
owner, on such grounds as running away
as fighting the Indians and French in Arctic conditions with few--if any--firearms,
(Benjamin Franklin had been apprenticed at age 12 to his printer-brother. The
term of his indenture was to have been for nine years, but he managed to have his
contract voided while his brother was in jail for seditious publishing. As a young
man, Franklin was once mistaken for a fugitive White slave, "and in danger of being
taken up on that suspicion").
The notion that Whites are particularly "hardhearted" and "racist" because
they upheld a fugitive slave law against Blacks is specious when considered in light
of the enactments against rebellious and fugitive White slaves. If a tiny clique of
wealthy Whites didn't feel sorry for their own people thus enslaved, and hunted them
when they escaped or revolted, why would anyone expect them to exempt negroes from the
same treatment?
Sometimes the reverse was true. Whites like Harriet Beecher Stowe were solely
concerned with the plight of Blacks and avoided or denied the oppression of Whites.
Like the wealthy "liberal" White elite of our time who do nothing for the White poor
but campaign tirelessly for the rights of colored people, the Quakers of colonial
Philadelphia were early advocates of Black rights and abolition of negro servitude
even as some Quakers whipped and brutalized the White slaves they continued to own. (7)
Torture and Murder of White Slaves
White slaves were punished with merciless whippings and
beatings. The records of Middlesex County, Virginia relate how a slavemaster confessed
"that he hath most uncivilly and inhumanly beaten a (White) female with great knotted
whipcord--so that the poor servant is a lamentable spectacle to behold."
"Whippings were commonplace...as were iron collars and chains." (Ekirch, p. 1
SO).
A case in the county from 1655 relates how a White slave was
"fastened by a lock with a chain to it" by his master and tied to a shop door and
"whipped till he was very bloody." The beating and whipping of White slaves resulted
in so many being beaten to death that in 1662 the Virginia Assembly passed a law
prohibiting the private burial of White slaves because such burial helped to conceal
their murders and encouraged further atrocities against other White slaves.
A grievously ill White slave was forced by his master to dig his own grave,
since there was little likelihood that the master would obtain any more labor from
him. The White slave's owner "made him sick and languishing as he was, dig his own
grave, in which he was laid a few days afterwards, the others being too busy to dig
it, having their hands full in attending to the tobacco." (Jaspar Danckaerts and Peter
Sluyter, Journal of a Voyage to New York and a Tour of Several American Colonies, 7
679- 1680).
In New England, Nicholas Weekes and his wife deliberately cut off the toes of
their White slave who subsequently died. Marmaduke Pierce in Massachusetts severely
beat a White slave boy with a rod and finally beat him to death. Pierce was not
punished for the murder. In 1655 in the Plymouth Colony a master named Mr. Latham,
starved his 14 year old White slave boy, beat him and left him to die outdoors in
sub-zero
temperatures. The dead boy's body showed the markings of repeated beatings and his
hands and feet were frozen solid.
Colonial records are full of the deaths by beating, starvation and exposure of
White slaves in addition to tragic accounts such as the one of the New Jersey White
slave boy who drowned himself rather than continue to face the unmerciful beatings of
his master (American Week/y Mercury, Sept. 2-9, 1731).
Henry Smith beat to death an elderly White slave and raped two of his female
White slaves in Virginia. John Dandy beat to death his White slave boy whose black and
blue body was found floating down a creek in Maryland. Pope Alvey beat his White slave
girl Alice Sanford to death in 1663. She was repotted to have been "beaten to a
Jelly." Joseph Fincher beat his White slave Jeffery Haggman to death in 1664.
John Grammer ordered his plantation overseer to beat his White slave 100 times
with a cat-o'-nine-tails. The White slave died of his wounds. The overseer, rather
than expressing regret at the death he inflicted stated, "I could have given him ten
times more." There are thousands of cases in the colonial archives of inhuman
mistreatment, cruelty, beatings and the entire litany of Uncle Tom's Cabin horrors
administered to hapless White slaves.
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