Chapter Six
IMPOSITION OF SLAVERY
In the Midrash Rabbah, a rabbinical commentary, there is a prediction one day all gentiles will be slaves of Jews. [1] In the British West Indies much of the early capital to finance White Slavery came from Sephardic Jews from Holland. They provided credit, machinery and shipping facilities. In the 1630s Dutch Jews had been deeply involved in the enslavement of the Irish, financing their transport to slave plantations in the tropics. By the 1660s, this combination of Zionist finance and White Slave labor made the British island colony of Barbados the richest in the empire. The island's value, in terms of trade and capital exceeded that of all other British colonies combined. [2] 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 almost no 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. [3] From their experience with rebellious Irish slaves, Dutch Jews would eventually be instrumental in the switch from White to Black slavery in the British West Indies.
Blacks were more docile, and more profitable. The English traffic in slaves in the first half of the seventeenth century was solely in White slaves. The English had no slave base in West Africa, as did the Dutch Sephardim who were not only bankers and shipping magnates but slavemasters and plantation owners themselves. Jews were forbidden by English law to own White Protestant slaves, although in practice this was not uniformly enforced, Irish slaves were allowed to the Jewish slavers but were regarded by them as intractable. Hence certain Jews became prime movers behind the African slave trade and the importation of negro slaves into the New World. [4] 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." [5]
And:
"The practice developed and tolerated in the kidnapping of Whites laid the foundation for the kidnapping of Negroes." [6]
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 declared in 1619 were "our principal wealth."
"The White Servant, a semi‑slave, was more important in the 17th century than even the negro slave, in respect IN BOTH NUMBERS and economic significance." [7]
Where Establishment 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 all- 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 Plantations" in the British Museum [8] written circa 1660‑1685 refers to Black and White Slaves as
"servants...the Colonyes were plentifully supplied with Negro and Christian {White} 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." [9]
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 1611 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. [10] 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 'egers,' 'Negro‑Servants,' 'Servants...from Africa..." [11]
Oscar Handlin, Professor of History at Harvard University, debunks the propaganda that slavery was strictly a racist operation, part of a conspiracy of White Supremacy. Prof. Handlin points to the facts that:
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:
"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...in New England and New York too there had early been an intense desire for cheap unfree hands, for 'bond slavery, villeinage of Captivity,' whether it be White, Negro or Indian..." [12]
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 category for Black slaves. [13]
"During Ligon's time in Barbados (1647‑1650), 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." [14]
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.
Prof. Handlin informs us that legislators in Virginia sought to cover‑up the record of White bondage and its equivalence to negro servitude:
"The compiler of the Virginia laws (codifying Black slavery for the first time) then takes the liberty of altering texts to bring earlier legislation into line with his own new notions." [15]
For Examples of alteratings to insert the word slave as a reference to Blacks in Virginia when it had not been used to describe them that way before, see Hening, Vol. 2, pp. iii, 170, 283, 490. What was later lawmakers sought to cover‑up? The fact that the White ruling class of Colonial America had cast their own White People into the same condition as the Blacks, or even worse. Richard Ligon's eyewitness report of a White Slave revolt in Barbados in 1649 has been consistently referred down through the years as a rebellion of Negro Slaves by at least a dozen later historians such as Poyer, Oldmixon, Schomburgh et al. In their cases this does not seem to have been a matter of deliberate falsification, but rather a complete inability to conceive of Whites as Slaves. Ligon had written that the rebels in question had not been able to "endure such slavery" any longer and the later historians automatically assumed that this had to have been a reference to negroes. IT IS THIS PERSISTENT COGNITION BY CATEGORICAL PRECONCEPTION THAT RENDERS MUCH OF WHAT PASSES FOR COLONIAL HISTORY IN OUR ERA INACCURATE AND MISLEADING.
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')." [16]
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..." [17]
IT WAS WHITE SLAVES WHO BUILT AMERICA FROM ITS VERY BEGINNINGS AND MADE UP THE OVERWHELMING MAJORITY OF SLAVE‑ ABORERS IN THE COLONIES NOT BLACKS 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 (Slaves) BETWEEN 1627 AND 1643." [18]
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 'leet men'; and Lord Shaftsbury's signory on Locke Island in 1674 actually attempted to put the scheme into practice." [19]
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." [20]
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." [21]
Another example:
"Eleanor Bradbury, sold with her three sons to a Maryland owner, was separated from her husband, who was bought by a man in Pennsylvania." [22]
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" and then put them up for auction at public fairs.
"Prospective buyers felt their muscles, checked their teeth...like cattle..." [23]
White Men and Women were driven by their Jewish slavers, just as a cowboy would a herd of cattle:
"They are frequently hurried in droves, under the custody of severe brutal drivers into the Back Country to be disposed of as servants." [24]
Those Whites for whom no buyer could be found even after marketing them inland were returned to the slave trader to be sold for a pittance. These Whites were officially referred to as "refuse."
The Virginia Company arranged with the City of London to have 100 POOR WHITE CHILDREN "out of the swarms that swarm 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."
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 hall 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..." [25]
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 [Jewish, or their lackys] 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 indentured servant should apply only to those persons who had bound them-selves voluntarily to service but it is generally used for all classes of bond servants." [26]
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." [27]
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. [28]
"...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." [29]
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..." [30]
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 SLAVE SHIPS IN LONDON KNOWN AS "WHITE GUINEAMEN." Ten thousand Whites were kidnapped from England in the year 1670 alone. [31] 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 cover‑up of the extent of the kidnapping, the denial of the existence of White Slavery and numerous other apologies for the establishment including a cover‑up of the deportation and enslavement of the Irish people. But the record proves otherwise. [32]
"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..." [33]
On September 11, 1655 came the following decree from the Puritan Protectorate by Henry Cromwell in London:
"Concerning the young (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. [34] Irish religious leaders were herded into,
"internment camps throughout Ireland, and were then moved progressively to the ports for shipment overseas like cattle." [35]
By the time Cromwell's men had finished with the Irish people, only one‑sixth of the Irish population remained on their lands. [36] 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. [37] Of course, Cromwell and the Puritan ruling class were not the only ones involved in the enslavement of Whites.
During the Restoration reign of Charles II, the king with Catholic sympathizers who had been Cromwell's arch‑enemy, King Charles enslaved large groups of poor Presbyterians and Scottish Covenanters and deported them to the plantations in turn. Legislation sponsored by King Charles 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." [38]; "BY FAR THE LARGEST NUMBER and certainly the most important group OF WHITE INDENTURED SERVANTS (Slaves) WERE THE POOR PROTESTANTS FROM EUROPE." [39]
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 at denying 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." [40]
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. Slaves were made of poor White "criminals" who had stolen as little as one sheep, a loaf of bread or had been convicted of destroying shrubbery in an aristocrat's garden. They would be separated from their parents or spouse and "transported" to the colonies for life. In 1655 four teenagers were whipped through the streets of Edinburg, Scotland, burned behind the ears and "barbadosed" for interrupting a minister, James Scott, while he was preaching in church. [41] 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. Through a process of subterfuge and entrapment, White apprentices were regularly transformed into White slaves, as we shall see.
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 through no Harriet Beecher Stowe rose to prominence in chronicling the anguish and hardship of these enslaved White Children.
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." [42]
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." [43]
By 1655, half of the total White population of Barbados consisted of political prisoners sold into slavery. [44]
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." [45]; "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 IIchester...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 stiles worse than pigs." [46]
This was no "temporary bondage." Of 1300 Cavaliers enslaved in 1652 in Barbados almost all of them died in slavery. [47] 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 as 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. [48] 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 Whyites 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 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 country, citty or towne corporate belonging to this commonwealth to from tyme to tyme by warrant...case 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..." [49]
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 indicated the four for "wandering." 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." [50]
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. But 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 even 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, Southhapton and Dover and in Scotland at Aberdeen where the kidnapping of White Children and their sale into slaver "had become an industry."
The kidnapping of English children into slavery in America was actually legalized during the first quarter of the 17th century. In that period a large number of the children of poor parents, as well as orphan children were targeted for the White Slave trade. The poor White Children were described as a "plague" and a "rowdy element."
Aristocrats who ran the Virginia Company such as Sir Thomas Smythe and Sir Edwin Sandys viewed the children as a convenient pool of slave laborers for the fields of the Virginia colony. In their petition to the Council of London in 1618 they complained of the great number of "vagrant" children in the streets and requested that they might be transported to Virginia to serve as laborers. A bill was passed in September of 1618 permitting the capture of children aged eight years old or older, girls as well as boys. The eight year old boys were to be enslaved for sixteen years and the eight year old girls for fourteen years, after which, it was said, they would be givne land. [51] A directive was issued for the capture of children in London, empowering city aldermen to direct their constables to seize children on the streets and commit them to the prison‑hospital at Bridewell, where they were to await shipment to America. [52]
"...their only 'crime' was that they were poor and happened to be found loitering or sleeping in the streets when the constable passed by." [53]
The street was not the only place child slaves were to be procured however. The homes of indigent parents with large families were also on the agenda of the slave‑traders. Poor English parents were given the "opportunity" to surrender one or more of their children to the slavers. If they refused they were to be starved into submission by being denied any further relief assistance from the local government:
"To carry out the provisions of the act the Lord Mayor [54] ...directed the alderman...to (make) inquiry of those parents 'overcharged and burdened with poor children' whether they wished to send any of them to Virginia...those who replied negatively were to be told they would not receive any further poor relief from the parish." [55]
The grieving parents were assured that the shipment of their children to Virginia would be beneficial to the children because it was a place where "under sever masters they may be brought to goodness." [56]
In January of 1620 a group of desperate, terrified English children attempted to break out of Bridewell where they had been imprisoned while awaiting the slave‑ships to America. They rose up and fought:
"...matters were further complicated by the refusal of some of the children to be transported. In late January a kind of 'revolt' occurred at Bridewell, with some of the 'ill‑disposed' among the children declaring 'their unwillingness to go to Virginia..." [57] "A hasty letter from (Sir Edwin) Sandys to the King's secretary (Sir Robert Naunton) quickly rectified the situation."
On January 31 the Privy Council decreed that if any of the children continued to their "obstinance" they would be severely punished.
It is possible that ONE OF THE CHILDREN WAS ACTUALLY EXECUTED AS AN EXAMPLE TO THE OTHERS! What is certain is that a month later the children, mostly boys, were forced on board the ship Duty and transported to Virginia. From thence onward, English male child slaves came to be known as "Duty Boys." [58]
There would be many more shipments of these doomed children bound for the colonies in the years ahead.
"From that time on little is known about them except that very few lived to become adults. When a 'muster' or census of the (Virginia) colony was taken in 1625, the names of only seven boys were listed (of the children kidnapped in 1619). All the rest were dead...The statistics for the children sent in 1620 are equally grim...no more than five were alive in 1625." [59]
On April 30, 1621 Sir Edwin Sandys presented a plan to the English parliament for the solution of the threat poor English people posed to the fabulously wealthy aristocracy: mass shipment to Virginia, where they would all be "brought to goodness."
When control of the colony of Virginia passed from the privately‑ held Virginia Company directly to the king, it was deemed more expedient, as time went on, to privatize the traffic in White Children while placing it on an even larger basis to meet the cheap labor needs of all the colonies. In this way the Crown avoided the opprobrium that might have been connected with the further official sale of English children even as the aristocracy covertly expanded this slave trade dramatically.
The early traffic in White Children to Virginia had proved profitable not only for the Virginia Company but for the judges and other officials in England who administered the capture of the children: J. Ferrar, treasurer of the Virginia Company, indicated that he had been approached by the Maarshal of London and other officials who had been involved in procuring children for the colony, proclaiming that they were owed a financial reward,
"for their care and travail therein, that they might be encouraged hereafter to take the like pains whensoever they should have again the like occasion."
The officials subsequently received the handsome "cut" for their part in the loathsome traffic in kidnapped White Children which they had desired. [60] This collusion between the public and private sphere generated profits and established a precedent for many more "occasions" where "liek pains" would be eagerly taken. The precedent established was the cornerstone of the trade in Child‑slaves in Britain for decades to come; a trade whose center, after London, would become the ports of Scotland:
"Press gangs in the hire of local merchants roamed the streets, seizing 'by force such boys as seemed proper subjects for the slave trade.' Children were driven in flocks through the town and confined for shipment in barns...So flagrant was the practice that people in the countryside about Aberdeen avoided bringing children into the city for fear they might be stolen; and so widespread was the collusion of merchants, shippers, suppliers and even magistrates that the man who exposed it was forced to recant and run out of town." [61]
This man was Peter Williamson who as a child in 1743 was captured in Aberdeen and sold as a slave for America with 70 other kidnapped Scottish Children in addition to other freight. After eleven weeks at sea, the ship ran aground on a sand bar near Cape May on the Delaware river. As it began to take on water, the crew fled in a lifeboat, leaving the boys to drown in the sinking ship. The Planter managed to stay afloat until morning however, and the slavers returned to salvage their "cargo."
Peter Williamson was twice‑blessed. He not only survived the Planter but had the great good fortune to have been purchased by a former slave, Hugh Wilson, who had also been kidnapped in Scotland as a child. Wilson had fled slavery in another colony and now bought Williamson in Pennsylvania. He did so solely out of compassion, knowing the boy would be bought by someone else had Wilson not bought him first. Wilson paid for Williamson's education in a colonial school and years later on his death, bequeathed to the lad his horse, saddle and a small sum of money, all Wilson had in the world.
With this advantage, Williamson married, became an Indian‑fighter on the frontier and eventually made his way back to Scotland, seeking justice for himself and on behalf of all kidnapped children including his deceased friend Hugh Wilson. This took the form of a book, The Life and Curious Adventures of Peter Williamson, Who Was Carried Off from Aberdeen and Sold for a Slave. But when he attempted to distribute it in Aberdeen he was arrested on a charge of publishing a,
"scurrilous and infamous libel, reflecting greatly upon the character and reputations of the merchants of Aberdeen."
The book was ordered to be publicly burned and Williamson jailed. He was eventually fined and banished from the city. Williamson did not give up but sued the judges of Aberdeen and took sworn statements from people who had witnessed kidnappings or who had had their own children snatched by slavers. Typical was the testimony of William Jamieson of Oldmeldrum, a farming village 12 miles from Aberdeen. In 1741, Jamiesons's ten year old son John was captured by a "spirit" gang in the employ of "Bonny John" Burnet, a powerful slave‑merchant based in Aberdeen.
After making inquiries, Jamieson learned that his son was 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 shipped. 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 100 pounds sterling. Williamson was personally vindicated and his book would later be printed in a new edition. The kidnapping continued, however.
The enslavement of WHITE CHILDREN FROM GREAT BRITAIN 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 as if 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. He 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 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 languished and died in slavery in the colonies was ignored and their lot 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. [62] 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 (White) 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." [63]
Foster R. Dulles writing in Labor in America: A History, p. 6, states that whether convicts, children 'spirited' from the countryside or political prisoners, White slaves,
"experienced discomforts and sufferings on their voyage across the Atlantic that 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." [64]; "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." [65]
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 slave ship 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. One White Woman Slave, 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 whipped:
"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." [66]
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 a day for many days 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." [67]; "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." [68]; "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." [69]
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 afire 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.
Ship Captains involved in the White Slaves trade obtained White Slaves with penal status free of charge and for all other categories of White Slaves paid at most a small sum to an agent to procure them, forfeiting 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 slave ships 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..." [70]; "...the transportation...became a profitable enterprise. Traders delivered thousands of bound laborers to Pennsylvania and exhibited a callous disregard for their...cargoes." [71]
As a result, White Slaves on board these ships suffered a high rate of disease. 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." [72]
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 the Province." [73]
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."
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 of 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 (the owner's word would do) or for "indolence."
For the price of a White Slave's transport, six pounds, his owner secured a "headright" to the land which was supposedly intended to go to the "servant" but which was instead combined with the land supposedly set aside for other White Slaves and formed into an estate which would multiply in value. By this means and with an occasional additional fee to an English merchant or "spirit" who provided the landowner with kidnapped extra White Slaves, the plantation owners of colonial America played Monopoly with the fertile valleys and wooded uplands of Maryland and Virginia. Meanwhile the rightful owners of this land lay in paupers' graves or enshackled for life. This monopolistic grip on the land market was detrimental to all White laborers. Those White slaves who did manage to obtain their freedom alter thirty or forty years as chattel, were swindled out of the spectral "freedom dues" of acreage, left to exist as landless peasants and scorned as "hillbillies" and "White trash," in spite of decades of labor under monstrous conditions of hardship.
"One would like to think that some of the few survivors went on to become prominent leaders of the colony or were the founders of great families. This does not appear to be the case...Some were doubtless the progenitors of the 'poor white trash' of the South...many of the free whites who had descended from the poorer elements of the white servant class became objects of charity..." [74]; "...at no time after 1640 in either Barbados or St. Christopher, and probably Nevis, was there any cheap land enough for a man to purchase with his freedom dues...the vast majority never became landholders..." [75]; "It then became the custom to give the servant at the end of his term, not land, but three hundred pounds of sugar, worth less than two pounds sterling...It was hardly worth the servant's while to endure the conditions which have been described for...($4 worth) of sugar." [76]
These former White Slaves' share of the accumulated wealth of the American colonies, measured by any standard, was negligible; their say in the planter aristocracy was virtually non‑existent. They were the "expendable" by‑products and survivors of a system of exploitation governed solely by merchant companies chartered in England by aristocratic fiat. It was the exclusive government by a merchant company which Adam Smith assailed as the worst of all governments for any country. Often working conditions were made especially gruesome toward the end of the period when the [White] servant's contract was due to expire in order to induce him to run away, lose his 50 acres and be held extra years in enslavement for fleeing.
"Toward the end of the term of servitude, working conditions would often be deliberately worsened, tempting the man to run away so the master might gain these advantages." [77]
Of 5,000 "indentured servants [Slaves]" who entered the colony of Maryland between 1670 and 1680, fewer than 1300 proved their rights to their 50 acre "freedom dues." What had become of the others? More than 1400 DIED FROM OVERWORK, CHRONIC MALNOURISHMENT AND DISEASE. THE OTHERS WERE DEFRAUDED.
"By the 18th century the White Servant class was disillusioned ...The planters had...squashed the laboring Whites...They were the easy pawns of the planters, who despised them..." [78]
The statutes overseeing non‑penal indentures servitude in colonial America were mere window‑dressing and neither these statutes or the Common Law proved any obstacle to the gradual enslavement of those with the non‑penal status of "indentured servant," by means of tacking on extra time to be served, on the basis of fabricated or trumped charges and minor offenses. A Virginia law of 1619 provided that
"if a servant willfully neglect his master's commands he shall suffer bodily punishment."
When Wyatt became Governor in 1621 he was ordered to see that punishment for offenses committed by White slaves would also be in terms of labor on behalf of the colonial government, such labor to be performed after the slave fulfilled his original period of service to his master. This is the evil practice of lengthening the time required for the White Person's term of labor, a practice which quickly resulted in the lengthening of the term of "service" by years and ended in the perpetual enslavement of the White.
"While it is true that the Common Law of England had the status of national law with territorial extent in the colonies, the relation of Master to servant in cases of what began as non‑penal indentured servitude, was unknown to the Common Law and could neither be derived from nor regulated by it." [79]
Both indentured servitude and the White Slavery were permitted under of the penal codes, depended for their regulation and sanction on special local statutes and tribunals which acted as the "necessities of the occasion" demanded. The legacy of White enslavement bound up in the medieval English legal concept of "villeinage" contributed an informal framework or milieu at least, for legitimizing the enslavement of the White poor in British‑America. In this light, Richard B. Morris is only partially correct. There was in fact precedent for White Slavery in Common Law but it was little cited in the colonies, perhaps because such former legal citation would have exposed the indentures racket for what it was.
Old English law did have something of a White Slave code, based on the concept of "villeinage" from which we derive the words villain and villainy with their now blatantly pejorative connotations. With the emergence of the English Common Law (1175‑1225) came the ruse of the writ of novel dissension which dealt with who was qualified to contest land evictions. The aristocrats who drafted the writ established a category of juridical unfreedom known as villein tenure which could defeat any English peasant's claim to land, no matte how long his family had held it.
At first villain denoted a White peasant (from the French Carolingian word vilani, a general description for a peasant dependent upon a lord), and the sense of evil that was attached to the word was largely a construct of the rich who would naturally want their world order to be seen as good and therefore any White kinsman enslaved was seen as "justly deserving" of such treatment and hence had to have been bad, evil, a "villain."
It was as important for the English nobility to make this claim about English slave "villeins" as it was for American colonial merchants to label the Whites they enslaved as criminals and traitors or in the common parlance found in original documents of the period, as "rubbish and dung." The Oxford Dictionary gives the following definition of villainy,
"The condition or state of a villein, bondage, servitude, henace base or ignoble condition." [80]
In other words, the connection between villaniny and evil first came about from a premeditated association between the condition of being a slave and the state of being an evil person. Who is it that would benefit from stigmatizing White Slaves as evil beings? who but the slave holding aristocracy who could then justify any crime they committed against these "villains." Much of the common understanding of the land swindles perpetrated against the English villein class is derived from the legal treatise, De legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae, commonly known as Bracton after Sir Henry de Bracton.
The Bracton code equates the English villein with the Roman servus or slve. The Bracton code denies all rights to the villein by placing him in the same category as the Roman servus. Villeinage was considered a hereditary condition:
"Neither of Duke, earl or lord by ancestry but of villain (vylayne) people." [81] "Thou are of vylayn blood on thy father's side." [82]
This propaganda‑labeling of enslaved Whites may be better understood if we examine the original meaning and the subsequent connotations associated with the use of another name, that of "churl." We call someone a churl today who is badly bred or bad acting. Yet according to the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, originally a churl was an English "freeman of the lowest rank" ‑‑ the poorest White who was not a slave. It is no coincidence that the names for White Slaves and White poor came to be linked with evil and bad breeding as part of a self‑serving process of appellation manufactured by their rulers. A revealing display of the opprobrium associated with both words is exhibited in a description by Sir Walter Scott,
"Sweeping from the earth some few hundreds of villain churles, who are born but to plow it."
The association of these names with what Scott views as a degraded existence of plowing the earth is a holdover from plutocratic ancient Roman philosophy.
"Romans considered manual occupations...as degrading in themselves..." [83]
Since these were associated in the aristocratic mind with the work of slaves. Up until recently, European history was largely written from the point of view of institutional Churchianity, the wealthy, the aristocracy and the merchant class, at the expense of the laboring people. Rodney Hilton further cautions that,
"historians risk falling into the trap dug for the peasants by the lawyers, for most of our evidence about freedom and serfdom depends on evidence which is a by‑product of the legal...process." [84]
The creation of an exculpatory nomenclature rigged to justify the depredations of the ruling class against the White poor by establishing an intrinsic relationship between being poor and being evil, is a masterstroke of propaganda. It leads to the internalization of these negative images in the minds of the White poor themselves.
Some memory of these connections and connotations were no doubt extant in the minds of colonial Americans and has surely contributed to the dearth of material on those who survived or were descended from White Slavery. In Britain and Europe under the laws of villeinage, survivors and descendants of White Slavery were susceptible to discrimination before the law and even reenslavement:
"The former (White) Slaves, now serfs, might gradually shift into another legal category over several generations, or the taint of servility might lose much of its practical meaning as they became de facto independent, but...the descendants of (White) Slaves were for centuries considered unfree in a way that other people in equally dependent economic positions were not." [85]
This taint, which the ruling class cleverly asserted was the result of some hereditary defect among White Slaves, has been applied to many nations of White peoples from the Slavs to the Irish, Welsh and Scottish. The stigma attached to White "slave blood" by the rulers served as an effective device for:
1). Keeping such descendants from seeking redress for past wrongs.
2). Being ashamed to identify their heritage and background in the form of written memorialization.
3). Serving as a neat propaganda justification for the continuing privileges and governance of the aristocracy.
This pattern is occasionally overturned when we examine unfiltered folk literature or music. For example, in such 13th century Icelandic folk sagas as the Frostbroeora and the Laxdoela, White Slaves are portrayed as fair and Nordic in general appearance and possessed of great personal courage and honor. Biblical provisions for bound and hired labor were cited to justify White Slavery in early America, on the grounds that it was Scriptural and therefore humane. The Body of Liberties of 1641, the first law code of Puritan New England, established four categories of servitude, citing Exodus 21:2; Leviticus 25:39‑55 and Deuteronomy 23:15‑16. However, had those Scriptures actually been obeyed, the enslavement of Christians (the heirs of the Israelites) would never have taken place. Deuteronomy mandates that a bondsman is not to be oppressed. Exodus decrees that the term of service will under no circumstance exceed six years. Leviticus forbids forced slavery for the payment of debts as well as child slavery. [86] The permanent enslavement of racial aliens and their children was permitted. [87]
Abraham Lincoln's use of the Bible, which according to his law partner he did not believe in, to justify rights for negro slaves, is another example of this masterful politician's distortion of fact. While it is true that Galatians 3:28 contains the famous passage about there being "neither slave nor free...in Christ Jesus," this statement is meant to have only a spiritual application. The passage also contains the statement that there is neither male nor female in Christ, but I rather doubt Paul intended to sanction transvestitism or homosexuality. In Ephesians 6:5 slaves are ordered to obey their masters "with fear and trembling as unto Christ." In considering the Biblical stand on slavery, it is necessary to differentiate Biblical laws concerning the enslavement of aliens and Israelites. The former could be permanent, the latter was to be temporary, even though many who claimed to be the Christian heirs of the Israelites acted otherwise.
In America, those who enslaved Blacks and disparaged the manual laborer generally did not derive their philosophy from Biblical sources, however: that legacy falls in the camp of ancient Rome. [88] Southern planters would sometimes justify the bondage of the negro with Biblical arguments, but this was usually a rejoinder to abolitionist attacks, rather than the main source of enslavement praxis, it is chiefly from the aristocratic notions of the Romans toward manual labor that the classic mindset of the modern slaver in the West evolved. These concepts differ considerably from the status of the manual laborer in the Bible. Jesus Christ, the "King of Kings," toiled as a carpenter for most of His life.
Then as now, religious hypocrites of "Churchianity," as it more properly may be called, ignored Bible teachings on the subject even as they cited them for purposes of their own justification in enslaving fellow White Christians for pecuniary gain. It should be noted that some individual masters in early America who felt convicted by the Scriptures regulating bonded kinsmen moderated their treatment of White bondsmen accordingly.
In colonial America, White people could be enslaved for such an "offense" as missing church services more than three times or for "prevention of an idle course of life." In 1640 a Virginia master needed to ensure further labor from his White servants in order to place his investments and land improvements on a more secure basis. He therefore falsely accused a number of his servants of a conspiracy "to run out of the colony and enticing divers others to be actors in the same conspiracy." As a result of his accusation the alleged "runaways" were severely whipped and had their term of forced labor lengthened an additional seven years, to be served "in irons."
This can be regarded as a light sentence in view of the fact that seven years was a standard addition of the term of labor for the crime of running away, or conspiring to do so, to which would then be added, in terms of additional time, the expenses incurred for capture and return of the White to his master, such costs being likely to include rewards, sheriffs and slave‑hunters' bounties and jail fees. These latter were not fixed by law until 1726 and were a source of tremendous abuse by tacking on huge costs to the capture of the runaway and then commanding that the runaway pay for these inflated costs in terms of years of his life in further forced‑labor.
A White Slave who fled or was accused of fleeing often had his term of labor extended fifteen, twenty or even fifty years, as a result. White Slave Lawrence Finny received an additional seven years, eleven months of forced labor for running away, while escaped White Slave William Fisher on being caught, received an additional term of six years and 250 days. [89]
Just for being absent from the plantation at any time, a White Slave would be forced to undergo one additional year of slavery for every two hours he was absent. [90] Starving White Slaves who took extra food from their masters' overflowing larders were enslaved another two years for each commission of that "crime."
Further accusations, infractions and violations added to these additions and in sum amounted to a lifetime of total enslavement and not the allegedly limited, benign White "indentured servitude" our court historians fleetingly refer to on their way to their semester‑long devotion to negro slave studies.
Indeed, one‑half of White "indentured servants" did not live to attain their freedom. Lest anyone think this grim datum refers mainly to Whites enslaved in old age, it actually refers to Whites who were first "indentured" between the ages of 16 and 20. [91] "The truth is," wrote White Slave Edward Hill, "we live in the fearfullest age that ever Christians lived in."
Young white females in bondage were denied the right to marry, a clever device for helping extend their servitude into full‑fledged slavery since the penalty for a woman having a baby out of wedlock while a slave, was an extension of her term of slave labor another two and a half years. A white male slave had at least four years added to his time for having sex with a White female slave or for entering into a compact of marriage with her. Twenty‑three year old Henry Carman, a White slave since he had been kidnapped in London at the age of seventeen, made White Slave Alice Chambers pregnant and received an additional seven years slavery for this "crime." [92]
A Virginia law of 1672 recognized that there were masters who had lengthened the enslavement of their White Female Slaves by making them pregnant by the slavemaster himself. No punishment was given to the master for such acts, however. As bad as this may seem it cannot compare with the dreadful fate that awaited the children of the enslaved White mother. The "bastard" or "obscene" children, as they were called, of unmarried White women‑slaves were bound over to the mother's slavemaster for a period of thirty‑one years! This heinous child‑slavery from birth was not modified until 1765 when the Assembly of Virginia declared it to be "an unreasonable severity to such children" and limited the term of bondage for such White Children to a "mere" 21 years for boys and 18 years for girls.
The following is an entry describing one such case of infant‑ enslavement:
"Margaret Micabin servant to Mr. David Crawley having a bastard Child, Mr. Crawley prays the gentlemen of this Vestry to bind out the said Child as they think fit. It is ordered by the Vestry that the Church‑Wardens bind out the said Child named John Sadler born the 26th July last 1720. The foresaid child is by indenture bound unto Mr. David Crawley to serve according to Law." [93]
At other times the baby was forcibly separated from the White Slave mother shortly after birth. White woman Sally Brant was enslaved to the wealthy Quaker family of Henry and Elizabeth Drinker. The Quakers were strong campaigners against negro slavery BUT HAD NO QUALMS ABOUT WHITE SLAVERY! When Sally Brant's baby was born in the Drinker's country house. Sally was forced by the Drinkers to return to their main house in Philadelphia, leaving the newborn infant behind with a stranger. The White Slave father of the child was also not allowed to see his baby and the infant subsequently died. Elizabeth Drinker, the wealthy Quaker slaveowner, kept a diary in which she philosophically noted that the death of her White Slave's baby had most likely worked out for the best.
"Unmarried (White) women servants who became pregnant, as did an estimated 20 percent, received special punishment. All had to serve additional years; some had their children taken from them and sold, for a few pounds of tobacco, to another master." [94]
By 1769 all children born to even free White women who were unmarried were also candidates for enslavement:
"...in 1769...the church wardens were instructed to bind out illegitimate children of free single White women." [95]
Long hours and exposure to disease and the elements were considered part of a first year "seasoning" process it was thought a good White Slave would require. A White Slave would work from sunrise to sunset in the fields and then might be put to work in a shed grinding corn until midnight or one a.m. and expected to return to the fields the next day at dawn. In some southern colonies with extreme heat, as many as 80% of a shipment of White Slaves died in their first year in the New World. Richard Ligon, a traveling writer and eyewitness to White Slavery has written that he saw a White Slave beaten with a cane,
"about the head till the blood has followed for a fault that is not worth speaking of; and yet he must be patient, or worse will follow." [96]
How many White tourists today who take winter vacations in such Caribbean islands as Jamaica and Barbados know that they are visiting the site of a gruesome holocaust against poor White people who died by the tens of thousands and were slaves in those islands long before Blacks ever were? Historian Richard Dunn has stated that the early sugar plantations of the British West Indies were nothing more than mass graves for White workers. [97] Four‑fifths of the White slaves sent to the West Indies didn't survive the first year. [98]
In 1688 a member of the nobility wrote from a British colony in the Caribbean islands to the British government,
"I beg...care for the poor White Servants here, who are used with more barbarous cruelty than if in Algiers. Their bodies and souls are used as if hell commenced here and only continued in the world to come." [99]; "Twenty or more (White) servants laboring under the supervision of an overseer led the most wearisome and miserable lives...if a servant complained, the overseer would beat him; if he resisted, the master might double his time in bondage...the overseers act like those in charge of galley slaves...The cost in (White) lives of such inhuman treatment is incalculable, but it was very, very high." [100]
One example of the horrible conditions White Slaves labored under can be seen in the case of the White Slave known to history as Boulton. In 1646 Boulton's master was suspected of cheating a colonial official of a large shipment of cotton. The master asked the White Slave if he would take the blame. If Boulton made the bogus confession in place of his master he was liable to have both his ears cut off by the colonial officials as well as having more time added to his period of bondage.
However Boulton's master promised that he would not only ignore the extra time if Boulton agreed to take the blame for him, but that he would free Goulton from slavery after Boutlton had been punished by the authorities. So desperate was Boulton to be free that Boulton agreed to pretend that his master had told him to give the cotton to the officials, but that instead he had embezzled it for his own use. Both of the White Slave's ears were subsequently cut off. Afterward, his master kept his part of the bargain and Boulton was emancipated.
"Some planters grew so desperate for help that they would ransom White captives from the Indians, returning them to a servitude which, according to one complainant, 'differeth not from her slavery with the Indians." [101]
"Fugitive Slave" laws, enacted to facilitate the apprehension and punishment of runaway White Slaves is another suppressed aspect of the history of early America. William Hening in his 13 volume Statutes at Large of Virginia records that the punishment for runaway Whites was to be "branded in the cheek with the letter R." they also often had one or both of their ears cut off. In 1640 the General Court of Virginia ruled that two White slaves,
"principal actors and contrivers in a most dangerous conspiracy by attempting to run out of the country and (by) enticing divers others to be actors in said Conspiracy,"
be whipped, branded and required to serve the colony an additional seven years in leg irons.
In the stock scenes from Hollywood films liek Glory the negro slave's shirt is dramatically lifted to reveal a back full of hideous scars from repeated shippings. This brings tears to the eyes of one of his White New England commanders in the fictional film Glory. Yet in reality, among the White soldiers in that scene there would have been more than a few who also bore massive scars from a whip or who had seen the scars of the lash on their White fathers' backs. The current image of Blacks as predominantly the ones who bore the scars of the whiplash is in error.
On September 20, 1776 the Continental Congress Authorized the whipping of unruly American enlisted men with up to one hundred lashes. There are cases on record of rank and file White troops receiving up to two hundred‑fifty whip‑lashes! [102] This incredible savagery represented the level of treatment poor Whites sometimes experienced at the hands of the authorities in 18th century America,
"...the officer class...came to use the lash unsparingly (on)...unpropertied... recruits...the poor white rank and file..." [103]
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." [104]; "In 1744 provision was made for whipping escaped servants through the parish, after proof had been made before a justice of the peace that they were fugitives...Dennis Mahoon was sentenced to be stripped naked to his wait and receive thirty‑nine lashes upon his naked back.' This was his punishment for a second offense in persuading fellow servants to run away..." [105]; "(White) servants were tortured for confessions (fire was inserted between their fingers and knotted ropes were put about their necks)..." [106]
Not only White Slaves were brutalized but also those who dared to aid them in gaining their freedom. The image of whites being hunted, whipped and even jailed for assisting fellow Whites out of slavery is completely absent from modern textbook accounts of slavery in America. Those who helped White Slaves run away in colonial America were known as "enticers" and received 30 lashes with a whip if caught. Merely to counsel a White Slave to seek his freedom was considered by the colonial courts as illegal interference with the property rights of the rich and resulted in criminal penalties. Hening states that to reduce the number of runaway White slaves a pass was required for any person leaving the Virginia colony and masters of ships were put under severe penalty for taking any White Slave to freedom. Advertisements regularly appeared in early American newspapers for fugitive White Slaves. One such wanted notice described a slave who had run off as having a,
"long visage of lightish complexion, and thin‑flaxen hair; sometimes ties his hair behind with a string, a very proud fellow...very impudent..." [107]
Notices of runaway White Slaves in South Carolina newspapers included specific warnings against harboring or assisting the fugitive White Slaves and listed the statutory criminal penalties for doing so. Certificates of freedom were required to be carried on the person of freed White Slaves at all times. All White workers and poor in colonial America were regarded as suspect, guilty of being fugitive slaves unless they could "give an intelligent account of themselves" or show their certificate; a very convenient arrangement for enslaving free White men and women in America by claiming they were fugitive White Slaves. White Slaves who ran away found safe haven in portions of North Carolina which became known in Virginia as the "Refuge of Runaways." The mountains of Appalachia also served as hideouts for fugitive White Slaves. The hunting of White slaves became a lucrative practice. In Virginia in 1699 persons who successfully hunted a White Slave received 1000 lbs. of tobacco, paid for by the future labor that would be extracted form the White Slave. Richard B. Morris describes the appearance of fugitive White Slaves:
"One culprit was described as having a string of bells (fastened) around his neck which made a hideous jingling and discordant noise, another wore an iron collar, and others bore the scars of recent whippings on their backs." [108]
The history of "racist White toleration" of the hunting of negro slaves as well as the controversy surrounding the capture of fugitive black slaves in the North just prior to the Civil War is incomprehensible without being placed in the context of the body of Fugitive Slave Law that was first established for use against White Slaves. In colonial America the fugitive White slave was considered the property of the master and the legal right to recovery was universally recognized.
The Articles of the New England Confederation provided that where a White Slave fled his master for another colony in the Confederation, upon certification by one judge in the colony to which the White Slave had fled, the fugitive would be delivered back into slavery. Classed with "thieves and other criminals," the fugitive White Slave could be pursued "by hue and cry" on land and over water, and men and boats were often impressed in the hunt for him. Magistrates, sheriffs or constables were authorized by statute to whip the fugitive white Man severely before returning him to his master, twenty to thirty‑nine lashes being the usual sentence imposed [Blacks were not commonly treated the same]. Massachusetts authorized that any White Slave who had been previously whipped for running away was to be whipped again just for being found outside his master's farm without a note of permission from the slavemaster.
Between February 12, 1732 and December 20, 1735, the South Carolina Gazette carried 110 wanted notices for fugitive Black slaves and forty‑one notices for fugitive White Slaves. The claims of masters in one colony upon the fugitive White Slaves in another jurisdiction were allowed from the beginning of colonial settlement in America. The U.S. Constitution upheld the colonial fugitive White Slave laws in its Article IV, section 2:
"No person held to service or labor in one state, under the Laws thereof escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labor, but shall be delivered up on a claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labor may be due."
This law was enacted by Whites against fellow White people and allowed White slavery to continue in some parts of America right up until the Civil War. The first legal blow to the system of White bondage didn't occur until 1821 when an Indiana court began to enforce the Ordinance of 1787 prohibiting White Slavery in the old "Northwest Territory." The decision cited the Constitution of the state of Indiana which in turn drew its base from the 1787 ordinance in holding all White Slavery null, void and unenforceable. The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution dealt a fatal blow to White Slavery. The enslavement of Whites in one form or another has proved very durable. bound White servitude for orphans and destitute children on contracts of indenture still occurred in New York State up until 1923 when they were finally banned.
During the American Revolution the Continental Congress, desperate for fighting manpower, permitted the recruitment of White Slaves into the army, which was tantamount to granting them their freedom. This was not particularly radical however, in view of the fact that "four score and seven years" before Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, Lord Dunmore, the Royal governor of Virginia, freed the negroes in his jurisdiction in the hope they would join the "Ethiopian Regiment" he had formed and fight the patriots. [109]
In 1765, a fourteen year old Irish lad, Matthew Lyon, was orphaned when his father was executed along with other leaders of the "White Boys," an Irish farmer's association organized to resist British government confiscation of their farmlands. The boy was enslaved and transported to America where he was purchased by a wealthy Connecticut merchant. Later he was made to endure the shame of being sold to another master in exchange of two deer
"which was a source of no end of scoffs and jeers" at Lyon's "irreparable disgrace of being sold for a pair of stags." [110]
By the spring of 1775 Matthew Lyon had taken advantage of the manpower shortage of the American Revolution and joined an obscure, rag‑tag band of guerrilla fighters. Lyon and his fellow rebels were destined to enter the annals of historical fame when not long afterward they appeared out of nowhere at Ticonderoga in northern New York where their commander, Ethan Allen, demanded the surrender of the mighty British fort. Matthew Lyon had joined the Green Mountain boys. "Eighty five of us," Lyon would later recall with pride, "took from one hundred and forty British veterans the Fort Ticonderoga."
The guns, cannon and ammunition obtained at Ticonderoga would supply the American army throughout the war. One of the founders of the state of Vermont, he was elected to its assembly and later to the U.S. Congress, where the eponymous firebrand wrestled a Federalist on the floor of the House of Representatives. He was the first American to be indicted under President John Adams' Sedition Act, for publishing material against central Federal government and Adams. Forced to run for Congress from a jail cell, Lyon was overwhelmingly re‑elected and returned to a tumultuous hero's welcome in Vermont.
The colonies of Rhode Island, New Jersey and Maryland declared White Slaves eligible to enlist in the Continental Army without their master's consent. Though such decrees had the effect of granting the freedom of those slaves who fought, the American Revolution did not result in a prohibition of the institution of White Slavery itself.
In rhetoric it was conceded that White Slavery was "contrary to the idea of liberty" but the system remained profitable and many Southern and middle colony White Slaves had not been allowed to join the Revolutionary Army and they remained in bondage. The importation of White Slaves was resumed on nearly as large a scale after the American Revolution as it had existed before. Fear of rebellion by White Slaves led to the passage of a Virginia law to suppress
"unlawful meetings" and directed that "all masters of families be enjoyned to take especial care that servants do not depart from their houses on Sundays or any other days without particular lycence from them."
Individual acts of rebellion by White Slaves were constant and many slavemasters were killed.
"...unrest among White servants was more or less chronic." [111]
In the Caribbean colonies White Slaves revolted by burning the sugar cane of the slavemaster "to the utter ruin and undon of their Masters."
Lured to colonial America with the promise of teaching job, Thomas Hellier was instead enslaved as a field worker. That betrayal combined with the viciousness of his slavemaster's wife led him to kill the slavemaster's entire family with an axe in 1678. Hellier was believed to have been inspired by Bacon's Rebellion two years before.
In 1676 Nathaniel Bacon led an uprising in Virginia. A small army of former White Slaves and fugitive White Slaves joined with the 30 year old Indian fighter Bacon against the House of Burgesses and the Governor, sparked by anger at the government's apathy in the face of warring Indians and their own penurious condition after having been cheated out of the "head" acreage they were promised. There was great fear among the circle of the royal governor, William Berkeley, that the White Slaves of the entire region would rise with Bacon and "carry all beyond remedy to destruction."
Bacon's rebels burned down the city of Jamestown, plundered the plantations and expelled the royal Governor. Bacon died suddenly, allegedly of dysentery, on October 26 at the height of the insurrection, "...an incredible number of the meanest (poorest) of people were everywhere armed to assist him and his cause," and these fought on through the winter, until the last of them were captured or killed by January of 1677. Other White Slave rebellions included the risings of 1634 which took 800 troops to put down, and 1647 in which 18 leaders of the White revolt were tortured and hung.
The rulers of Barbados even passed a proclamation in 1649,
"And act for an Annual Day of Thanksgiving for our deliverance from the last Insurrection of servants."
Richard Ligon was an eyewitness to this White Slave plot on Barbados:
"Their sufferings being grown to a great height, and their daily complainings to one another...being spread throughout the Island; at the last, some amongst them, whose spirits were not able to endure such slavery, resolved to break through it, or die in the act; and so conspired with some others...so that a day was appointed to fall upon their Masters and cut all their throats..." [112]
And in Virginia:
"After mid‑century the number of runaway (White) servants increased steadily, and in 1661 and 1663, servants in two separate (Virginia) counties took up arms and demanded freedom. The first episode occurred in York County, where servants complained of 'hard usage'...Isaac Friend, their leader, planned to bring together about forty servants. They would then 'get arms' and march through the country, raising recruits by urging servants 'who would be for liberty, and free from bondage,' to join them. Once a large enough force had been aroused, the rebels would go through the country and kill those that made any opposition, and they would either be free or die for it." [113]
More White Slave "plots" and revolts occurred in 1686 and 1692 including a rebellion the "Independents," an insurgent group of White Protestant slaves and freedmen who revolted against Maryland's Catholic theocracy. In 1721 White slaves were arrested while attempting to seize an arsenal at Annapolis, Maryland, the arms to be used in an uprising against the Planters. In Florida in 1768 White Slaves revolted at the Turnbull plantation in New Smyrna. The government needed two ships full of troops and cannon to put down the revolt.
"If the servant class threw up one radical hero, it was Cornelius Bryan, an Irish servant, imprisoned for mutiny on countless occasions and regularly whipped by the hangman for assembling servants and publicly making anti‑planter remarks." [114]
The colonial powers were not adverse to call on unlikely policemen to suppress White slave revolts: Blacks. BLACKS WERE ADMITTED TO THE COLONIAL MILITIA RESPONSIBLE FOR POLICING WHITE SLAVES! The aristocratic planters had felt the necessity to "arm part of their blackmen" to assist in suppressing White Slave revolts. [115] Armed Black militias patrolled the Carolinas from the end of the 17th century to at least 1710 when Thomas Nairne reported that Blacks continued to be members of armed colonial militias organized by local governments.
These White rebellions foreshadowed the later switch from reliance on masses of White slaves to greater and greater importation of Blacks because of their pliability and passivity. But throughout the 17th and much of the 18th century, the tobacco, sugar and cotton colonies maintained a sizable White Slave population. Negro Slaves simply cost too much to import and purchase. Whites were cheaper and more expendable, until they began to fight.
"...planter, especially in the South, eventually elected to replace the restive White Servants with the more identifiable and presumably less criminal black slaves." [116]
The toughness and sturdiness of the White Slaves who not only fought in Bacon's Rebellion but took the worst duty in the French and Indian wars and the American Revolution may have been due in part to the presence of convicts in their ranks.
Not all colonists looked with favor on the reliance upon White convict‑slave‑labor to build America. Benjamin Franklin totally opposed White Slavery and supposedly referred to White convict‑slaves shipped to America as "human serpents." Yet when attempts were made to abolish White Slavery and thereby stop the flow of both kidnapped and convict labor into colonial America, the measures were generally voted down, as when in 1748 Virginia's Burgesses upheld the Act of 1705, which legitimized the White Slavery under a veil of legal phraseology. White convict‑labor was used for the very harshest and life‑threatening jobs others would not do, such 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 THE SLAVERY OF WHITES TO DENY THE OPPRESSION OF WHITES. Like the wealthy White elite of the 1990s 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 THEY WHIPPED AND BRUTALIZED THE WHITE SLAVES THEY CONTINUED TO OWN.
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE WAS ONE OF THE GREAT HYPOCRITES OF THE 19th CENTURY, A PIOUS FRAUD WHOSE LEGACY OF MALIGNANT HATRED FOR HER OWN KIND HAS INFECTED MANY ANOTHER WHITE MAN AND WOMAN OF THIS DAY. During her triumphal 1853 tour of Britain in the wake of the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe was the guest of Duchess of Sutherland, a woman of vast wealth who had an interest in the "betterment of the negro."
The Sutherland wealth was based in part on one of the most criminal land‑grabs in British history. The Sutherlands had seized the ancient holdings of the traditional clans of Scotland and burned the Highland crofters off their lands, resulting in pauperism and in many cases, outright starvation of Scottish women and children. [117] At one point the Sutherlands even hired armed guards to prevent famine‑stricken Scottish Highlander "rabble" from catching fish in the Sutherland's well‑stocked salmon and trout rivers. [118] When Harriet Beecher Stowe returned to America she wrote a glowing account of the Sutherlands in her travel book Sunny Memories, specifically praising them for their "enlightened land policies" in Scotland, which she described as
"an almost sublime instance of the benevolent employment of superior wealth and power in shortening the struggles of advancing civilization." [119]
In response to Stowe's appalling whitewash of the crimes committed against the Scottish Highlanders, a London newspaper described Uncle Tom's Cabin as a "downright imposture" and "ranting, canting nonsense." [120] 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."
A case in the country 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." [121]
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 one of the New Jersey White Slave boy who drowned himself rather than continue to face the unmerciful beatings of his master. [122] 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 girls Alice Sanford to death in 1663. She was reported 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 from his wounds. The overseer, rather than expressing regret at the death he inflicted stated,
"I could have givne him tenn 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.
In Australia, White Slave Joseph Mansbury had been whipped repeatedly to such an extent that his back appeared,
"quite bare of flesh, and his collar bones were exposed looking very much like two Ivory Polished horns. It was with difficulty that we could find another place to flog him. Tony [Chandler, the overseer] suggested to me that we had better do it on the soles of his feet next time." [123]
Hughes describes the fate of White slaves as one of "prolonged and hideous torture." One overseer in Australia whose specialty was shipping White Slaves would say while applying his whip on their backs.
"Another half pound mate, off the beggar's ribs."
The overseer's face and clothes were described as having the appearance of,
"a mincemeat chopper, being covered in flesh from the victim's body." [124]
In colonial America, in one case, the sole punishment for the murder of a White Slave (explained as an accident) consisted of the master and his wife being forbidden from owning any White Slaves for a period of three years. A White girl enslaved by a woman called "Mistress Ward," was whipped so badly that she died from it. On the finding of a jury that such action was "unreasonable and unchristian like" Mistress Ward was fined 300 pounds of tobacco.
"...it was no easy task to secure the conviction of a master for the murder of his (White) servant...Convictions of masters for the murder or manslaughter of their servants were definitely the exception. In a preponderance of such trials they were acquitted or let off lightly, often in the face of incontrovertible evidence of guilt." [125]
In 1678 Charles Grimlin, a wealthy American colonial planter, was found guilty of murdering a female White Slave he owned. He was pardoned and set free. In the same year a White woman "of low origins," killed her husband, a man of some wealth. The same judge who pardoned Grimlin sentenced the White woman (who was probably a descendant of White Slaves) to be "burned alive according to the law." Nor should it be concluded that because some trials were held for those masters who murdered their White Slaves that this reflected a higher justice than that given to Black slaves.
In thousands of cases of homicide against poor Whites there were not rials whatsoever, murdered White Slaves were hurriedly buried by their masters so that the resulting decomposition would prohibit any enquiry into the cause of their deaths. Others just "disappeared" or died from "accidents" or committed "suicide." Many of the high number of so‑called "suicides" of White Slaves took place under suspicious circumstances, but in every single case the slavemaster was found innocent of any crime. [126] At the same time, White Slaves, White Servants and poor White working men were forbidden to serve on a jury. Only Whites who owned property could do so. Judges were recruited solely from the propertied class. When the few cases regarding the torture and murder of white Slaves reached a court it was not difficult to predict the outcome.
A White orphan boy was kidnapped in Virginia and enslaved under the guise of "teaching him a trade." The boy was able to get the Rappahannock County Court to take notice of his slaver:
"...an orphan complained on July 2, 1685 that he was held in a severe and hard servitude illegally and that he was taken by one Major Hawkins 'under pretense of giving him learning.' The case came before the court on August 2, but the justices decided that he must continue in the service of his present master." [127]; "They possessed one right, to complain to the planter‑magistrates concerning excessively violent abuse. But this right, which by custom was also available to black slaves in some societies, had little or no mitigating effect on the overall nature of their treatment on the estates." [128]
Constables and local magistrates in Virginia to whom mistreated White slaves might appeal were often the same men who enslaved and assaulted them. It should be recalled that the killing and maiming of White Slaves was visited upon them by kinsmen of the same race and religion as their slaves, making the callous disregard for their human rights doubly heinous. White Slaves were whipped, broken on the wheel, shot, hung or even burned alive. [129]
The whole apparatus of the institution of human slavery in English‑speaking America, which has been sparingly memorialized in the voluminous literature on negro slavery, was first put into place in the enslavement of Whites who were kidnapped in their native land, died on board ship, suffered child slavery and separation of parents from children forever; endured fugitive slave‑laws, the banning of White Slave meetings and severe and extreme corporal punishment, sometimes unto death.
THE MOTIVATION FOR THE COVER-UP OF THE EXTENT OF WHITE SLAVERY BY ESTABLISHMENT‑ FUNDED AND APPROVED HOUSE SCHOLARS IS OBVIOUS. TO ADMIT THE TRUE HISTORY OF WHITE SLAVERY AND RECORD IT FAITHFULLY IN MODERN HISTORY IS TO FURNISH EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE THAT WHITE SKIN DOES NOT NECESSARILY EMBODY POWER OF STATUS; that the "poor White," "redneck" of the 1990s who is asked to subsidize with his taxes and make sacrifices in his living wage and job prospects so that Blacks may be "compensated for slavery." IN REALITY OWES NOBODY FOR ANYTHING!
A 1679 colonial census of Whites who fled slavery to scratch out an existence as subsistence and tenant farmers shows that they had to flee to the worst land where they existed in extreme poverty, forming yeoman peasant communities in the hills. It is instructive to note that this White yeomanry was mocked and scorned by both the wealthy White planter elite as well as the negroes.
Rich, White plantation owners joined with the negroes in insulting White Slaves and poor White people, referring to them as "poor‑white earthscratching scum," "redshanks," "redlegs" [forerunner of the "redneck" racial insult current nowadays], "Hill Billys" and "Scotland Johnnies." "The servants were regarded by the planters as 'white trash.'" [130] White Slaves were taunted in the West Indies by Blacks who would chant the ditty, "Yella hair, speckly face and dey feet brick red" at them. [The epithet "redshanks" developed into the name redlegs which has since become a term for all survivors and descendants of White Slaves in the Caribbean region.
Various merchants and aristocrats of the 18th and 19th centuries despised the independence of these survivors of White Slavery when they encountered them in the British West Indies. The chief hallmark of the redlegs has been their absolute refusal to interbreed with the negroes and their independent subsistence lifestyle of fishing and gardening. Her is a typical 19th century description of them by an aristocrat:
"...that lowest of all beings, the 'redshanks.' The latter were miserable and degraded White Men who, priding themselves on their Caucasian origin, looked with contempt upon the African race." [131]
In 1654 Henry Whistler called the White slaves of Barbados "rubbish, rogues and whores." [132] In England they had been referred to by Edmund Burke as a "swinish multitude," by Samuel Johnson as "rabble" and by Sir Josiah Child as "loose, vagrant... vicious...people."
While the public articulation of such negative epithets against Black people as "nigger" is regarded as a sacrilegious incitement to "hate crimes," hateful terms of abuse of White people such as "redneck" are gleefully used in newspapers and television today to express the contempt with which the corporate elite openly hold White working and poor people.
It is a travesty of historiography that out of deference to the vast political house‑of‑cards that has been built upon the myth that only Blacks were merchandised in the Atlantic lave trade, historians have failed to consistently describe White Chattel by the scientifically accurate term for their condition, THAT OF SLAVE. By avoiding this description, many academics have perpetuated the propaganda of the plutocracy which inflicted these horrors upon White humanity. Powerful colonial land companies motivated by gigantic profits were loath to admit truths subversive of the fictions which permitted the smooth functioning of "business as usual." The label given the White laborer in bondage was crucial to a correct understanding of his condition.
In the founding era of colonial America, both White and black slaves were referred to as "servants." Once the term slavery came into universal usage (a word derived from the enslavement of Slavic peoples), objective observers of the time who were without mercenary ties to the traffic in White "servants" called them slaves:
"Contemporary observers described it as 'White Slavery' and referred to indentured servants as 'White Slaves.'" [133]
Some who in England lived fine and brave,
Was there like horses forc'd to trudge and slave.
Some view'd our Limbs turned us around,
Examining like Horses we were sound.
Some felt our hands others our legs and Feet,
And made us walk to see we were compleat,
Some view'd our Teeth to see if they was good,
And fit to Chaw our hard and homely food.
No shoes nor stocking had I for to wear
Nor hat, nor cap, my hands and feet went bare.
Thus dressed unto the fields I did go,
Among Tobacco plants all day to hoe.
Till twelve or one o'clock a grinding corn,
And must be up at day break in the morn.
For I was forc'd to work while I could stand,
Or hold the hoe within my feeble hands.
Forc'd from Friends and Country go go...
Void of all Relief...Sold for a Slave.
From the writing of White Slave John Lawson, 1754. [134]
"Honored Father: '...O Dear Father...I am sure you'll pity your distressed daughter. What we unfortunate English people suffer here is beyond the probability of you in England to conceive. Let it suffice that I am one of the unhappy number toiling day and night, and very often in the horse's druggery, with only the comfort of hearing me called, 'You, bitch, you did not do half enough.' Then I am tied up and whipped to that degree that you's not serve an animal. I have scarce anything but Indian corn and salt to eat and that even begrudged. Nay, MANY NEGROES ARE BETTER USED...after slaving after Master's pleasure, what rest we can get is to wrap ourselves up in a blanket and lay upon the ground. This is the deplorable condition your poor Betty endures..." [135] [136]
[1] Soncino edition, section Ecclesiastes, p. 58.
[2] The British Empire in America, John Oldmixon, Vol. 2, p. 186.
[3] Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America, Elizabeth Donnan, pp. 125‑126.
[4] An Historical Account of the Rise and Growth of the British West Indies, Dalby Thomas, pp. 36‑37; The Role of the Sephardic Jews in the British Caribbean Area in the Seventeenth Century, G. Merrill; Caribbean Studies, Vol. 4, No. 3 [1964‑65]; 32‑49.
[5] White Servitude, Hilary McD. Beckles, pp. 6‑7, 71.
[6] From Columbus to Castro, Eric Williams, p. 103.
[7] Laboring and Dependent Classes in Colonial America, Marcus W. Jernegan, p. 45.
[8] Stowe Manuscripte 324, f. 6.
[9] Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, p. 2,739.
[10] cf. Genesis 9:25 in the New International Version Bible.
[11] Handlin, p. 205.
[12] Handlin, pp. 202‑204, 218.
[13] Hening, Vol. 1, pp. 226, 258, 540.
[14] Natural Rebels, Beckles, p. 29.
[15] Handlin, p. 216.
[16] Natural Rebels, Beckles, pp. 56‑57.
[17] Bridenbaugh, p. 118.
[18] Natural Rebels, Beckles, p. 8.
[19] Handlin, p. 207.
[20] White Servitude, Beckles, p. 5.
[21] Labor in America: A History, Foster R. Dulles, p. 7.
[22] Van der Zee, p. 165.
[23] To Serve Well and Faithfully, Labor and Indentured Servants in Pennsylvania, Sharon Salinger, 1682‑1800, p. 97.
[24] Jernegan, p. 225.
[25] p. 59.
[26] A History of Colonial America, Oliver P. Chitwood, p. 341.
[27] p. 310.
[28] Bridenbaugh, pp. 120‑121). Black indentured servants in the 18th century even had an "education clause" in their contracts.
[29] Jernegan, p. 162.
[30] Warren B. Smith, p. 106.
[31] History of the United States, Vol. 2, Edward Channing, p. 369.
[32] For more on Abbot Emerson Smith's errors cf. Warren B. Smith, White Servitude in Colonial South Carolina, p. ix.
[33] Slavery in Colonial America, America's Revolutionary Heritage, George Novack, p. 142.
[34] The Curse of Cromwell: A History of the Ironside Conquest of Ireland, D.M.R. Esson, 1649‑53, p. 176.
[35] D.M.R. Esson, p. 159.
[36] Esson, p. 168.
[37] Eric Williams, p. 101.
[38] Acts Passed in the Island of Barbados, Richard Hall, p. 484.
[39] Warren B. Smith, p. 44.
[40] White Servitude, Beckles, pp. xiv and 5.
[41] Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, Vol. 5, p. 1,113.
[42] White Servitude, Beckles, p. 52.
[43] Eric Williams, p. 101.
[44] The 'Redlegs' of Barbados, Jill Sheppard, p. 18.
[45] Glencoe, John Prebble, p. 65.
[46] A History of Barbados, Ronald Tree, p. 35.
[47] Bridenbaugh, pp. 110‑111; Heinrich von Uchteritz, Kurze Reise, pp. 3‑10.
[48] Sheppard, p. 3.
[49] Egerton Manuscript, British Museum.
[50] Register for the Privy Council of Scotland, third series, Vol. 1, p. 181; Vol 2. p. 101.
[51] The Transportation of Vagrant Children from London to Virginia, 1618‑1622, Robert C. Johnson, in Early Stuart Studies, p. 139.
[52] Johnson, pp. 130‑140.
[53] Johnson, p. 142.
[54] Sir William Cockayne.
[55] Johnson, p. 142.
[56] Johnson. p. 143.
[57] Johnson, p, 143.
[58] The First Republic in America, Alexander Brown, p. 375.
[59] Johnson, p. 147.
[60] The Records of the Virginia Company of London, Susan M. Kingsbury, ed., Vol. 1, p. 424 and Johnson, pp. 144‑145.
[61] Bound Over, Van der Zee, p. 210.
[62] Information in a pamphlet by M. Godwyn, London, 1680.
[63] Salinger, p. 91.
[64] Jernegan, pp. 50‑51.
[65] Warren B. Smith, p. 42.
[66] Journal of Ralph Clark, entry of July 3, 1787.
[67] White Servitude, Beckles, p. 3.
[68] Van der Zee, p. 138.
[69] Bridenbaugh, p. 120.
[70] Kendall, p. 1.
[71] Salinger, p. 88.
[72] Salinger, p. 89.
[73] Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania, Colonial Records, 4:306.
[74] Johnson, p. 147; Jernegan, pp. 56 and 178.
[75] Bridenbaugh, p. 113.
[76] Eric Williams, pp. 102‑103.
[77] Kendall, p. 7.
[78] Rebels and Ractionaries, Beckles, pp. 18‑19.
[79] Massachusetts and the Common Law, American History Review, cf. Richard B. Morris, 1926.
[80] Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, p. 3,631.
[81] St. Werburge, Bradshaw, 1513.
[82] Caxton, 1483.
[83] William Phillips, p. 28.
[84] Freedom and Villeinage in England, Past and Present, Hilton, July, 1965, p. 6.
[85] Karras, p. 36.
[86] cf. 25:40‑41.
[87] Leviticus 25:45‑46, Exodus 21:4, which destroys the whole basis of Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address.
[88] see Classical Antiquity and the Proslavery Argument, Slavery and Abolition, J. Drew Harrington, May 1989.
[89] Petitions, Chester County, Pennsylvania, Court of Quarter Sessions, August 1731 and June, 1732.
[90] White Servitude, Beckles, p. 84.
[91] Bridenbaugh, p. 123.
[92] Johnson, p. 148.
[93] The Vestry Book and Register of Bristol Parish Virginia, 1720‑1789.
[94] Levine, p. 52.
[95] Jernegan, p. 180.
[96] Ligon, p. 44.
[97] Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, p. 302.
[98] Van der Zee, p. 183.
[99] Sir Thomas Montgomery to the Lords of Trade and Plantations, August 3, 1688, Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, 1685‑1688, p. 577.
[100] Bridenbaugh, p. 107; Pere Biet, Voyage, p. 290.
[101] Van der Zee, p. 85.
[102] Reflections of 'Democracy' in Revolutionary South Carolina, in The Southern Common People, Walter J. Fraser, Jr., p. 16.
[103] Frasher, p. 17.
[104] White Servitude, Beckles, p. 5.
[105] Warren B. Smith, p. 76.
[106] Rebels and Reactionaries, Beckles, p. 14.
[107] Jernegan, p. 51.
[108] Government and Labor in Early America, Morris, p. 435.
[109] Ronald Hoffman, pp. 281‑282.
[110] Life and Services of Matthew Lyon, Pliny H. White, p. 6.
[111] Bridenbaugh, p. 108.
[112] Ligon, p. 45.
[113] Levine, p. 56.
[114] Rebels and Reactionaries, Beckles, p. 18.
[115] Rebels and Reactionaries, Beckles, p. 17.
[116] Van der Zee, p. 266.
[117] The Slave Trade, Domestic and Foreign, Henry C. Carey, pp. 204‑209; The Highland Clearances, John Prebble, pp. 288‑295.
[118] Prebble, p. 293.
[119] Cunliffe, p. 18, Prebble, p. 292.
[120] Cunliffe, ibid.
[121] Journal of a Voyage to New York and a Tour of Several American Colonies, Jaspar Danckaerts and Peter Sluyter, 1679‑1680.
[122] American Weekly Mercury, September 2‑9, 1731.
[123] The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes, p. 115.
[124] Hughes, p. 115.
[125] Morris, pp. 485 and 487.
[126] For acquittals of masters in Virginia or instances of failure to prosecute them for the murder of White slaves, see Virginia General Court Minutes, pp. 22‑24, VMYH, XIX, 388.
[127] Jernegan, pp. 159‑160.
[128] White Servitude, Beckles, p. 5. For information on blacks allowed to accuse White slavemasters in court and who were freed from slavery as a result of hearings before White judges, see the Minutes of Council of March 10, 1654 in the Lucas Manuscripts, reel 1, f. 92, Bridgetown Public Library, Barbados.
[129] The Tragicall Relation of the Virginia Assembly, 1624 in the Library of Congress.
[130] Capitalism and Slavery, Eric Williams, p. 17.
[131] Sheppard, p. 3.
[132] Journal of the West India Expedition.
[133] Beckles, p. 71.
[134] Quoted in Van Der Zee, Bound Over.
[135] Public Record Office, London, England, High Court of Admiralty, 30:258; No. 106.
[136] From a letter by White Slave Eliabeth Sprigs in Maryland to her father John Sprigs in London, England, September 22, 1756.