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..." (Handlin, pp. 202‑204, 218)
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. (Hening, Vol. 1, pp. 226, 258, 540) "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." (Natural Rebels, Beckles, p. 29)
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." (Handlin, p. 216) For Examples of alterations 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')." (Natural Rebels, Beckles, pp. 56‑57)
In the 17th century White slaves were cheaper to acquire than Negroes and therefore were often mistreated to a greater extent. Having paid a bigger price for the Negro, "the planters treated the black better than they did their 'Christian' White Servant. Even the Negroes recognized this and did not hesitate to show their contempt for those White Men who, they could see, were worse off than themselves..." (Bridenbaugh, p. 118)
It was White Slaves who built America from its very beginnings and made up the overwhelming majority of slave‑ laborers 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." (Natural Rebels, Beckles, p. 8)
The merchant class of early America was an equal opportunity enslaver and viewed with enthusiasm the bondage of all poor people within their grasp, including their own White kinsmen. There was a precedent for this in the English legal concept of villeinage, a form of medieval White Slavery in England. "...as late as 1669 those who thought of large‑scale agriculture assumed it would be manned not by Negroes but by servile Whites under a condition of villeinage. John Locke's constitutions for South Carolina envisaged an hereditary group of servile 'leet men'; and Lord Shaftsbury's signory on Locke Island in 1674 actually attempted to put the scheme into practice." (Handlin, p. 207)
The Random House Dictionary of the English Language defines servitude as "slavery or bondage of any kind." The dictionary defines "bondage" as "being bound by or subjected to external control." It defines "slavery" as "ownership of a person or persons by another or others." Hundreds of thousands of Whites in colonial America were owned outright by their masters and died in slavery. They had no control over their own lives and were auctioned on the block and examined like livestock exactly like Black slaves, with the exception that these Whites were enslaved by their own race. White Slaves,� "found themselves powerless as individuals, without honor or respect and driven into commodity production not by any inner sense of moral duty but by the outer stimulus of the whip." (White Servitude, Beckles, p. 5)
Upon arrival in America, White Slaves were, "put up for sale by the ship captains or merchants ...Families were often separated under these circumstances when wives and offspring were auctioned off to the highest bidder." (Labor in America: A History, Foster R. Dulles, p. 7)
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." (Van der Zee, p. 165)
White people who were passed over for purchase at the point of entry were taken into the back country by "soul drivers" who herded them along "like cattle to a Smithfield market" and then put them up for auction at public fairs. "Prospective buyers felt their muscles, checked their teeth...like cattle..." (To Serve Well and Faithfully, Labor and Indentured Servants in Pennsylvania, Sharon Salinger, 1682‑1800, p. 97) 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." (Jernegan, p. 225) 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 kidnaped 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..." (A True and Exact History, p. 59)
In general, Whites were not treated with the relative dignity of the term of "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 lackeys] 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." (A History of Colonial America, Oliver P. Chitwood, p. 341)
Richard B. Morris in Government and Labor in Early America notes that, "In the colonies, however, apprenticeship was merely a highly specialized and favored form of bound labor. The more comprehensive colonial institution included all persons bound to labor for periods of years as determined either by agreement or by law, both minors and adults, and Indians and Negroes as well as Whites." (Government and Labor in Early America, p. 310)
In a reversal of our contemporary ideas about White "indenture" and Black "slavery," many Blacks in colonial America were often temporary bondsmen freed after a period of time. Peter Hancock arranged for a Negro servant named Asha to serve for twelve months, thenceforth to be a free person. (Bridenbaugh, pp. 120‑121). Black indentured servants in the 18th century even had an "education clause" in their contracts)� "...free Negro boys bound out as apprentices were sometimes given the benefit of an educational clause in the indenture. Two such cases occur in the Princess Anne County Records; one in 1719, to learn the trade of tanner, the master to 'teach him to read,' and the other, in 1727, to learn the trade of gunsmith, the master to teach him 'to read the Bible distinctly." (Jernegan, p. 162)
Newspaper and court records in South Carolina cite, "a free Negro fellow named Johnny Holmes...lately an indented servant with Nicholas Trott..." and "a Negro man commonly called Jack Cutler ‑‑ he is a free Negro having faithfully served out his time with me four years according to the contract agreed upon..." (Warren B. Smith, p. 106)
David W. Galenson is the author of an Orwellian suppression of the horrors and conditions of White Slavery entitled White Servitude in Colonial America. He states concerning White slaves, "European men and women could exercise choice both in deciding whether to migrate to the colonies and in choosing possible destinations."
THIS IS POSITIVELY MISLEADING! At the bare minimum, HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF WHITE SLAVES WERE KIDNAPED 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 kidnaped from England in the year 1670 alone. (History of the United States, Vol. 2, Edward Channing, p. 369)� The very word "kidnapper" was first coined in Britain in the 1600s to describe those who captured and sold White Children into slavery ("kid‑nabbers").
Another whitewash is the heralded "classic work" on the subject, Abbot Emerson Smith's Colonists in Bondage which is one long cover‑up of the extent of the kidnaping, 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. (For more on Abbot Emerson Smith's errors cf. Warren B. Smith, White Servitude in Colonial South Carolina, p. ix)
"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..." (Slavery in Colonial America, America's Revolutionary Heritage, George Novack, p. 142)
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. (The Curse of Cromwell: A History of the Ironside Conquest of Ireland, D.M.R. Esson, 1649‑53, p. 176)
Irish religious leaders were herded into, "internment camps throughout Ireland, and were then moved progressively to the ports for shipment overseas like cattle." (D.M.R. Esson, p. 159)
By the time Cromwell's men had finished with the Irish people, only one‑sixth of the Irish population remained on their lands. (Esson, p. 168) Cromwell did not only enslave Catholics. Poor White Protestants on the English mainland fared no better. In February, 1656 he ordered his soldiers to find 1,200 poor English Women for enslavement and deportation to the colonies. In March he repeated the order but increased the quota to "2,000 young women of England." In the same year, Cromwell's Council of State ordered all the homeless poor of Scotland, male and female, transported to Jamaica for enslavement. (Eric Williams, p. 101) Of course, Cromwell and the Puritan ruling class were not the only ones involved in the enslavement of Whites.
During the Restoration reign of 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." (Acts Passed in the Island of Barbados, Richard Hall, p. 484); "BY FAR THE LARGEST NUMBER and certainly the most important group OF WHITE INDENTURED SERVANTS (Slaves) WERE THE POOR PROTESTANTS FROM EUROPE." (Warren B. Smith, p. 44)