Some Non-Politically Correct Facts on the History of Slavery

Source: gnosticliberationfront.com

The following interview, undertaken in late December 2008, was extracted from Thus Speaks Qadosh Erectus: Political Thoughts For a Sane Society and distributed as a separate publication.]

Interviewer:

Referring to the section entitled Across the Spectrum of Economic Slavery: Marxism and Capitalism you state that "the ‘free’ northern wage slaves were in fact worse off then the Southern chattel slaves" and that many “free” Southern workers were also worse off then the Southern chattel slaves and then a bit further on you mention about England "transporting convicts to its various Australian penal colonies". Couldn’t this be construed as belittling that era of black slavery, after all the Northern and Southern free workers were not forced to work by being held in bondage? Also your comments regarding English convicts; after all these people were criminals and yet what crime did the black slaves commit to be held by force in servitude?

QE:

Fair enough question. Now for a start only a person lacking knowledge about the history of slavery would construe such a thing. Now your comments about the Northern worker not being forced to work by being held in bondage; most Northern workers held no title to land so thus were forced to seek employment to survive thus their bondage was their poverty and it was poverty and that held them in servitude. I must also add that there is much evidence pointing to the fact that the average Southern free worker was worse off then the average Southern chattel slave. Now I know that this statement will raise a number of eyebrows and will be outright condemned by some but the facts are there indicating that was so; but I will put this aside for the moment and touch on this later. Now I gather from your comment on English convicts that you lack some knowledge on this subject as it was not only the English who were transported. A bit of research effort shows convicts were made up of English and Welsh – 70%, Irish - 24%, Scottish - 5%, and the remaining 1% from the British outposts in India and Canada, Maoris from New Zealand, Chinese from Hong Kong and slaves from the Caribbean. Also your comments in regards to the transported convicts “after all these people were criminals” shows that you are rather a callous person or you lack knowledge regarding the era of transportation and the conditions that lead up to it.

Interviewer:

Will I have to admit my knowledge in this area is somewhat limited

QE:

Right…prior to the transportation era there were in force laws in Britain that are referred to as the Bloody Code. By the 1820’s, there were over 200, I believe the correct figure was 222 crimes which carried the death penalty, almost all of them for crimes against property. Many even included offences such as stealing of goods worth over five shillings, the cutting down of a tree, stealing an animal or stealing from a rabbit warren. Under the Bloody Code over 90% of those hanged were less than 21 years of age – as an example it has been recorded that a brother and sister aged seven and eleven were reportedly hanged in 1708 for theft.

Interviewer:

Why were these laws referred to as the Bloody Code introduced?

QE:

Although England remained a primarily agricultural country in this period, the many Enclosure Acts resulted in less people controlling more of the land. These landowners and manufacturers increased their wealth through property ownership and trade, therefore increasing the gap between the rich and the poor. During this time poverty was rife and people broke the law of the land to survive. Of course the wealthy elite became very influential in demanding the introduction of laws that protected their interests while on the other-hand the poor had no political rights.By the end of the 1700's few people convicted of a capital crime were actually executed due to the increasing use of royal pardon, by which transportation was substituted for hanging upon the recommendation of judges. Transportation had in fact first begun in 1654 and had continued during the rest of the seventeenth century. Before 1750, transportation had been used to send criminals who had been reprieved from a death sentence to work on plantations in the colonies in North America and the West Indies. It is a little known fact that four-fifths that is eighty percent of the white slaves sent to Britain’s sugar plantations in the West Indies did not survive their first year. By the late 1760’s transportation had reached a high level. After American Independence, however, an alternative destination was available - this was Botany Bay in Australia. Over a period of eighty years spanning 1788 to 1868 about 164,000 convicts were transported to the Australian colonies. Up to 1834 it was an offence for a convict to return home from transportation - the punishment was death – but then in 1834 it was altered to penal servitude for life. Until 1840 English Judges passed long and savage sentences of transportation for the most trivial offences. As an example in his book, In Punishments of Former Days by Ernest William Pettifer the author states: “In 1827 a youth of 18 who was sentenced to transportation for life for stealing a pocket handkerchief.” W. Eden Hooper in Newgate and the Old Bailey gives many instances of the sentences handed out. I give a few sentences taken at random. Stealing an apron, transported for life; bacon, life; worsted yarn, life; 2 lbs. of potatoes, 14 years; a pair of shoes, 14 years; a bottle of spirits, 14 years. In the book A Shepherd's Life by W.H. Hudson, the author states: “In 1830, the farm labourers, driven wild by grinding poverty, and the threat of unemployment owing to the introduction of machinery, rose, and there was some rioting. It was mercilessly put down and Special Commissions sat at Salisbury; 33 to be transported for life, ten for 14 years, and so on.”

Interviewer:

I really had no understanding that such harsh sentences were handed out.

QE:

Now you mentioned that your knowledge on the subject is somewhat limited. Now from what I have observed I would say that view would apply to most people in New Zealand society; especially school children who get a sanitised version of history.

Interviewer:

What do you mean by sanitised version?

QE:

Ask the average school student about slavery and they think that only white people had slaves and that slavery evolved and virtually only existed in North America before their Civil War. They have a distorted and very narrow view on this subject because this is what they are taught. Now you can approach a subject in an unbiased way or you can be selective in the facts given which distorts what people perceive as being truthful. To give a distorted version on a subject clouds what people perceive about a subject and evolves into a false impression.

We live in an age of deception where propaganda rules; lies are presented as fact and the truth is distorted.

From the propaganda one could not be blamed for believing that slavery was solely a pre-Civil War US phenomenon but the hard reality is that slavery has existed throughout the past for thousands of years. Peoples of all races and nationalities have been the subjects of slavery. German tribesmen captured by the Mongols were sold in Asian slave markets. The Manchus took slaves from China, Korea, and Mongolia. Greek slaves served in Egypt. Barbarosia pressed thousands of Christians into slavery. The Ottoman Turks demanded that the defeated Hungarians send ten percent of their population each decade to serve as slaves. Germans, Gauls, and Celts were enslaved by the Romans. The Germans captured Slavs and supplied them to the Romans to be used as slaves. Even the New Zealand Maori had slaves in the pre-Colonial days.Now it may surprise some people but slavery and a slave trade existed in Africa before the arrival of the slave traders from Europe. Before the arrival of the slave buyers from Europe the African tribal kings and chieftains already had made alliances with other non-European slave traders to supply their fellow countryman for assorted commodities that lead to the exported of millions of sub-Saharan Africans to North Africa, the Middle East, and the Persian Gulf. When the slave traders from Europe turned up in Africa the wheels of slavery were already established and well-greased and it was only a matter of adapting itself to the increase demand. In her publication Confronting the Legacy of the African Slave Trade [1] Zayde Gordon Antrim [2] also pointed out that African slavery was in existence well before the arrival of the Europeans:

"Not only was slavery an established institution in West Africa before European traders arrived, but Africans were also involved in a trans-Saharan trade in slaves along these routes. African rulers and merchants were thus able to tap into preexisting methods and networks of enslavement to supply European demand for slaves. Enslavement was most often a byproduct of local warfare, kidnapping, or the manipulation of religious and judicial institutions. Military, political, and religious authority within West Africa determined who controlled access to the Atlantic slave trade. And some African elites, such as those in the Dahomey and Ashanti empires, took advantage of this control and used it to their profit by enslaving and selling other Africans to European traders."

Hugh Thomas in his book The Slave Trade has detailed the African involvement in the production of victims for slavery. African monarchs often bought slaves from dealers, in order to sell them again to Europeans, to other Africans, or to Arabs especially. The rulers of Benin, the kings of Ashanti, Congo, and Dahomey; and the Vili rulers of Loango, sold great numbers of slaves over many generations. Hugh Thomas quotes Jean Barbot, who was on a slave ship during the 17th century as saying; "the slaves [whom the African monarchs] possess and sell are prisoners of war, or, if from among themselves, are condemned to slavery for some crime. But there are also those who have been kidnapped by their compatriots, these being mainly children..." The Muslims in Africa also had a heavy interest in the slave trade. Hugh Thomas noted that the Muslims traded their African slaves to many countries, selling them as far off as Java and India in the Middle Ages, and even to the Chinese. Richard Hellie in Slavery in Russia 1450-1725 says:

"In Africa down to the 1930's, the various tribes continued to raid one another to capture slaves both for domestic use and to sell to outsiders. Moreover, in spite of the picture presented in Alex Haley's Roots, white slave traders almost never entered the interior in pursuit of prey but rather purchased their cargo from Africans at the ocean front; coastal Africans would not allow Europeans either into or through their own countries ...some scholars claimed that slavery in Africa was a response to the international slave trade, but it is now obvious that (Black) slavery was an old domestic institution that was adapted for supplying the international market when it developed." [3]

Hellie's view was echoed by Thomas Jackson in American Renaissance.

"Among the Tuareg of the southern Sahara, during the 19th century 70-90% of the population were probably slaves. In the Sahel and the savannah, half the population might be slaves, while in the forests the figure could be as low as 10 to 20 percent. Professor Oliver in ‘The African Experience’ argues that the European and American demand for slaves may not have increased the supply. White slave traders almost never ventured into the interior and were dependent on a varying supply over which they had no control. They followed the flow of captives rather than create it, shifting their bases up and down the coast according to where tribal wars were producing the most slaves. Africa clung to slavery long after it was abolished elsewhere. Between the world wars, Liberia, founded by freed American slaves, was censured by the League of Nations for practising slavery." [4]

The article History: Slavery, on the Mel Fisher Maritime Museum website, shows how widespread slavery was at that time.

"At the dawn of the transatlantic trade, slavery was not new, nor were Africans the only people to be enslaved. Slavery is mentioned in the Bible, and most ancient societies including Egypt, China, India, Mexico, Peru and Greece made use of slave labor. Slaves were usually prisoners of war, conquered peoples, debtors or criminals. In Europe, the Roman Empire took slaves from every nation it overcame, including England, France, Spain and Germany. Slavery persisted in the Mediterranean Basin throughout the 17th century … The institution of slavery was present in Africa long before the arrival of Europeans on its shores - slaves had been taken from parts of the continent since the time of ancient Egypt. In the early 19th century, caravans of 18,000 to 20,000 black Africans were brought to Cairo for resale, and slaves of every color were sold in the great markets of North Africa, even as late as the first part of the 20th century.” [5]

The Economist, an English registered publication, admitted that the British, French, Spanish and Portuguese were not the only people involved in the African slave trade:

"In Africa, slavery was accepted as the norm in most societies. Before Europeans arrived, and long after, millions of Africans were marched north across the desert by Arab traders. Most had been taken in war. The guns given in exchange helped wars to multiply and grow larger. Prisoners who might earlier have been absorbed into the victor's army or workforce, or killed, were now fed to European and American ships seeking human cargo, from Gambia round to Mozambique. Other Africans were sold as slaves because they owed a debt; some even by their own families. Some, like Equiano, were simply grabbed; though only in the early years by Europeans, because that upset relations with the African coastal kings, who wanted to keep control of the trade ... Between the mid-15th century and the late 19th, 12m Africans, about a third of them women, made that voyage. Whites had found a new world, and needed blacks to exploit it. Seized - by other blacks, not whites - force-marched to the coast carrying ivory or copper, then inspected like animals, sold and crammed into ships, they made the 30-40-day voyage chained and forced to lie in their own ordure and vomit. Then taken out, inspected again and resold, they were branded and forced to dig in mines, clear land, plant and harvest sugar." [6]

In the early 18th century, Kings of Dahomey (known today as Benin) became big players in the slave trade, waging a bitter war on their neighbours, resulting in the capture of 10,000, including another important slave trader, the King of Whydah. King Tegbesu made £250,000 a year selling people into slavery in 1750. King Gezo said in the 1840s he would do anything the British wanted him to do apart from giving up slave trade: "The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory of their wealth ... the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery." [7] In 1998, President Clinton visited Uganda and offered an apology to Africans for slavery. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni replied; "African chiefs were the ones waging war on each other and capturing their own people and selling them. If anyone should apologize, it should be the African chiefs. We still have those traitors here even today." [8] Now I do not doubt the hardship and torment that Africans abducted into slavery suffered, but while this historical fact has been exploited for political and financial gain not many people are aware that huge numbers of Europeans were also abducted and sold into slavery.

To put into perceptive; you had a group of pale skinned Predators on one side of the world, that had no compunction about killing or treating their own their own pale skinned people as chattel, trading with a group of dark skinned Predators on the other side of the world who also had no compunction about killing or treating their own their own dark skinned people as chattel.

As I said people have a very narrow and distorted view on the subject of slavery. Most people believe that it was a solely a white thing, now is this a coincidence or has the subject of slavery been manipulated to create this perceived view?

Is this belief consequential or has this perception been manipulated?

Interviewer:

Some people would call you paranoid for such a statement.

“The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly - it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over” Joseph Goebbels

QE:

There's a part of the human psyche that tends to accept that which is repeatedly put into the mind. As a result, the peddler of lies very often reaches a point where he/she believes that his/her lies are actually the truth. Very frequently, honest and well-meaning people get caught in these false stories and perpetuate them. I remember reading a psychology article once that touched on a subject called "contiguity". Apparently from experiments done it was shown that if you pair one word or concept - stimulus one - with another word or concept - stimulus two - long enough, one by itself will automatically supply the other in the mind. A classic example is that of slavery; mention the subject of slavery and people automatically think of Africans or think of slaves as black. Now am I paranoid? Paranoia is a thought process characterized by excessive anxiety or fear, often to the point of irrationality and delusion. Now am I being irrational or delusional…well let’s look at the facts and let the facts speak for themselves. Now I will have to refer to my notes I have on this subject…I will give you the references and links to my information to enable you to verify what I say.

Interviewer:

Will I have been impressed with what you have stated up to this point on this subject; I am certainly interested in hearing more.

QE:

Well I will certainly have a lot to say in my defence. Slavery in early medieval Europe was so common that the Roman Catholic Church repeatedly prohibited it - or at least the export of Christian slaves to non-Christian lands was prohibited at, for example, the Council of Koblenz in 922, the Council of London in 1102, and the Council of Armagh in 1171. Old English law itself did have something of a slave code, based on the concept of villeinage from which we derive the words villain and villainy with their new pejorative connotations. With the emergence of English Common Law [1175-1225], the aristocrats drafted the writ of novel disseisin to establish a category of juridical un-freedom known as villein tenure which could defeat any English peasant's claim to land, no matter how long his family had held it. Later the Bracton [9] code equated the English villein with the Roman servus or slave, thus denying him all basic rights. It is interesting to note that during this time villeinage was considered a hereditary condition. Not only were the people of Europe treated like chattel by their own predatory rulers but the Barbary Corsairs also thought them fair game for exploitation. The Barbary Corsairs, also sometimes called Ottoman corsairs or Barbary Pirates, were Muslim pirates and privateers that operated from North Africa, from about 1500 to 1800. Their stronghold was along the stretch of northern Africa known as the Barbary Coast from which their reach extended throughout the Mediterranean, south along West Africa's Atlantic seaboard, and into the North Atlantic as far north as Iceland. They often made raids on European coastal towns to capture Christian slaves to sell at slave markets in places such as Algeria and Morocco. For most of this period the various European navies were too weak to put up more than token resistance. In the book, White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and North Africa’s One Million European Slaves by Giles Milton, the author illuminates the less-well-known history of the Europeans who were captured for the North African slave markets by Barbary pirates. He asserts that there may have been one million such white slaves seized from Spain, France, England and even the fledgling American colonies. In a review of this book by English newspaper The Guardian it states: "Giles Milton's remarkable tale of 18th-century slavery, White Gold, is a hidden nugget from the treasure house of history." [LINK] According to Professor Robert C. Davis in his book Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800 the trans-Atlantic trade in blacks was strictly commercial, but for Arabs, memories of the Crusades and fury over expulsion from Spain in 1492 seem to have fuelled an almost jihad-like Christian-stealing campaign. Professor Davis writes: "It may have been this spur of vengeance, as opposed to the bland workings of the marketplace, that made the Islamic slavers so much more aggressive and initially (one might say) successful in their work than their Christian counterparts,…” During the 16th and 17th centuries more slaves were taken south across the Mediterranean than west across the Atlantic. Some were ransomed back to their families, some were put to hard labour in North Africa, and the unluckiest were worked to death as galley slaves. What is most remarkable about the Barbary slaving raids is their scale and reach. Pirates took most of their slaves from ships, but they also organized huge, amphibious assaults that practically depopulated parts of the Italian coast. Italy was the most popular target, partly because Sicily is only 125 miles from Tunis, but also because it did not have strong central rulers who could resist invasion. According to Professor Davis when pirates sacked Vieste in southern Italy in 1554, for example, they took an astonishing 6,000 captives. Another 7,000 slaves were taken in the Bay of Naples in 1544, in a raid that drove the price of slaves so low it was said you could "swap a Christian for an onion." Spain also suffered large-scale attacks; after a raid on Granada in 1566 netted 4,000 men, women, and children, it was said to be "raining Christians in Algiers." Professor Davis points out that for every large-scale raid of this kind there would have been dozens of smaller ones. Some Arab pirates were skilled blue-water sailors, and terrorized Christians 1,000 miles away. One spectacular raid all the way to Iceland in 1627 took nearly 400 captives. We think of Britain as a redoubtable sea power ever since the time of Drake, but throughout the 17th century, Arab pirates operated freely in British waters, even sailing up the Thames estuary to pick off prizes and raid coastal towns. In just three years, from 1606 to 1609, the British navy admitted losing no fewer than 466 British and Scottish merchant ships to Algerian corsairs. By the mid-1600s the British were running a brisk trans-Atlantic trade in blacks, but many British crewmen themselves became the property of Arab raiders. Davis states: “One of the things that both the public and many scholars have tended to take as given is that slavery was always racial in nature - that only blacks have been slaves. But that is not true.” He goes on to say: “We cannot think of slavery as something that only white people did to black people.” During the time period that Professor Davis studied, it was religion and ethnicity, as much as race, that determined who became slaves. Professor Davis also states that the vast scope of slavery in North Africa has been ignored and minimised; in large part because it is on no one’s agenda to discuss what happened. In regards to this he states: “The enslavement of Europeans doesn’t fit the general theme of European world conquest and colonialism that is central to scholarship on the early modern era.”

Interviewer:

What brought about the end of this slave trade?

QE:

It ended in 1816 in an action I believe that was inspired by Sir Sidney Smith and his Society of Knights Liberators of the White Slaves of Africa. A fleet of British and Dutch ships led by Sir Edward Pellew attacked Algiers on the 27th August, eventually destroying the corsair fleet and forcing the unconditional surrender of the city. Tunis, Tripoli and Morocco renounced slavery soon after. But while this saga was brought to an end you still had the continuing saga of Indentured Servitude that, throughout its history, brought much misery, suffering and premature death to many of the hundreds of thousands of whites shipped out to the English colonies.

Interviewer:

What was an indentured servant?

QE:

Indenture was a system under which a man or woman could gain passage to the English Colonies in exchange for a set period as a servant. The most common period was seven years, but it could be for a much longer or shorter period. Criminals convicted of a capital crime in England could be transported in lieu of a death sentence to a number of the English colonies – remember the Bloody Code was in force at this time. Servitude also could result from indebtedness, where a person, their spouse or parents owed money, and the person was sold into servitude to recover the debt. In other cases, a parish indentured orphans in order to keep them off the poor roles. Plus, the poor sometimes sold themselves into indenture just to survive. People who engaged themselves voluntarily were called free-willers, but a great many were coerced. In theory, the person was only selling his or her labour; but in practice, however, indentured servants were basically slaves and the courts enforced the laws that made it so.

Indentured servants were basically slaves and the courts enforced the laws that made it so.

Also political prisoners, beggars, prostitutes, and unwanted Scots or Irishmen were rounded up and banished to hard labour in the colonies for as long as 14 years, while an unknown number of young people were simply kidnapped and sold.According to the book White Cargo, by Don Jordan [10] and Michael Walsh [11], mainstream histories refer to these labourers as indentured servants, not slaves, because many agreed to work for a set period of time in exchange for land and rights. The authors argue, however, that slavery applies to any person who is bought and sold, chained and abused, whether for a decade or a lifetime. Many early settlers died long before their indenture ended or found that no court would back them when their owners failed to deliver on promises. And many never achieved freedom. This vividly written book tells the tale from both sides of the Atlantic. Its condemnation is aimed at both American planters and the English elite, who were blinded by greed, arrogance and a desire to get rid of their “society’s sweepings.” Horribly, one of the first groups sent to America was made up of street children, ages 8 to 16, who arrived in 1619. This slave trade, which the authors say was often “dressed up in bright humanitarian clothes” for the public, later extended to beggars, Gypsies, prostitutes, dissidents, convicts and anyone else who displeased the upper classes. I must add that this is an excellent book that covers this era in stark details. Lay historian Col. A.B. Ellis, writing in the British newspaper Argosy, dated May 6, 1893, states: “Few, but readers of old colonial State papers and records, are aware that between the years 1649-1690 a lively trade was carried on between England and the plantations, as the colonies were then called, in political prisoners ... where they were sold by auction to the colonists for various terms of years, sometimes for life as slaves.” Michael A. Hoffman II confirms white slavery in his book, They Were White and They Were Slaves. He wrote; “Plantation slavery was instituted in the British West Indies as early as 1627.” By the 1640s, 21,700 of 25,000 slaves in Barbados were white according to the Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series of 1701. Hoffman goes on to state: “A large number of the white slaves arriving in America were described as convicts, but were actually political prisoners. Of the Scottish troops captured at the Battle of Worcester, more than 600 were shipped to Virginia as slaves in 1651.” George Downing wrote a letter to the honourable John Winthrop Colonial Governor of Massachusetts in 1645, “Planters who want to make a fortune in the West Indies must procure white slave labor out of England if they wanted to succeed.” [12] Lewis Cecil Gray’s History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860 vol.1 pp 316, 318 records Sir George Sandys’ 1618 plan for Virginia, referring to bound whites assigned to the treasurer’s office: “To belong to said office forever … The service of whites bound to Berkeley Hundred was deemed perpetual.” In 1641, Ireland's population was 1,466,000 and in 1652, 616,000. According to Sir William Petty [13], 850,000 were wasted by the sword, plague, famine, hardship and banishment during the Confederation War of 1641-1652. At the end of the war, vast numbers of Irish men, women and children were forcibly transported to the American colonies by the English government [14]. These people were rounded up like cattle, and, as John P. Prendergast reports on “Thurloe's State Papers” [15] in The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland: "In clearing the ground for the adventurers and soldiers (the English capitalists of that day)... To be transported to Barbados and the English plantations in America. It was a measure beneficial to Ireland, which was thus relieved of a population that might trouble the planters; it was a benefit to the people removed, which might thus be made English and Christians … a great benefit to the West India sugar planters, who desired men and boys for their bondsmen, and the women and Irish girls…To solace them."

Higham estimated that in 1652 Barbados had absorbed no less than 12,000 of these political prisoners [16]. E. Williams reports: "In 1656 Cromwell's Council of State voted that 1,000 Irish girls and 1,000 Irish young men be sent to Jamaica." [17] Smith declares: "it is impossible to say how many shiploads of unhappy Irish were dispatched to America by the English government," and "no mention of such shipments would be very likely to appear in the State Papers... They must have been very considerable in number." [18] J. Williams provides additional evidence of the attitude of the English government towards the Irish in an English law of June 26, 1657: "Those who fail to transplant themselves into Connaught (Ireland's Western Province) or (County) Clare within six months... Shall be attained of high treason... Are to be sent into America or some other parts beyond the seas..." [19] He also goes on to state that anyone banished who return are to "suffer the pains of death as felons by virtue of this act, without benefit of Clergy.” [20] [21] In 1659 the English parliament debated the practice of selling British whites into slavery in the New World. In the debate whites were referred to not as Indentured Servants, but as slaves “whose enslavement threatened the liberties of all Englishmen.” [22] Michael A. Hoffman II confirms white slavery in his book, They Were White and They Were Slaves. He wrote, “Plantation slavery was instituted in the British West Indies as early as 1627.” By the 1640s, 21,700 of 25,000 slaves in Barbados were white. [23] The English government variously referred to Irish to be transported as rogues, vagabonds, rebels, neutrals, felons, military prisoners, teachers, priests, maidens etc. All historians call them servants, bondsman, indentured servants, slaves, etc., and agree that they were all political victims. The plain facts are that most were treated as slaves. After their land was confiscated by England, which drove them from their ancestral homes to forage for roots like animals, they were kidnapped, rounded up and driven like cattle to waiting ships and transported to English colonies in America, never to see their country again. They were the victims of what many called the immense Irish Slave Trade. The following are but a few of the numerous references to those Irish transported against their will between 1651 and 1660. Emmet asserts that during this time, more that: "100,000 young children, who were orphans or had been taken from their Catholic parents, were sent abroad into slavery in the West Indies, Virginia and New England, that they might lose their faith and all knowledge of their nationality, for in most instances even their names were changed... Moreover, the contemporary writers assert between 20,000 and 30,000 men and women who were taken prisoner were sold in the American colonies as slaves, with no respect to their former station in life." [24]

Estimates vary between 80,000 and 130,000 regarding the amount of Irish sent into slavery in America and the West Indies during the years of 1651 - 1660: Prendergast  says 80,000 [25]; Boudin 100,000 [26]; Emmet 120,000 to 130,000 [27]; Lingard 60,000 up until 1656 [28] ; and Condon estimates "the number of Irish transported to the British colonies in America from 1651 - 1660 exceeded the total number of their inhabitants at that period, a fact which ought not to be lost sight of by those who undertake to estimate the strength of the Celtic element in this nation..." [29] Even though the figures given are but estimates, they are estimates from eminent historians. After reviewing the profitability of the slave trade, King Charles II chartered the Company of Royal Adventurers in 1662, which later became the Royal African Company. The Royal Family, including Charles II, the Queen Dowager and the Duke of York, then contracted to supply at least 3000 slaves annually to their chartered company. They far exceeded their quotas. It is interesting to note that from 1680 to 1688, the Royal African Company sent 249 shiploads of slaves to the Indies and American Colonies, with a cargo of 60,000 Irish and Africans. More than 14,000 died during passage. [30] There are records of Irish sold as slaves in 1664 to the French on St. Bartholomew, and English ships which made a stop in Ireland en route to the Americas, typically had a cargo of Irish to sell on into the 18th century. Few people today realize that from 1600 to 1699, far more Irish were sold as slaves than Africans. [31] Then there were the Scots who were also sold into slavery. Kelly D. Whittaker writes in White Slavery: “There were hundreds of thousands of Scots sold into slavery during Colonial America…The judges of Edinburgh Scotland during the years 1662-1665 ordered the enslavement and shipment to the colonies a large number of rogues and others who made life unpleasant for the British upper class.” [32] It is interesting to note the early ancestors of the Scots, Alba and Pics were enslaved as early as the first century BC. Julius Caesar enslaved as many as one million whites from Gaul. Varro, a Roman philosopher stated in his agricultural manuscripts that white slaves were only things with a voice or instrumenti vocali. [33]

The Irish and Scots would differently fall into the category of being of those who have been most oppressed peoples over the last millennium; in fact what these people endured must be summed-up as a genuine holocaust that has been buried in the past and never mentioned by those who promote the distorted propaganda that is presented as history.

As with black slaves from Africa, whites throughout Britain – England included - were being kidnapped and shipped overseas; not for reasons of unvarnished human hatred, but because it was profitable. When all the horrors are peeled away, the kidnap business was precisely that - a business. Without a strong profit motive, the wholesale seizure of flesh wouldn’t have occurred. Thomas J. Wertenbaker in The First Americans writes: “One could kidnap a man at random in the alleys of London and be sure of a ready sale for him in the South,...” [34] Amazingly, kidnapping was in many cases a legally sanctioned practice. A 1618 Parliamentary bill allowed for constables to forcefully nab all orphaned children over eight years old and to detain them in prisons awaiting shipment to colonial plantations. [35] n 1618 the London authorities began rounding up beggar children between the ages of eight and sixteen. This was urban renewal that paid for itself because the children, like convicts, brought a good price from American planters. In the WHITE CARGO: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America by Don Jordan and Michael Walsh the authors note that "of the first 300 children shipped between 1619 and 1622, only twelve were still alive in 1624." At least one is known to have died after she was subjected to 500 strokes for skipping work. Over the years, towns all over England gathered up young beggars judged to be a burden, and sold them in the colonies. Other laws allowed for the bodily capture of debtors and criminals. A 1652 Commonwealth law permitted officials to identify “begging or vagrant” subjects and cause them to be “seized on and detained” in order to be schlepped in shackles to the colonies [36]. Similar initiatives arose throughout the British Isles as local officials realized it was cheaper to sail their lumpen proles [37] [38] westward than to continue doling out poor relief. Hoping to send their underclass en masse to New York, the Scottish Privy Council in 1669 issued orders for local officials to round up “strong and idle beggars, vagabonds, egyptians, common and notorious whoores, theeves, and other dissolute and lousy persons.” [39] In his book Bound Over the author, John Van der Zee, states the following: “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.”

In The Mind of the South by W.J. Cash the author states that, “the greater number” of indentured servants “seems to have been mere children or adolescents, lured from home by professional crimps or outright kidnapped.” [40]An estimate published in 1670 alleged that 10,000 British subjects had been kidnapped that year [41]. A pamphlet issued ten years later reckoned that ten thousand Brits were still being captured per year, every year. [42] If those stats are reliable, this would total 100,000 British kidnapping victims in the 1670s alone. In the history of slavery in America, fewer than 400,000 black slaves were imported. [43] Then there was the journey by sea, known as the Middle Passage, which often proved as traumatic and lethal as it had for African slaves. The British slaveships were often little more than floating coffins. Duncan Campbell, an English merchant who shipped white convicts to America until the Revolution broke out, chalked up a ten percent middle-passage death rate as a “moderate loss.” [44] One historian calculated that between ten and fifteen percent of all white bondsmen “commonly died during the voyage.” [45] Others peg the overall death quotient as murderously higher. Ships carrying White slaves to America often lost half their slaves to death. According to historian Sharon V. Salinger, “Scattered data reveal that the mortality for [White] servants at certain times equaled that for [Black] slaves in the ‘middle passage,’ and during other periods actually exceeded the death rate for [Black] slaves.” [46] Salinger reports a death rate of ten to twenty percent over the entire 18th century for Black slaves on board ships enroute to America compared with a death rate of 25% for White slaves enroute to America. In Journey to Pennsylvania [47] the author records his journey in 1790 by ship to the English colony of Pennsylvania. He states:

"When the ships have for the last time weighed their anchors near the city of Kaupp [Cowes] in Old England, the real misery begins with the long voyage. For from there the ships, unless they have good wind, must often sail 8, 9, 10 to 12 weeks before they reach Philadelphia. But even with the best wind the voyage lasts 7 weeks. . . But during the voyage there is on board these ships terrible misery, stench, fumes, horror, vomiting, many kinds of sea-sickness, fever, dysentery, headache, heat, constipation, boils, scurvy, cancer, mouth-rot, and the like, all of which come from old and sharply salted food and meat, also from very bad and foul water, so that many die miserably Add to this want of provisions, hunger, thirst, frost, heat, dampness, anxiety, want, afflictions and lamentations, together with other trouble, . . . the lice abound so frightfully, especially on sick people, that they can be scraped off the body. The misery reaches the climax when a gale rages for 2 or 3 nights and days, so that every one believes that the ship will go to the bottom with all human beings on board. In such a visitation the people cry and pray most piteously . . . No one can have an idea of the sufferings which women in confinement have to bear with their innocent children on board these ships. Few of this class escape with their lives; many a mother is cast into the water with her child as soon as she is dead. One day, just as we had a heavy gale, a woman in our ship, who was to give birth and could not give birth under the circumstances, was pushed through a loop-hole (port-hole) in the ship and dropped into the sea, because she was far in the rear of the ship and could not be brought forward. . . Children from 1 to 7 years rarely survive the voyage. I witnessed misery in no less than 32 children in our ship, all of whom were thrown into the sea. The parents grieve all the more since their children find no resting-place in the earth, but are devoured by the monsters of the sea. . . That most of the people get sick is not surprising, because, in addition to all other trials and hardships, warm food is served only three times a week, the rations being very poor and very little. Such meals can hardly be eaten, on account of being so unclean. The water which is served out on the ships is often very black, thick and full of worms, so that one cannot drink it without loathing, even with the greatest thirst. Toward the end we were compelled to eat the ship's biscuit which had been spoiled long ago; though in a whole biscuit there was scarcely a piece the size of a dollar that had not been full of red worms and spiders nests. . . When the ships have landed at Philadelphia after their long voyage, no one is permitted to leave them except those who pay for their passage or can give good security; the others, who cannot pay, must remain on board the ships until they are purchased, and are released from the ships by their purchasers. The sick always fare the worst, for the healthy are naturally preferred and purchased first; and so the sick and wretched must often remain on board in front of the city for 2 or 3 weeks, and frequently die, whereas many a one, if he could pay his debt and were permitted to leave the ship immediately, might recover and remain alive. . . The sale of human beings in the market on board the ship is carried on thus: Everyday Englishmen, Dutchmen and High-German people come from the city of Philadelphia and other places, in part from a great distance, say 20, 30, or 40 hours away, and go on board the newly arrived ship that has brought and offers for sale passengers from Europe, and select among the healthy persons such as they deem suitable for their business, and bargain with them how long they will serve for their passage money, which most of them are still in debt for. When they have come to an agreement, it happens that adult persons bind themselves in writing to serve 3, 4, 5, or 6 years for the amount due by them, according to their age and strength. But very young people, from 10 to 15 years, must serve until they are 21 years old. . . Many parents must sell and trade away their children like so many head of cattle; for if their children take the debt upon themselves, the parents can leave the ship free and unrestrained; but as the parents often do not know where and to what people their children are going, it often happens that such parents and children, after leaving the ship, do not see each other again for many years, perhaps no more in all their lives. . . It often happens that whole families, husband, wife, and children are separated by being sold to different purchasers, especially when they have not paid any part of their passage money. . . When a husband or wife has died at sea, when the ship has made more than half of her trip, the survivor must pay or serve not only for himself or herself, but also for the deceased … When both parents have died over half-way at sea, their children, especially when they are young and have nothing to pawn or to pay, must stand for their own and their parent's passage, and serve until they are 21 years old. When one has served his or her term, he or she is entitled to a new suit of clothes at parting; and if it has been so stipulated, a man gets in addition a horse, a woman, a cow. . . If some one in this country runs away from his master, who has treated him harshly, he cannot get far. Good provisions has been made for such cases, so that a runaway is soon recovered. He who detains or returns a deserter receives a good reward. . . If such a runaway has been away from his master one day, he must serve for it as a punishment a week, for a week a month, and for a month half a year.”

Michael A. Hoffman, the author of They Were White and They Were Slaves quotes an article from the Argosy in which lay historian Col. A.B. Ellis states: “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.”

Foster R. Dulles writing in Labor in America: A History, 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 goes on to state 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.”In his book America at 1750: A Social Portrait, in the chapter titled “White Servitude”, the author Richard Hofstadter states the following:

“A merchant who would spend from six to ten pounds to transport and provision an indentured servant might sell him on arrival - the price varied with age, skill, and physical condition - for fifteen to twenty pounds, although the profits also had to cover losses from sickness and death en route. The typical servant had, in effect, sold his total working powers for four or five years or more in return for his passage plus a promise of minimal maintenance. After the initially small capital outlay, the master simply had to support him from day to day as his services were rendered, support which was reckoned to cost about thirteen or fourteen pounds a year. In Maryland, where exploitation was as intense as anywhere, the annual net yield, even from unskilled labor, was reckoned at around fifty pounds sterling. The chief temptation to the master was to drive the servant beyond his powers in the effort to get as much as possible out of him during limited years of service ... Buyers came on shipboard to take their pick of the salably healthy immigrants, beginning a long process of examination and inspection with the muscles and the teeth, and ending with a conversational search for the required qualities of intelligence, civility, and docility. At Philadelphia buyers might be trying to find Germans and eschew the Scotch-Irish, who were reputed to be contumacious and work resistant and disposed to run away. Some buyers were "soul drivers" who bought packs of immigrants and brutally herded them on foot into the interior where they were offered along the way to ready purchasers.”

The acclimatization phase was known ominously as “seasoning.” With the prick of a mosquito’s proboscis, malaria was shot into their veins. Dysentery wormed a bloody swath through their intestines. Bone-melting fevers often boiled them alive. According to accounts from both Virginia and the West Indies during the 1600s, roughly EIGHTY PERCENT of white slaves/servants died within the first twelve months after arrival. [48] Thousands and thousands of white servants, male and female, quietly perished in tropical squalor, their “seasoning” having rendered them crispy corpses.Barbados was barbaric. Not only was the flaming equatorial heat inimical to the European metabolism, Barbadian slave-drivers were said to be particularly cruel. One island commissioner reportedly petitioned Cromwell to switch over to black slavery, reasoning that since black slaves were a costlier, more permanent investment, the vicious overseers might “take more interest in their preservation and so work them with moderation.” [49] All writers on the 17th century American colonies are in agreement that the treatment of white servants or white slaves in English colonies was cruel to the extreme, worse than that of black slaves; that inhuman treatment was the norm, that torture and branding FT, fugitive traitor, on the forehead was the punishment for attempted escape. Dunn stated: "Servants were punished by whipping, strung up by the hands and matches lighted between their fingers, beaten over the head until blood ran," - all this on the slightest provocation. Ligon, an eyewitness in Barbados from 1647-1650 said, "Truly, I have seen cruelty there done to servants as I did not think one Christian could have done to another." [51] In Bound Over: Indentured Servitude and American Conscience by John Van Der Zee the author states:

''Negroes being a property for life, the death of slaves, in the prime of youth or strength, is a material loss to the proprietor: they are, therefore, in almost every instance, under more comfortable circumstances than the miserable European, over whom the rigid planter exercises an inflexible severity. They are strained to the utmost to perform their allotted labour; and, from a prepossession in many cases too justly founded, they are supposed to be receiving only the just reward which is due to repeated offences. There are doubtless many exceptions to this observation, yet, generally speaking, they groan beneath a worse than Egyptian bondage.''

In American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, the author Edmund S. Morgan states:

“Indentured servants served longer terms in Virginia than their English counterparts and enjoyed less dignity and less protection in law and custom. They could be bought and sold like livestock, kidnapped, stolen, put up as stakes in card games, and awarded - even before their arrival in America - to the victors in lawsuits. Greedy magnates (if the term is not redundant) stinted the servants’ food and cheated them out of their freedom dues, and often out of their freedom itself, when they had served their time. Servants were beaten, maimed, and even killed with impunity. For expressing opinions unfavourable to the governor and the governing council, one man had both his arms broken and his tongue bored through with an awl, while another lost his ear and had to submit to a second seven-year term of servitude - to a member of the council that had judged his case.”

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 conceal their murders and encouraged further atrocities against other White slaves. [52] Of course the white slaves in the Caribbean were no better of. Although 21,700 Irish slaves were purchased by Barbados planters from 1641 to 1649, there never seemed to have been more than about 8 to 10 thousand surviving at any one time. [53] 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." [54] Carl and Roberta Bridenbaugh write in No Peace Beyond the Line: The English in the Caribbean: "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."

In stark contrast to the small number of White indentured servants present on Barbados, who could at least theoretically look forward to eventual freedom no matter how bad their temporary bondage may have been, White slaves possessed no such hope. Indeed, they were treated the same as slaves of African descent in every manner imaginable. Irish slaves in Barbados were regarded as property to be bought, sold, treated and mistreated in any way the slave-owner saw fit. Their children were born into hereditary slavery for life as well. [55] Punitive violence, such as whippings, was liberally employed against Irish slaves, and was often used on them immediately upon their arrival in the colonies to brutally reinforce their enchained status, and as a warning against future disobedience. [56] The dehumanizing and degrading cattle-like physical inspections used to assess and showcase the "qualities" of each captive for prospective buyers, which reached infamy with the Black slave markets, was also practiced upon both White slaves and indentured servants in the colonies of the West Indies and North America. Irish slaves were marked off from their free White kinsmen through a branding of the owner’s initials applied to the forearm for women and on the buttocks for men by a red-hot iron. Irish women, in particular were seen as a desirable commodity by White slave owners who purchased them as sexual concubines. Others found themselves sold off to local brothels. This degrading practice of sex slavery made Irish men, women and children potential victims to perverse whims of many unsavoury buyers. [57] In reality, White slaves fared no better a fate as unwilling human property than did contemporary captive Africans. At times they were even treated worse then their Black counterparts due to economic considerations. This was especially true throughout most of the 17th century, as White captives were far more inexpensive on the slave market than their African counterparts, and hence were mistreated to a greater extent as they were seen as a conveniently disposable labour force. It was not until later that Black slaves became a cheaper commodity. [58] An account dating back to 1667 grimly described the Irish of Barbados as “poor men, that are just permitted to live ... derided by the Negroes, and branded with the Epithite of white slaves.” [59] A 1695 account written by the island’s governor frankly stated that they laboured “in the parching sun without shirt, shoe, or stocking”, and were “domineered over and used like dogs.” It was common knowledge among the Irish of this era that to be deported, or “barbadosed”, to the West Indies meant a life of slavery. [60] In many cases, it was actually common for White slaves in Barbados to be supervised by mulatto or Black overseers, who often treated captive Irish labourers with exceptional cruelty. Indeed: “The mulatto drivers enjoyed using the whip on whites. It gave them a sense of power and was also a protest against their white sires. White women in particular were singled out for punishment in the fields. Sometimes, to satisfy a perverted craving, the mulatto drivers forced the women to strip naked before commencing the flogging and then forced them to continue working all day under the blistering sun. While the women were weeding in the fields in that condition, the drivers often satisfied their lust by taking them from the rear.” [61]

Such instances of horrific rape and unwilling sexual union between Irish female slaves and Black slave-drivers, was actually implicitly encouraged by many of their masters. Mulatto children, who resulted from such unions, both willing and unwilling, were seen by the plantation masters as a potentially unlimited breeding stock of future native-born slave labour, acquired free of charge and without the costs of transportation. [62] Existing public records on Barbados reveal that some planters went as far as to systematize this process of breeding through the establishment of special “stud farms” for the specific purpose of breeding mixed-race slave children. White female slaves, often as young as 12, were used as “breeders” to be forcibly mated against their will. [63]On the subject of slave breeding James F. Cavanaugh states the following:

“The planters quickly began breeding the comely Irish women, not just because they were attractive, but because it was profitable,,, as well as pleasurable. Children of slaves were themselves slaves, and although an Irish woman may become free, her children were not. Naturally, most Irish mothers remained with their children after earning their freedom. Planters then began to breed Irish women with African men to produce more slaves who had lighter skin and brought a higher price. The practice became so widespread that in 1681, legislation was passed “forbidding the practice of mating Irish slave women to African slave men for the purpose of producing slaves for sale.” This legislation was not the result of any moral or racial consideration, but rather because the practice was interfering with the profits of the Royal African Company!” [64]

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; "planters, especially in the South, eventually elected to replace the restive white servants with the more identifiable and presumably less criminal black slaves." [65] How many 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 slaves 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. [66] Four-fifths of the White slaves sent to the West Indies didn't survive the first year. [67] Upon release from bondage, white servants were legally entitled to “freedom dues.” The popular myth is that most servants received a fertile chunk of sod and lived happily ever after. This is an outright falsehood, as most states granted no land whatsoever as part of their freedom dues. Maryland was an exception. But a study of approximately 5,000 white indentured servants in Maryland during the 1670s reveals that only a quarter of them inherited the 50-acre headright; [68] in fact, a higher number of them had died in bondage than had received land. [69] Instead of land, most white ex-slaves were promised only clothing, tools, and/or a pittance of cash. A 1700 Pennsylvania law provided only for two suits, an axe, and two hoes. [70] In the mid-1700s, Virginia’s freedom dues for newly released servants amounted to a one-shot cash payment of three pounds, ten shillings. [71] In North Carolina around the same time, freedom dues were a trifling three pounds. [72] So how far could a white ex-slave go on three pounds sterling? Would he be able to purchase livestock, land, or slaves - in short, any of the things which brought financial security, especially in the South? For the freed indentured servant, “[T]he statistical probability for rising to even middle-class position was very slight,” writes one historian [73]. The most commonly cited guesstimate, provided by indentured-servitude specialist Abbot Emerson Smith, is that only one in ten white ex-slaves would “wax decently prosperous.” Smith reckoned that maybe another one in ten would achieve some measure of self-sufficiency. Eight of ten servants, however, either “died during their servitude, returned to England after it was over, or became ‘poor whites.’” [74] A Maryland priest observed that “white servants, after their terms of bondage is out, are stroling [sic] the county without bread.” [75] Governor Bradford of Massachusetts lamented that “by one means or another, in 20 years time, it is question whether ye greater part be not growne ye worser.” [76] In South Carolina, Frederick Law Olmsted commented that “the poor white people, meaning those, I suppose, who bring nothing to market in exchange for money but their labor…are worse off in almost all respects than the [black] slaves.” [77] Now I stated earlier many Southern free workers were worse off then the Southern chattel slaves. An excellent booklet entitled AMERICA FOR FREE WORKING MEN written by Charles Nordhoff in 1865 [LINK] gives an insight on how chattel slavery impacted on the free workers in the Southern states. I quote a few extracts from this publication:

“Printers call that work which is most quickly and easily done, and which is the best paid, “fat;" that which is hard to do and poorly paid, they call "lean." Now, in all mechanical and other labor performed in the Slave States, the slave constantly gets the best, the easiest - the fat; the free mechanic or laborer, if he is employed at all, gets only the leavings of the slave, the lean. This comes about, because the slave-owner is a wealthy and influential man, who is able to select the lightest tasks for his slave; by this the slave-owner of course makes the greatest profit, and incurs the least expense. But the free white workingman must stand aside, or take that task which the slave-owner will not have. [Page 7] “Another planter in Virginia employed a gang of Irishmen in draining some land. But mark the reasons he gave for this use of free labor. ‘It's dangerous work’ (unwholesome), said he; ‘and a negro's life is too valuable to he risked at it. If a negro dies, it is a considerable loss, you know.’ This slaveholder did not care how many Irishmen died in his malarious ditches. So, too, on the southwestern steamboats, slaves are employed to do the lightest and least dangerous labor, but Irish and German free workingmen are employed to perform the exhausting and dangerous work. Thus, on the Alabama River, Olmsted observed that slaves were sent upon the bank to roll down cotton bales, but Irishmen were kept below to drag them away. The mate of the boat said, by way of explanation, ‘The niggers are worth too much to be risked here ; if the Paddies are knocked over-board, or get their backs broke nobody loses anything.’ [Pages 7-8 Emphasis added] “Alfred E. Matthews, of Starke county, Ohio, in his ‘Journal of his Flight’ from Mississippi, in 1861, remarks: ‘I have seen free white mechanics obliged to stand aside while their families were suffering for the necessaries of life, when slave mechanics, owned by rich and influential men, could get plenty of work; and I have heard these same white mechanics breathe the most bitter curses against the institution of slavery and the slave aristocracy.’ [Page 8 Emphasis added] “These instances, culled from southern life, show the bearing of the slave system upon the free working population. The planters do not need the assistance of the free laboring class; they despise it, and discourage it. [Page 8] “In another part of his address he said: ‘Eighteen or at most nineteen dollars will cover the whole necessary annual cost of a full supply of wholesome and palatable food, purchased in the market,’ for one person in South Carolina. It would seem, therefore, that so completely had the slave system robbed the free man of the opportunity to make an honest livelihood, that one-sixth of the free white population of South Carolina could not earn even the paltry sum of eighteen dollars per annum! So completely have the slaveholders monopolized the labor market for their slaves! [Page 9] “The bitter hatred of the ‘free white’ in the South for the negro has been often spoken of. Does any one wonder at it, when he considers that these free men feel the wrongs they suffer, but are too ignorant to trace them to their sources? They hate the slaves, but if they were somewhat more intelligent they would hate the slaveholders, who are the authors of all their woes. [Page 9] “The slaveholders have the political power; they look only to their own interests; and even where they have established manufactures, they have given work preference to slaves over free men and women. [Page 10] “It matters nothing to him (the slaveholder) how low others can produce the article ; he can produce it lower still, so long as it is the best use he can make of his labor, and so long as that labor is worth keeping. That is to say, a free white mechanic is at the mercy of his neighbor, the capitalist, in a slave state, because, if the capitalist does not like his price, he can ‘go and buy a carpenter and sell him again when the work is done.’ Thus, while it is true that in the long run and on the average free labor is always cheaper than slave labor, the capitalist who monopolizes the slave labor is able to drive out or starve out the free laborer over whom he and his slaves have an unfair advantage. The slaveholders used to boast that there were no ‘strikes’ in the South - here we see the reason. [Page 11] “The capitalist, in a slave state, is a man with a hundred black arms, all bare, all eagerly seeking work, all ready to work for less than a free man can support his family decently upon. The capitalist is a hundred-armed workman, with enough social influence to command work for all his hundred arms, to the exclusion of the honest free mechanic and laborer. The slave, in the hands of this capitalist, is the most dangerous enemy the free workman can have. Suppose a job of work for twenty mechanics is to be given out in a southern town - twenty free men offer themselves - but a slave-owner comes, with the prestige of great wealth, with his social influence and his political power, and he gets the preference for his twenty slaves, the profits of whose labor go to make him richer, while his free neighbors grow poorer. It is not strange that the southern free workingmen resent this monstrous wrong - but it is lamentable that they make the error of hating the tools with which the wrong is done, and not those who use these helpless tools, and the iniquitous system which permits it. It is as though a martyr should abhor only the thumb-screws which torture him, but regard kindly the executioner who applies them; it is as though a western traveller should complain of the scalping knife, but love the Indian savage who uses it. [Page 13] “...the products of slave labor were also exempted from taxation. Tobacco, corn, wheat and oats were not taxed; but the product of free labor, consisting of cattle, hogs, sheep, etc., was heavily taxed; as were also the earnings of free laboring men, who were obliged to pay an income tax. It was asserted by Mr. Peirpoint, in 1860, that 'upwards of two hundred and thirty million dollars of the Virginia slaveholders' capital in slaves was exempted from taxation.’ [Page 15] “But while the slave owner was so protected, see how it fared with the free laborer? Every free mechanic, artisan, or laborer of whatever kind, who was in the employment of any person, was obliged, by a special law, to pay an income tax...The Virginia slaveholders exempted only themselves! They taxed the poor, but left the rich to pay nothing. [Page 15] “Thus was slave labor encouraged and free labor made penal in the South. Thus, to use Marion's words, the poor became poorer and the rich richer. Thus free mechanics were driven out of the slave states, taxed out, starved out, until, in 1859, Charleston, one of the chief seaports of the South, had not left so much as a single ship-carpenter.” [Page 16]

I will next quote an extract from the book American Negro Slavery by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips:

“Even without pestilence, deaths might bring a planter's ruin. A series of them drove M.W. Philips to exclaim in his plantation journal: "Oh! my losses almost make me crazy. God alone can help." In short, planters must guard their slaves' health and life as among the most vital of their own interests; for while crops were merely income, slaves were capital. The tendency appears to have been common, indeed, to employ free immigrant labor when available for such work as would involve strain and exposure. The documents bearing on this theme are scattering but convincing. Thus E.J. Forstall when writing in 1845 of the extension of the sugar fields, said thousands of Irishmen were seen in every direction digging plantation ditches; [78] T.B. Thorpe when describing plantation life on the Mississippi in 1853 said the Irish proved the best ditchers; [79] and a Georgia planter when describing his drainage of a swamp in 1855 said that Irish were hired for the work in order that the slaves might continue at their usual routine. [80] Olmsted noted on the Virginia seaboard that "Mr. W.... had an Irish gang draining for him by contract." Olmsted asked, "why he should employ Irishmen in preference to doing the work with his own hands. 'It's dangerous work,' the planter replied, 'and a negro's life is too valuable to be risked at it. If a negro dies, it is a considerable loss you know,’” [81] On a Louisiana plantation W.H. Russell wrote in 1860:

‘The labor of ditching, trenching, cleaning the waste lands and hewing down the forests is generally done by Irish laborers who travel about the country under contractors or are engaged by resident gangsmen for the task. Mr. Seal lamented the high prices of this work; but then, as he said, “It was much better to have Irish do it, who cost nothing to the planter if they died, than to use up good field-hands in such severe employment,”’

“...Likewise Olmsted noted on the Alabama River that in lading his boat with cotton from a towering bluff, a slave squad was appointed for the work at the top of the chute, while Irish deck hands were kept below to capture the wildly bounding bales and stow them. As to the reason for this division of labor and concentration of risk, the traveller had his own surmise confirmed when the captain answered his question by saying, ‘The niggers are worth too much to be risked here; if the Paddies are knocked overboard, or get their backs broke, nobody loses anything!’ [82] To these chance observations it may be added that many newspaper items and canal and railroad company reports from the 'thirties to the 'fifties record that the construction gangs were largely of Irish and Germans. The pay attracted those whose labor was their life; the risk repelled those whose labor was their capital. There can be no doubt that the planters cherished the lives of their slaves.” [Emphasis added]

It was much better to have Irish do it, who cost nothing to the planter if they died, than to use up good field-hands in such severe employment.

Now what I have just quoted about division of labour and concentration of risk many sound strange and in conflict with peoples’ perception of slavery but this division appears to be common thread during my studies into the slave era in the Southern States. And I must admit, even it may sound cold and calculating, this approach of the slave owners is quite logical. Taking into account that a slave may be worth between one to two thousand dollars - and represented a capital investment - why risk such a valued investment in dangerous or life-threatening work when you could hire free-labour for a dollar a day for such work. If free-labour was injured, crippled or killed they could be easily replaced at no financial loss or extra incurred costs to the slave owners.Now a small minority of the population who were white owned slaves but this does not justify placing the blame and guilt of this slave era on the backs of all white people. The facts show that the white slave owner had no feelings of kith and kin towards his follow, non-slave owning, free workingmen and in fact evidence shows the opposite; he felt contempt towards them. The slave owners considered themselves to be an elite and acted accordingly; they controlled and welded the political power and owned most of the wealth.

Interviewer:

I had no idea that slavery had such a big impact through society at the time.

QE:

It is most interesting to note that Ulrich B. Phillips, the author of Life and Labor in the Old South explained in his book that white enslavement was crucial to the development of the Negro slave system. The system set up for the white slaves governed, organized and controlled the system for the black slaves. Black slaves were “late comers fitted into a system already developed.” It is interesting to note that the first blacks in the Virginia Colony were treated as indentured servants. As with white indentured servants, the blacks were freed after a stated period. Blacks gradually did sink to a status lower than whites, and a man who was a freed indentured servant helped push them in that direction. A full-blooded African from Angola, he took the English name of Anthony Johnson. After his term of indentured service he prospered mightily, accumulating more than 1,000 acres and a score of servants both black and white. He found fault with one of his blacks, an individual named John Casor, and in 1650, after a lengthy lawsuit, persuaded a court to make the man a servant for life. Casor, then, was one of the first blacks condemned to chattel slavery as we know it. It was only in 1671 that Virginia made all blacks coming into the colony slaves for life.

Interviewer:

Will I must say that puts a new twist to the saga.

QE:

Yes, I thought it rather ironic that the first legally recognised black slave in North America was owned by a black man. But what is more ironic is that during the era of chattel slavery in the Southern States many free blacks owned slaves.

Interviewer:

To be quite honest I haven’t heard that before.

QE:

The myth created is that slavery in North America consisted solely of cruel white masters and exploited blacks. Few people realize that black Americans owned slaves, too. In his book Black Slaveowners, Larry Koger wrote a meticulously researched account of the black, slave-owning elite of South Carolina. According to Koger, before the American Civil war, black slave-owners could be found in every slave state and at nearly all educational and economic levels. Mr. Koger reports that, according to the 1830 census, black masters in just four states - Louisiana, Maryland, Virginia and South Carolina - owned more than 10,000 slaves. Even the enlightened state of New York was home to eight black slave-owners. In the South, many pro-slavery whites grew to accept these men and women as neighbours and as allies against abolition.This subject was mentioned in AMERICAN HERITAGE, under the title "Selling Poor Steven". Citing the official US Census of 1830, there were 3,775 free blacks who owned 12,740 black slaves. [83] Mr. Koger reports that by 1840, South Carolina boasted 454 Negro masters with 2,357 slaves. Although only about one in five white households in the South owned slaves, approximately 75 percent of the free black heads of household in the state owned slaves. Many former slaves did not regard slavery as a malevolent institution but as an economic opportunity, and had no qualms about buying other blacks once they were able to. The reality is large numbers of free Negroes owned black slaves; in fact, in numbers disproportionate to their representation in society at large. In 1860 only a small minority of whites owned slaves. According to federal census reports, on June 1, 1860, there were nearly 27 million whites in the country; of that total some eight million of them lived in the slaveholding states. According to the authors Raymond Logan and Irving Cohen in their book The American Negro: Old World Background and New World Experience the census determined that there were fewer than 385,000 individuals who owned slaves. Now even if all slaveholders had been white, that would amount to only 1.4 percent of whites in the country or just 4.8 percent of southern whites owning one or more slaves. According to these same census reports there were nearly 4.5 million blacks in the United States, with fewer than four million of them living in the southern slaveholding states. Of the blacks residing in the South, 261,988 were not slaves. Of this number, 10,689 lived in New Orleans. One of America’s leading African American historians, Duke University professor John Hope Franklin, records that in New Orleans over 3,000 free blacks, owned slaves, or 28 percent of the free blacks in that city. Another interesting book on the same subject is Free Negro Owners of Slaves in the United States in 1830, by the noted black historian, Carter G. Woodson. This book lists the names and address of free blacks who owned slaves. The book is very readable, and outlines cases of free black women owning their husbands, free black parents selling their children into slavery to white owners, and absentee free black slave owners, who leased their slaves to plantation owners, among other things. In conclusion I have to quote the author Larry Koger who writes in Chapter 6 of his book, Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790-1860 that: “By and large, Negro slaveowners were darker copies of their white counterparts.”

There will only be racial peace when knowledge of radical historical truths are widespread and all sides base their actions on ethical reasoning and not from fantasies of White guilt and the uniqueness of Black suffering.

Though slavery has been described as the greatest tragedy in human history, and people think of it as something that happened in the past it still exists in different forms in the modern day society. According to a broad definition of slavery used by Free the Slaves, an advocacy group linked with Anti-Slavery International, there were, in 2007, 27 million people, although some put the number as high as 200 million, throughout the world who worked in virtual slavery.

Interviewer:

What you have stated is amazing.

QE:

All I have done is add a bit of ballast to the subject in an attempt to place it back on an even keel.But what is amazing is when we rip the scab away covering the issue of slavery and peer deeply into the wound we see and discover facts that are rarely discussed or not mentioned at all; one subject which is certainly not mentioned in the propaganda about slavery is Jewish involvement in the slave trade.

The Predator has no conscience when it comes to exploitation; whether it be his own kind or people of a different race.

Interviewer:

Jewish involvement in the slave trade? I must admit I have not heard anything about their involvement.

QE:

The problem is people are either too lazy or too busy to question what they are told by authority figures. There is much information available if people are prepared to spend time and effort doing research. On the BLACK & JEWS website [LINK] there is a review of the book, published in 1991, and entitled The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews by the Historical Research Department of the Nation of Islam which presents a multitude of compelling facts describing first hand accounts of a pernicious and extensive involvement of Jews in the African slave trade. This review states in part:

“Jewish historians and scholars are extensively quoted in this easy to read and fascinating 334 page volume. Not since the release of W.E.B. DuBois' The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in 1896 has a more riveting discussion of the topic of slavery been offered for public inspection...Every fact was painstakingly footnoted. The research was matchless and worthy of commendation. Attempts to assuage this work as allegedly 'anti-Semitic' or 'anti-Jewish' falls on its face given the fact that the work contains the contributions of 'respected scholars of the Jewish community.'...The power of this presentation is so strong that the facts cannot be refuted. Yet this work does not pretend to be the end-all on this subject of slavery. It provides a window to even more extensive research regarding slavery by its other co-conspirators, the white Christians of Europe, the Arabs of the Middle East, and the Black African leaders who sold their own people to the slave traders.”

The Truth Establishment Institute [LINK] stated in a review of the book: “Well packaged, the book contains 334 pages of fully documented text including 1,275 footnotes, from more than 3,000 sources. Most of the sources, if not all, were collected from Jewish historical literature.” [Emphasis added] Then the review goes on to make the following interesting points:

“One area of note is the abolitionist movement, of which Jewish scholars ostensibly claim membership. On page 147 the Historical Research Department clearly shows using Jewish sources, that those involved in the abolitionist movement were few, and those who did stand against the institution of slavery ‘were scorned and rebuked – most harshly by their own brethren in the synagogue.’ … There is an additional point of interest identified through the research of the Historical Research Department. It is shown that those who did stand against the spread of slavery did so because of the threat it presented to their jobs and economic well being. This is a central difficulty and one that cannot be easily countered by the Jewish thought control organizations, since many who decried this book as anti-Semitic, cited the fact that Jews were apart of the abolitionist movement as a defense … There is no denying that they were a part of the abolitionist movement. Similarly, there is no denying that members of the Jewish community were involved in the civil rights movement of the 1960’s, however, the motivation behind the involvement must be brought to light. Interestingly enough, their involvement appears motivated by self-interests and not compassion and concern … In exhaustive detail, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews provides geographic records beginning with the infamous Columbus voyages, and dealing with Jews and slavery in Brazil, Surinam, Barbados, Curacao and Jamaica. Jewish Slavery in Colonial North America, the South, and Jewish involvement in the Civil War … Jewish court records, port records and wills of Jewish slave owners were used. The names of ships, their owners and in many cases, their cargo, were listed and presented in an easy to understand format. Not only is the information easy to read, but using Jewish sources also eliminates the accusation of fraud - unless of course the Jewish scholars maintain that their research in this matter is shoddy and fraudulent.”

An article on the Radio Islam website [LINK] entitled Jews and the Black Holocaust What are the Issues? states: “The historical record is formidable and well-represented in The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Volume One. Within 334 pages there are 1,275 footnotes containing multiple references for the reader to examine. The irrefutable record of Jewish historical compliance with Black oppression is no longer a ‘secret.’ The debate has surely changed.” Also on the same Radio Islam website they also have a number of "Quotes and Facts regarding Blacks and Jews" [LINK]. I give two of these quotes:

Louis Epstein, author of Sex Laws and Customs in Judaism writes: "The female slave was a sex tool beneath the level of moral considerations. She was an economic good, useful, in addition to her menial labor, for breeding more slaves. To attain that purpose, the master mated her promiscuously according to his breeding plans. The master himself and his sons and other members of his household took turns with her for the increase of the family wealth, as well as for satisfaction of their extra-marital sex desires. Guests and neighbors too were invited to that luxury." Seymour B. Liebman [84] the author of New World Jewry 1493-1825: Requiem for the Forgotten states in his book: "They came with ships carrying African blacks to be sold as slaves. The traffic in slaves was a royal monopoly, and the Jews were often appointed as agents for the Crown in their sale ... [They] were the largest ship chandlers in the entire Caribbean region, where the shipping business was mainly a Jewish enterprise … The ships were not only owned by Jews, but were manned by Jewish crews and sailed under the command of Jewish captains."

Referring once again to the Blacks & Jews website they have a list, and I quote: “All of the following ‘Chosen People’ are confirmed to have participated in the Black African slave trade. According to their own literature, each one is a prominent historical figure and most are highly regarded and respected by Jews themselves. Even the most prominent of Jewish Americans never voiced any reservation whatsoever about this practice. Writes Rabbi Bertram W. Korn, ‘it is realistic to conclude that any Jew who could afford to own slaves [and needed them] would do so.’ In fact, ‘Jews participated in every aspect and process of the exploitation of the defenseless blacks.’" [LINK]

I would add that this site is differently worth looking at for those wishing to broaden their knowledge base.So based on a careful review of the scholarly literature on "New World" Jewish history by Jewish historians, here is what we do know about Jews in the slave trade: [LINK]

Lee M. Friedman, a one-time president of the American Jewish Historical Society, wrote that in Brazil, where most of the Africans were actually shipped, "the bulk of the slave trade was in the hands of Jewish settlers." Jewish scholar Dr. Arnold Wiznitzer is most explicit about Jewish involvement in Brazil: "Besides their important position in the sugar industry and in tax farming, they dominated the slave trade....The buyers who appeared at the auctions were almost always Jews, and because of this lack of competitors they could buy slaves at low prices." Author Marcus Arkin wrote in his book Aspects of Jewish Economic History that the Jews of Surinam used "many thousands" of Black slaves. Rabbi Herbert I. Bloom wrote in his book, The Economic Activities of the Jews in Amsterdam, that "the slave trade was one of the most important Jewish activities here (in Surinam) as elsewhere in the colonies." He even published a 1707 list of Jewish buyers by name with the number of Black humans they purchased. British Jewish historian Dr. Cecil Roth, writer of 30 books and hundreds of articles on Jewish history, wrote in his book History of the Marranos that the slave revolts in parts of South America "were largely directed against [Jews] as being the greatest slave-holders of the region." "I gather," wrote Jewish scholar Wilfred Samuels, "that the Jews [of Barbados] made a good deal of their money by purchasing and hiring out negroes..." He wrote that all Barbadian Jews owned slaves, and even the rabbi had "the enjoyment of his own two negro attendants." Isaac and Susan Emmanuel report in their book History of the Jews of the Netherland Antilles that in Curaçao, which was a major slave-trading depot, "the shipping business was mainly a Jewish enterprise [and] [a]lmost every Jew bought from one to nine slaves for his personal use or for eventual resale."

According to the Blacks & Jews website on Jewish slave-dealing in America, there is also no shortage of troubling evidence:

Rabbi and historian Bertram W. Korn reported of the case in the 1830s, when Levy Jacobs of New Orleans was outraged at a rumor that claimed he was selling Kentucky-bred slaves. Jacobs took out an ad in the local paper to assure his potential customers that he would in the future keep for sale no other than "Virginia born negroes, of good character." Rabbi Korn, the acknowledged expert on 19th-century American Jewry, observed, "It would seem to be realistic to conclude that any Jew who could afford to own slaves and had need for their services would do so....Jews participated in every aspect and process of the exploitation of the defenseless blacks." According to the "Dean of American Jewish History," Dr. Jacob Rader Marcus, the two largest slave cargoes brought into New York between 1800 and 1850 were brought in by Jew Nathan Simson. Marcus laments in one of his many works that "very few Jews anywhere in the United States protested against chattel slavery on moral grounds." Others have revealed that in Newport, Rhode Island, the center of the rum and slave trade, all Jewish families owned Black slaves; the Touro synagogue was built by Black slaves "of some skill"; and of the 22 distilleries serving the slave trade all 22 were owned by Jewish merchants. The sad reality is that one can go on and on without much difficulty in enumerating the extensive involvement of Jews in the Black-slave trade. Actually, one is hard-pressed to name one (just one) prominent colonial American Jew who did not own slaves. Dr. Marc Lee Raphael, who is the editor of American Jewish History, the journal of the American Jewish Historical Society at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, states quite openly on page 14 of his 1983 book Jews and Judaism in the United States that:

“Jews also took an active part in the Dutch colonial slave trade; indeed, the bylaws of the Recife and Mauricia congregations (1648) included an imposta (Jewish tax) of five soldos for each Negro slave a Brazilian Jew purchased from the West Indies Company. Slave auctions were postponed if they fell on a Jewish holiday. In Curacao in the seventeenth century, as well as in the British colonies of Barbados and Jamaica in the eighteenth century, Jewish merchants played major role in the slave trade. In fact, in all the American colonies, whether French (Martinique), British, or Dutch, Jewish merchants frequently dominated ... This was no less true on the North American mainland, where during the eighteenth century Jews participated in the 'triangular trade' that brought slaves from Africa to the West Indies and there exchanged them for molasses, which in turn was taken to New England and converted into rum for sale in Africa. Isaac Da Costa of Charleston in the 1750's, David Franks of Philadelphia in the 1760's, and Aaron Lopez of Newport in the late 1760's and early 1770's dominated Jewish slave trading on the American continent."

Now before I finish I must emphasis again that most, if not all, of the sources proving Jewish involvement in the slave trade have were collected from Jewish historical literature.

Interviewer:

This is a bit of a shock and a bit much to digest all at once. I gather the information you present is factual?

QE:

As I have said may times: “The truth will survive an unbiased interrogation but a lie will wither and die.” The information I give I believe to be truthful. Now what would I have to gain by lying…nothing…in fact I would discredit myself. Now, any facts I give can be verified by anyone who is prepared to make the effort.

The truth will survive an unbiased interrogation but a lie will wither and die.

© Copyright Qadosh Erectus. Permission granted to freely distribute this article for non-commercial purposes if unedited and copied in full, including this notice. Reproduction of this article for the purposes of commercial redistribution is prohibited except with written permission from Qadosh Erectus. No copyright is claimed on the images used in this publication or on the material quoted. Contact details: QadoshErectus@gmail.com or PO Box 31-175, Lower Hutt 5011, New Zealand.

Links for articles on White Slavery:

The Irish Slave Trade – The Forgotten “White” Slaves http://www.africaresource.com/rasta/sesostris-the-great-the-egyptian-hercules/the-irish-slave-trade-forgotten-white-slaves/ Slaves of a different color http://archive.salon.com/books/it/2000/06/15/white_slaves/index.html SLAVERY http://homepage.eircom.net/%257Eodyssey/Politics/Quotes/Slavery.html A Little History on WHITE SLAVES http://kentuckysip.homestead.com/whiteslaves.html Irish slaves in the Caribbean by James F. Cavanaugh - Clann Chief Herald http://www.kavanaghfamily.com/articles/2003/20030618jfc.htm Irish Slavery by James F. Cavanaugh http://www.raceandhistory.com/cgi-bin/forum/webbbs_config.pl/noframes/read/1638 White Servitude by Richard Hofstadter http://www.montgomerycollege.edu/Departments/hpolscrv/whiteser.html Passage To America, 1750 http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/passage.htm White Slavery, what the Scots already know by Kelly d. Whittaker http://www.electricscotland.com/history/other/white_slavery.htm The Forgotten Slaves: Whites in Servitude in Early America and Industrial Britain by Michael A. Hoffman [Book review] http://www.revisionisthistory.org/forgottenslaves.html BLACK SLAVEOWNERS by Robert M. Grooms http://americancivilwar.com/authors/black_slaveowners.htm Master and Servant a review of the book WHITE CARGO: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America by Don Jordan and Michael Walsh http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/books/review/Lau-t.html?_r=1 White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America [Book review] http://frontlineclub.com/news/2008/08/white-cargo-the-forgotten-history-of-britains-white-slaves-in-america.html White Slavery and Indentured Servitude in the Age of Imperialism, Part 1 http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=396 A QUICK HISTORY OF THE WHITE AMERICAN UNDERCLASS http://www.jimgoad.net/whiteslavery.html Slave Trade: the African Connection, ca 1788 http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/slavetrade.htm

FOOTNOTES:

[1]“Confronting the Legacy of the African Slave Trade” http://www.pbs.org/wonders/Episodes/Epi3/slave_2.htm [2] Assistant Professor of History Syracuse University [3] Slavery, http://homepage.eircom.net/~odyssey/Politics/Quotes/Slavery.html [4] Thomas Jackson, 1992, American Renaissance 3, cited in Slavery, http://homepage.eircom.net/~odyssey/Politics/Quotes/Slavery.html [5] Mel Fisher Maritime Museum, A Slave Ship Speaks: The Wreak of the Henrietta Marie http://www.melfisher.org/exhibitions/henriettamarie/slavery.htm [6] "Guilty parties", from The Economist print edition, 23 Dec 1999. http://www.economist.com/diversions/millennium/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=347154 [7] BBC, "The Story of Africa" http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/specials/1624_story_of_africa/page50.shtml [8] France and Legacy of Slavery by Nick Tattersall, Tue May 9, 11:22 AM ET, Reuters http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/1584.html [9] He was the author of De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae [on the laws and customs of England], a broad, philosophic treatise. Bracton was the first judge to research, collect and record over 2,000 decisions of his court in a casebook (called the Note Book), thus publishing the world's first "law report." This work pioneered the use of precedents and the stare decisis rule. More importantly, law reports provide publicity to the rules of law laid down by the courts and act as a control over arbitrary decisions. Bracton's example was thereafter followed in England as judges began to record their decision in Year Books or Yearbooks, which were published from 1291 to 1535. It stood as the primary general reference book and authority on the English law until William Blackstone published his Commentaries some 500 years later. [10] Don Jordan is a television producer and director who has worked on dozens of documentaries and dramas. [11] Michael Walsh spent twelve years as a reporter and presenter on World in Action and has won six awards. [12] Kelly d. Whittaker, White Slavery, what the Scots already know http://www.electricscotland.com/history/other/white_slavery.htm [13] Sir William Petty, Political Anatomy of Ireland [14] Sir William Petty, Political Anatomy of Ireland [15] John Thurloe, Letter of Henry Cromwell, 4th Thurloe's State Papers [Published: London, 1742] [16] C. S. S. Higham, The Development of the Leeward Islands Under the Restoration, 1660-1688 [17]Edward O'Meagher Condon, The Irish Race in America [18] Abbot Emerson Smith, Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America 1607-1776 [19] Joseph J. Williams, Whence the "Black Irish" of Jamaica [20] Joseph J. Williams, Whence the "Black Irish" of Jamaica [21] Benefit of Clergy: Dating back to the middle ages, benefit of clergy was originally a right accorded to the church, allowing it to punish its own members should they be convicted of a crime. In this instance the court did not prescribe any punishment for the defendant and instead handed him over to church officials. [22] Thomas Burton, Parliamentary Diary: 1656 59, Vol. 4, p. 253 274. [23] Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series of 1701 [24] Thomas Addis Emmet, Ireland Under English Rule [25] John P. Prendergast, The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland [26] Anthony Broudine, Propuguaculum, Pragae Anno [27] Thomas Addis Emmet, Ireland Under English Rule [28] Dr. John Lingard, History of England [29] Edward O'Meagher Condon, The Irish Race in America [30] James F. Cavanaugh - Clann Chief Herald, Irish slaves in the Caribbean http://www.kavanaghfamily.com/articles/2003/20030618jfc.htm [31] In memory of the Irish victims of Slavery http://www.giftofireland.com/IrishSlaves.htm [32] White Slavery, what the Scots already know http://www.electricscotland.com/history/other/white_slavery.htm [33] William D Phillips, Slavery from Roman Times to the Early Transatlantic Trade [34] Thomas J. Wertenbaker, The First Americans, p. 63 [35] Michael A. Hoffman, They Were White and They Were Slaves, p. 72, citing Robert C. Johnson, The Transportation of Vagrant Children From London to Virginia, 1618-1622, in Early Stuart Studies, p. 139 [36] Michael A. Hoffman, They Were White and They Were Slaves, p. 70, citing Egerton Manuscript, British Museum. [37] Definition of lumpen: Designating or of persons or groups regarded as belonging to a low or contemptible segment of their class or kind because of their unproductiveness, shiftlessness, alienation, degeneration, etc. [38] Definition of prole: Derogatory slang, short for proletarian [39] Gary Nash, Red, White And Black, p. 217 citing Peter Gouldesbrough, An Attempted Scottish Voyage to New York in 1669, Scottish Historical Review, 40 (1961), p. 58 [40] W.J. Cash, The Mind of the South, p. 7 [41] Michael A. Hoffman, They Were White and They Were Slaves, p. 55 citing Edward Channing, History of the United States, Vol. II, p. 369. [42] Michael A. Hoffman, They Were White and They Were Slaves, p. 77, citing a pamphlet by M. Godwyn, London, 1680. [43] Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, p. 5 [44] A. Roger Ekirch, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718-1775, p. 104 [45] A. Roger Ekirch, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718-1775, p. 104 [46] Sharon V. Salinger, To Serve Well and Faithfully: Labor and Indentured Servants in Pennsylvania, 1682-1800 [47] Gottlieb Mittelberger, Journey to Pennsylvania in the Year 1750 and Return to Germany in the Year 1754. [48] Lewis W. Diuguid, Discovering the Real America, p. 299 [49] Clinton V. Black, History of Jamaica, p. 37 [50] Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies 1624-1713 [51] Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of Barbadoes [52] V. F. Calverton, The Awakening of America [53] James Cavanaugh Irish slaves in the Caribbean http://www.kavanaghfamily.com/articles/2003/20030618jfc.htm [54] Sir Thomas Montgomery to the Lords of Trade and Plantations, August 3, 1688, Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, 1685 - 1688, p. 577 [55] Sean O'Callaghan, To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland, p.111 [56] Sean O'Callaghan, To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland, p.118 [57] Sean O'Callaghan, To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland, p.113 [58] Michael A. Hoffman II, They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America, p.50 [59] Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America, p. 144-145 [60] Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America, p.144-145 [61] Sean O'Callaghan, To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland, p.119 [62] Sean O'Callaghan, To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland, p.168 [63] Sean O'Callaghan, To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland, p.115 [64] James F. Cavanaugh - Clann Chief Herald, Irish slaves in the Caribbean http://www.kavanaghfamily.com/articles/2003/20030618jfc.htm [65] John Van der Zee, Bound Over, p 105 [66] Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies 1624-1713, p. 302. [67] Van der Zee, Bound Over, p. 183 [68] The headright system was used in Jamestown, Virginia, starting in 1618 as an attempt to solve labour shortages due to the advent of the tobacco economy, which required large plots of land with many workers. It was also a way to attract immigrants. Virginian colonists were each given two headrights of 50 acres; immigrant colonists who paid for their passage were given one headright, and individuals would receive one headright each time they paid for the passage of another individual. This last mechanism increased the division between the wealthy land-owners and the working poor. [69] Michael A. Hoffman, They Were White and They Were Slaves, pp. 85-6. [70] Richard Hofstadter, America at 1750. A Social Portrait, p. 60. [71] A. Roger Ekirch, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718-1775, p. 125. [72] Richard Hofstadter, America at 1750, p. 60 [73] Gary Nash, Red, White And Black, p. 220 [74] Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, p. 47 [75] A. Roger Ekirch, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718-1775, p. 183 [76] Thomas J. Wertenbaker, The First Americans: 1607-1690, p. 193 [77] Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, p. 641. [78] The Agricultural Productions of Louisiana by Edward J. Forstall (New Orleans, 1845) [79] Harper's Magazine, VII, 755 [80] DeBoufs Review, XI, 401 [81] Seaboard Slave States by Frederick Law Olmsted, pp. 90, 91 [82] Seaboard Slave States by Frederick Law Olmsted, pp. 550, 551 [83] AMERICAN HERITAGE, February/March 1993 vol. 441, p. 90 [84] Liebman is an attorney; LL.B., St. Lawrence University, 1929; M.A. (Latin American history), Mexico City College, 1963; Florida chapter American Jewish Historical Society, 1956-58; Friends of Hebrew University, 1958-59; American Historical Society Contributor to scholarly journals on Jewish history.