whiteslaves

A Little History on WHITE SLAVES

Subject: WHITE SLAVES

Rich, White plantation owners joined with the negroes in insulting White slaves and poor White people, referring to them as "poor-white earthscratching scum," "crackers", "redshanks" , "redlegs"

(forerunner of the "redneck" racial insult current nowadays), "Hill Billys" and "Scotland Johnnies". p 110

" A loyalist refugee from Georgia wrote in 1783: 'The southern colonies are overrun with a swarm of men from the western parts of Virginia and North Carolina, distinguished by the name of Crackers. Many of these people are descended from the convicts that were transported from Great Britain to Virginia at different times, and inherit so much profligacy from their ancestors, that they are the most abandoned set of men on earth, few on them having the least sense of religion. During the King's Government these Crackers were very troublesome in the settlements they also occasioned frequent disputes with the Indians" (Anthony Stokes, A View of the Constitutions of the British Colonies, quoted in Ekirch, p 193) p 111

In 1717, it was proposed that a qualification for election to the South Carolina Assembly was to be "the ownership of one white man." (Journals of the Commons House of Assembly of the Province of South Carolina: 1692-1775, volume 5,pp.294-295)

" It is enacted that no negro or Indian though baptized and enjoyned their owne ffreedome shall be capable of any such purchase of Christians [white slaves]...."......Statutes of the Virginia Assemble, Vo. 2,pp.280-81...[This statute was passed in 1670 to stop the growing 'problem', brought to a head especially by the purchasing of white females slaves by blacks and Indians].

In 1654 Henry whistler called the White slaves of Barbados "rubbish, rogues and whores" (Journal of the West Indian Expedition) p 111

In England they were referred to by Edmund Burke as a "swinish multitude," by Samuel Johnson as "rabble" and by Sir Josiah Child as "loose, vagrant .vicious people." p 111

historians have failed to consistently describe White chattel by the scientifically accurate term for their condition, that of a slave. By avoiding this description, many academics have perpetuated the propaganda of the plutocracy which inflicted these horrors upon White humanity. p 112

"Contemporary observers described it (being a servant) as 'white slavery' and referred to indentured servants as 'White Slaves." (Beckles, p

"Their bodies and souls are used as if hell commenced here and only continued in the world to come." (Thomas Montgomery, in a letter to the Lords of Trade and Plantations, on the suffering of white slaves, August 3, 1688.) "Indentured servitude gave ordinary whites of the (American) revolutionary generation galling experience if a variety of social oppressions" (Roediger, p 30)

Harriet Beecher Stowe was one of the greatest hypocrites of the 19th century, a pious fraud whose legacy of malignant hatred for her own kind has infected many another White man and woman to this day. During her triumphant 1853 tour of Britain in the wake of the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe was the guest of the Duchess of Sutherland, a woman of vast wealth who had an interest in the "betterment of the negro." The Sutherland wealth was based in part on one of the most criminal land-grabs in British history. The Sutherlands had seized the ancient holdings of the traditional clans of Scotland and burned the Highland 'crofters"

(farmers) off their lands, resulting in pauperism and in many cases, outright starvation of Scottish women and children (Henry C. Carey, The Slave Trade, Domestic and Foreign, pp 204-209; John Prebble, The Highland Clearances, pp 288-295). At one point the Sutherlands even hired armed guards to prevent famine-stricken Scottish Highlander "rabble" from catching fish in the Sutherland's well-stocked salmon and trout rivers (Prebble, p 293).

When Harriet Beecher Stowe returned to America she wrote a glowing account of the Sutherlands in her travel book Sunny Memories, specifically praising them for their "enlightened land policies" in Scotland, which she described as, "an almost sublime instance of the benevolent employment of superior wealth and power in shortening the struggles of advancing civilization"

(Cunliffe, p 18, Prebble, p 292). In response to Stowe's appalling whitewash of the crimes committed against the Scottish Highlanders, a London newspaper described Uncle Tom's Cabin as a "downright imposture" and "ranting, canting nonsense" (Cunliffe, Ibid.) p 123

English White Slave History:

Old English law did have something of a White slave code, based on the concept of "villeinage" from which we derive the words villain and villainy with their new perjorative connotations. With the emergence of English Common Law (1175-1225), the aristocrats drafted the writ of novel disseisin to establish a category of juridical unfreedom 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 code

( from his treatise, De Legibus et Consuetudinunibus Angliae...Sir Henry de Bracton) equated the English villein with the Roman servus or slave, thus denying him all basic rights p 118

Villeinage was considered a hereditary condition: "Neither of Duke, earl or lord by ancestry but of villain (vylayne) people" (Bradshaw, ST Werburge, 1513). "Thou art of vylayn blood on thy father's side"

In Britain and Europe under the laws of villeinage, survivors and descendants of White slavery were susceptable to discrimination before the law and even reenslavement. p 121

This stigma was based not only in law but in racial terms: "the culture of

(medieval) slaveholders created an image of (White) slaves that set them apart, their whole moral character tainted by the fact of enslavement if not by slave ancestry." (Karras, pp 15-16) p 121

This taint, which the ruling class cleverly asserted was the result of some hereditary defect among White slaves, has been applied to many nations of White peoples form the Slavs to the Irish, Welsh and Scottish..p

The creation of an exculpatory nomenclature rigged to justify the depredations of the ruling class against the White poor by establishing an intrinsic relationship between being poor and being evil, is a masterstroke of propaganda. It leads to the internalization of these negative images in the minds of the White poor themselves. p 121 The auction block:

Another observer watching the auction of a hundred White slaves in Williamsburg, Virginia, "I never seen such passels of poor wretches in my life. Some almost naked " (Ekirch, pp100 and 122)...p 80

White Salve Revolts:

Individual acts of rebellion by White slaves were constant and many slavemasters were killed.......unrest among the servants was more or less chronic." (Bridenbaugh, p 108)

"During the third quarter of the seventeenth century, impoverished white laborers had kept the (Virginia) province on the brink of civil war." (Ekirch, p 133)p 101..In the Caribbean colonies White slaves revolted by burning the sugar cane of the of the slave masters "to the utter ruin and undoing of their Masters."

In 1676 Nathaniel Bacon led an uprising in Virginia. A small army of former White slaves and fugitive White slaves joined with the 30 year old Indian fighter Bacon against the House of Burgesses and the Governor, sparked by anger at their own penurious condition after having been cheated by the Royal out of the "head" acreage they were promised and enraged by the Royal government's apathy in the face of murderous Indian raids. Bacon's rebels burned down the city of Jamestown, plundered the plantations and expelled Berkeley. The last of them were captured or killed by January of 1677.. p 101

"Governor Berkeley despaired of ever subduing a White underclass of 'people where six parts in seven are poor, indebted, discontented and armed."

(Ekirch, p 134) p 102

Other White slave rebellions included the risings of 1634 which took

800 troops to put down, and 1647 in which 18 leaders of the White revolt were tortured and hung. P 102

The rulers of Barbados passed a proclamation in 1649, "an act for an Annual Day of Thanksgiving for our deliverance from the last insurrection of servants." Richard Ligon was an eye witness to this White slave plot on Barbados.. p 102

And in Virginia: "After mid century the number of runaway (White) servants increased steadily, and in 1661 and 1663, servants in two separate

(Virginia) counties took up arms and demanded freedom...

(Levine, p 56...p 102

More White slave "plots" and revolts occurred in 1686 and 1692 including a rebellion by the "Independents" an insurgent group of White Protestant slaves and freedmen who revolted against Maryland's Catholic theocracy p 102

Forty Irish slaves in 1735 ran a vessel aground off Nova Scotia and executed the entire ship's company p 102

In 1751 English slaves from Liverpool shot the ship's captain, drove a spike through the jaw of one of the crew, locked up the remainder and fled the vessel for the north Carolina coast(Ekirch, p 109) p 103

Around 1720 a teenager, James Dalton, who had seen his father hanged at the Tyburn gallows, was seized, sentenced to enslavement in the colonies and placed aboard the ship Honor, bound for Virginia. During a storm he and fifteen other White slaves successfully battled the captain and crew, winning control of the ship and escaping to the Spanish coast.

In 1721 white slaves were arrested while attempting to seize an arsenal at Annapolis, Maryland, the arms to be used in an uprising against the Planters..p 103

In Florida in 1768 White slaves revolted at the Turnbull plantation in New Smyrna. The government needed two ships full of troops and cannon to put down the revolt. p 103

The true story continues. Read and weep. A White field slave, Jeremiah Swift, when ordered by his master's son to hoe another 1000 tobacco hills before night, bashed his head in with his hoe. Grabbing an axe and a knife we went to the master John Hartley's house, killing one of his daughters and stabbing another.

(Pennsylvania Gazette, May 9, May 16, June 27, 1751) p 104

Another White slave, worked half to death, grabbed an axe, confronted the master's wife in her kitchen, and while laying his hand on her chopping block, whacked it off and threw it at her with the admonition, "Now see me work if you can!" (Maryland Gazette, April 17, May 1,

"Irish servant class hero Cornelius Bryan was imprisoned for mutiny on countless occasions and regularly whipped by the hangman for assembling servants and publicly making anti-planter remarks" (Beckles, "Rebels and Reactionaries," p 18) p 104

The aristocratic planters had felt the necessity to "arm part of their blackmen" to assist in suppressing White slave revolts. (Beckles, ibid. p 17) p 104

Armed Black militias patrolled the Carolinas from the end of the

17th century to a least 1710 when Thomas Nairne reported that Blacks continued to be members of British colonial militias organized by local governments p 104

In Maryland in 1715, a reward was offered to American Indians who were recruited as bounty hunters to capture runaway Whites and return them to their masters, "For the better discovery of and encouragement of our neighbor Indians to seize, apprehend or take up any runaway servants." It was decreed that for every fugitive White laborer the Indians caught and brought "before a magistrate, they shall, for a reward, have a match-coat paid him or them, or the value thereof (Maxy's Laws of Maryland, vol one, p. 111)p 104

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." ( Van der Zee p 266) p 105

Political/Penal Prisoners:

Ship Captains involved in the White slave trade obtained White slaves with penal status either free of charge or were subsidized to take them, and for all other categories of White slaves, they paid at most a small sum to an agent to procure them, forfeiting only the cost of their keep on board ship if they died. "There were thirty-four identifiable London firms involved in the trade to Maryland form 1746 to 1775." (Ekirch . pp73-74)

"convicts provided the colonies with cannon fodder against the Spanish, the French, and the Indians."(Ekirch, p 153) p 105

Benjamin Franklin opposed White slavery and supposedly referred to White convict-slaves shipped to America as "human serpents". (Ekirch, p

"Surviving court records show that in areas (of colonial America) where convicts were imported in large numbers they committed very few offenses -- crime never became a major social problem before the Revolution." (Ekirch, pp 4 and 186) p 105

"Overall most of the convicts were not the 'atrocious villains' so often spoken of" (Shaw, p 164) p 105

When attempts were made to abolish White slavery the measures were generally voted down, as when in 1748 Virginia's Burgesses upheld the Act of

1705-which legitimized White slavery under a veil of legal phraseology p 105

White convict-labor was used for the very harshest and life-threatening jobs others would not do-such as fighting the Indians and French in Arctic conditions with few-if any-firearms p 106

the robber Robert Welch pleaded to be hanged rather than given a transportation he had rather die that live under bondage' Thief Mary Stanford .pleaded to be hanged rather than be transported p 126

"transportation represented a curse that large numbers of men and women feverishly sought to avoid .requesting other punishments, like volunteering their bodies for medical experimentation. In 1721, six prisoners volunteered to undergo a smallpox experiment Similarly, ten years later, Charles Ray, a prisoner in Newgate, offered to let doctors remove his ear drum rather than be transported Another Englishman permitted one of his arms to be amputated 'to test styptic medicines discovered by Mr. Thomas Price" (Ekirch, pp 62-63; Shaw p 34) p 127

Transportation Conditions/Death rates

White slave ships were cargo ships with no special provisions for passengers p 81

Ships carrying White slaves to America often lost half their slaves to death ..p 77

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 to a death rate of 25% for White slaves ( Salinger, p 92) p77

An average cargo was three hundred, but the shipmaster, for greater profit, would sometimes crowd as many as six hundred into a small vessel. The mortality under such circumstances was tremendous, sometimes more than half Mittleberger (an eye witness) says he saw thirty-two children thrown into the ocean during one voyage. (Jernegan, pp 50-51)

A study of the middle passage of White slaves was included in a Parliamentary Petition of 1659. It reported that White Slaves were locked below deck for two weeks while the slave ship was still in port. Once under way, they were "all the way locked up under decks -- among the horses". They were chained form their legs to their necks.

A witness who saw a White slave aboard a ship owned by the slaver John Stewart, reported: " All the states of horror I ever had an idea of are much short of what I saw this man in; chained to a board in a hole not above sixteen feet long, more than 50 with him; a collar and padlock about his neck, and chained to five of the most dreadful creatures I ever looked on." p 79

Out of 350 White slaves on a ship bound for the colonies in 1638 only 80 arrived alive. "We have thrown over board two and three a day for many dayes together" wrote Thomas Rous, a survivor of the trip p 80

A ship carrying White slaves in 1685, the Betty of London, left England with

100 White slaves and srrived in the colonies with 49 left p 80

Captains of slave ships became infamous for providing sufficient for only the first half of the trip and then virtually starving their White captives until they arrived in America. Those that had been pre-sold that died on the second half of the trip were the loss of the buyer p 81

"Jammed into filthy holds, manacled, starved and abused, they suffered and died in during the crossings in gross numbers. Thousands were children under 12, snatched off the streets." (Kendall p 1) p 81

Due to the high disease rate of arriving White slaves, a ship board quarantine was added to the horrors of the ten to twelve week trip

(Salinger, p89) p 82

In 1750 an island was established for their quarantine, Fisher Island, at the mouth of the Schuylkill River In 1764 a clergyman, Pastor Helmuth, visited Fisher Island and described it as "a land of the living dead, a vault full of living corpses." .p 82

" Before 1650, however, the greater victims of man's inhumanity were the mass of white Christian servants who suffered at the hands of callous, white Christian masters. For the time being, with all of their troubles, the blacks had it better." (Bridenbaugh, p 120) p 82

"Sold to a master in Merion, near Philadelphia, David Evans was put to work 'hewing and uprooting trees'---land clearing, the most arduous of colonial labor, work that was spared black slaves because they were too valualbe." (Van der Zee, p 138) p 82

"Honored Father, ...O Dear Father....I am sure you'll pity your distressed daughter. What we unfortunate English people suffer here is beyond the probability of England to concieve. Let it suffice that I am one of the unhappy number toiling day and night, and very often the horses druggery, with only the comfort of hearing me called. 'You bitch, you did not do half enough.' Then I am tied up and whipped to that degree that you'd not serve an animal. I have scarce any thing but Indian corn and salt to eat and that even begrudged. Nay, many negroes are better used.... after slaving after Master's pleasure, what rest we can get is to wrap ourselves up in a blanket and lay upon the ground. This is the deplorable condition your poor Betty endures...." ...from a letter by White slave Elizabeth Sprigs in Maryland to her father John Sprigs in London, England, September

22, 1756. (Public record Office, London England, High Court of Admiralty).

White Slaves...the Mother Load...Part III

Relations with blacks:

Runaway laws, captures, punishments:

The punishment for a runaway Whites was to be 'branded in the cheek with the letter R.' They also had one or both ears cut off. Statues of Virginia, Vol

13, William Henning , p 92

1640the General Court of Virginia "...two White slaves ..attempting to run out of the country..be whipped, branded and required to serve the colony an additional seven years in leg irons. p 92

Sept. 20, 1776 the Continental Congress authorized the whipping of unruly enlisted men with up to one hundred lashes. There were cases of 250 lashes. P 93

Herman Melville, in White Jacket or The World in a man of War, witnesses more floggings than had taken place on a plantation of five hundred slaves in ten years. In fourteen months he witnessed 163 floggings p 93

Flogging through the fleet p 94

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 p 106

One White slaves owner "made him sick and languishing as he was, dig his own grave, in which he was laid a few days afterwards, the others being too busy to dig it, having their hands full attending to the tobacco."

(Jaspar Dankaerts and Peter Sluyter, Journal of a Voyage to New York and a Tour of Several American Colonies, 1679-1680). p 107

In New England, Nicolas Weekes and his wife deliberately cut off the toes of their White slave who subsequently died p 107

Marmaduke Pierce in Massachusetts severely beat a White slave boy with a rod and finally beat him to death.. p 107

In 1655 in the Plymouth a master named Mr. Latham, starved his 14 year old White slave boy, beat him and left him to die outdoors in sub-zero temperatures...p 107

Colonial records are full of the deaths by beating, starvation and exposure of White slaves in addition to tragic accounts of suicides of those seeking the final refuge from their harsh treatment (American Weekly Mercury, Sept. 2-9, 1731) p 107

Henry Smith beat to death an elderly White slave and raped two of his female White slaves in Virginia p 107

John Dandy beat to death his White slave boy whose black and blue body was found floating down a creek in Maryland p 107

Pope Alvey beat is White slave girl Alice Sanford to death in 1663. She was reported to have been "beaten to a jelley." p 107

Joseph Fincher beat his White slave Jeffery Haggman to death in 1664. p 107

John Grammer ordered his plantation overseer to beat his White slave

100 times with a cat-o'-nine-tails. (he died) p 107

There are thousands of cases in the colonial archives of inhuman mistreatment, cruelty, beatings and the entire litany of Uncle Tom's Cabin horrors administered to hapless White slaves. p 107

In The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes describes the fate of White slaves as one of "prolonged and hideous torture."."another half pound mate, off the beggar's ribs"..the overseer's face and clothes were described as having the appearance of "a mincemeat chopper, being covered in flesh from the victim's body." (Hughes, p 115) p 108

In colonial America, in one case, the sole punishment for the murder of a White slave (explained as an accident) consisted of the master and is wife being forbidden form owning any White slaves for a period of three years. p 108

On the finding that the beating to death by Mistress Ward of her White slave girl was "unreasonable and unchristianlike," she was fined 300 pounds of tobacco. p 108

In 1678 Charles Grimlin, a wealthy American colonial planter, was found guilty of murdering a female White slave he owned, was pardoned and set free. In the same year a woman "of low origins", who had killed her husband, a man of some wealth, was sentenced by the same judge to be 'burned alive according to the law." p 108

In thousands of cases of homicide against poor White slaves there were no trials at all-murdered White slaves were hurriedly buried so that decomposition would hide the crime. Others just "disappeared" or died from "accidents" or committed "suicide". For acquittals of masters in Virginia or instances of failure to prosecute them for the murder of White slaves, see Virginia General Court Minutes, VMH, XIX, 388). p 109

For information on Blacks allowed to accuse White slavemasters in court and who were freed from slavery as a result of hearings before White judges, see the minutes of Council of March 10, 1654 in the Lucas manuscripts, reel 1, f. 92, Bridgetown Public Library, Barbados). p 109

In Westmoreland County, Virginia in 1724 a White slave received twenty lashes for having complained of mistreatment. In 1738 another Westmoreland White slave, George Smith, was whipped Twenty-nine times for making a complaint. p 109

(White) servants were tortured for confessions (fire was inserted between their fingers and knotted ropes were put about their necks)

(Beckles 'Rebels and Reactionaries', p 14, p 95)

Yet even as late as the mid-18th century, of 1724 wanted notices for fugitives from servitude, "the great majority" were White "indentured servants" (Jonathan Prude, "Runaway Ads and the Appearance of Unfree Laborers in America. 1750-1800," The Journal of American History, June

All white workers and the poor in colonial America were regarded as suspect---guilty of being fugitive slaves unless they could "give an intelligent account of themselves" or show their certificate; a very convenient arrangement for enslaving free White men and women in America by claiming they were fugitive White slaves.

In the British West Indies torture of White slaves was routine. Masters hung their White slaves up by their hands and set them on fire.. To end this barbarity, Colonel William Brayne wrote to English authorities in

1656 urging the importation of negro slaves on the grounds that, "as the planters would have to pay much for them and would have an interest in preserving their lives, which was wanting in the case of (Whites)" many of whom are killed by overwork and cruel treatment p 83

In Virginina in 1699 persons who successfully hunted a White slave receive 1000 pounds of tobacco, paid for by the future labor that would be extracted from the White slave. P 96

Physical descriptions of runaway white slaves often included the mention of fresh whipping marks on their backs, iron collar scars, ugly burns, Thomas Burns was 'remarkably cut on the buttocks by a flogging' from his master, whereas Sarah Davis's shipping had left 'many scars on her back" (Ekirch, pp. 157-159) p97

The Articles of New England Confederation provided for the extradition of all runaway White slaves.

Between Feb 12, 1732 and Dec. 20, 1735, the South Carolina Gazette carried 110 wanted notices for fugitive Black slaves and forty one for fugitive White slaves. P 98

The US Constitution upheld the colonial fugitive White slave laws in its Article IV, section 2: 'No person held to service or labor in one state, under the Laws thereof escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from the Service or Labor,

but shall be delivered up on a claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labor may be due." P 98

It was not until 1821 that the first legal blow to the system of White bondage occurred when an Indiana Court began to enforce the Ordinance of

1787 prohibiting White slavery, which held all White slavery null, void and unenforceable. The 13th amendment was the final blow to white slavery. P 98

The Indenture Racket:

An apprentice would be induced to borrow money under terms that he could not possibly meet, thereby guaranteeing his or her violation and earning an extension of their servitude that could transform their indenture into lifetime of slavery.

Those that signed indentures for land grants could forfeit them at the slightest pretext of his owner for even 'planning to run away (the owners affidavit would due for a conviction) or even for 'indolence'. By paying the six pound price of a White slave's transportation, the owner secured a "headright" to the land. An additional fee to a spirit gang for kidnapping these slaves. Those White slaves that died in bondage or served additional time for ''violations' provided a land conveyor belt to their owners' estates.

Those that managed to survive their 30 or 40 years as chattel, could the be swindled out of the freedom dues acreage and left to live as landless peasants despite decades of hard labor. Those that actually got land had no tools or the means to work it. A small loan with an assured default was all that was needed to take it from them.

In Barbados, since their was no land left that was affordable as freedom dues, it became the custom to give 300 pounds of sugar, worth less than two pounds sterling ($4), a pittance for years of hard labor (Eric Williams pp102-103) p 84

Some had their health so ruined that no one would hire them and they just signed new contracts out of desparation on whatever terms their masters wanted (Ekirch pp 179- 183) p 85

Of 5000 of 'indentured servants' who entered the colony of Maryland between 1670 and 1680, fewer than 1300 proved their headrights to their 50 acre freedom dues. More than 1400 died from overwork, chronic malnourishment and disease. The other were defrauded.

A Virginia law of 1619 provided that 'if a servant willfully neglect his master's commands he shall suffer bodily punishment." When Wyatt became Governor in 1621, he was ordered to see that these punishment included bondage over to the colony itself after the original service was completed.

In colonial America, White people could be enslaved for such an offense as missing church services more than three times or for the "prevention of an idle course of life".

Seven years additional time was the standard punishment (after a severe whipping) for running away often in irons. All costs of recapture were added on, also. Of course these were abused and inflated. For just being absent from the plantation at any time, a White slave would get an additional year for every two hours he was away. ( Beckles, White Servitude, p 84) p 88

Taking some extra food from the master's larder added an extra two years for each offense.

Young White female slaves were denied the right to marry, a device that assured a steady supply of violators whose pregnancy would add an extra two and a half years to her time. The man got at least four years and even up to seven.

A Virginia law of 1672 recognized that masters who had lengthened the enslavement of their White female slaves by making them pregnant by the slavemaster himself. No punishment was given to the master for such acts however. p 89

The enslavement of the White offspring of these unions followed the ancient Roman slave code "Partus sequitor ventrem" ( the condition of the child follows the condition of the mother). Girls were originally bound over for 31 years, later reduced to 18 when the Virginia Assembly in 1765 decided that 31 years was too severe. Boys got 18 years. Of course if these girls became pregnant, they were trapped all over again.

http://www.southernmessenger.org/reparations.htm

From: The Webfairy [mailto:webfairy@thewebfairy.com] Sent: Thursday, January 23, 2003 11:45 PM Subject: RE: WHITE SLAVES

When I lived in New Orleans, I discovered that when it came to canal building, slaves were better off than white immigrants. Slaves had an intristic value to be protected as property. Famine driven immigrants were expendable. The numbers of dead admitted to in the article below is way, way low. Maybe they are only counting the workers, and not the women and children.

http://msn.ancestry.com/library/view/ancmag/2155.asp

When Irish Eyes Weren't Smiling -- Charles H. Williams, III

During the period between the War of 1812 and the beginning of the Civil War in

1861, a large influx of settlers journeyed to Louisiana. The majority came from the older southern states, but many also arrived in large and small numbers from foreign lands. The most prevalent immigrant groups at the time were the Germans and the Irish. The larger percentage of both groups was predominantly unskilled laborers; however, some of them had learned carpentry, blacksmithing, or other skilled or semi-skilled trades. They were generally paid by the day for their labor, although some of them contracted by the week, month, or even by the year. All were poorly paid.

Louisiana became host to a multitude of these foreign immigrants; and as they flocked to her shores to nest and build their families, each group had their own story. This one is the story of the Irish. It is a sad and tragic story. It is an account of shattered dreams that all too soon became a nightmare.

From 1846 to 1856, the largest number of Irish immigrants came to America to escape the famines in Ireland. By 1860 there were 25,000 Irish living in New Orleans. Many of these immigrants colonized an area known today as the Irish Channel, in the lower section of the Garden District, bounded by Magazine Street, the Mississippi River, Jackson Avenue, and Felicity Street.

The Irish settlers were not well liked by the majority of the other inhabitants of New Orleans (mostly French) and were not treated kindly. They were poor and hungry and anxious to earn a dollar. They most often competed with African Americans for menial jobs, such as collecting trash, working as laborers on the riverfront, or whatever work they could get. In the public's view they were a bunch of rowdy, hard-drinking, boisterous, hot-headed rabble rousers who were always stewing for a fight.

Oddly enough, although the good citizens of New Orleans looked down on the Irish because of their wild natures and eagerness to become involved in brawls, they owe a special tribute to a hero of Irish descent whose fighting spirit championed their cause at the Battle of New OrleansÃ¢â,¬â??General Andrew Jackson, whose parents both migrated from Ireland.

So when plans for the construction of the New Basin Canal were being put into effect in New Orleans in 1832, the Irish were already there. The estimated cost of the project was $250,000. The New Basin Canal was to run from Lake Pontchartrain down what is now the Pontchartrain Expressway to South Rampart Street.

Problems with building the canal had already been anticipated by the developers. The monumental project required digging through primitive swampland. This was considered extremely dangerous. Rather than use "expensive" slaves as laborers, which would not make good economic sense, Irish immigrants were recruited for the gruesome task. They were brought to New Orleans by the thousands (a smaller group of German immigrants were also employed) and paid the miserly wage of less than a dollar a day.

Housing available to the Irish clans was in a deplorable collection of boardinghouses in a filthy and debris-infested part of the city located by the Mississippi River on Girod and Julia streets. The immigrant workers were clumped together in small quarters and with no alternative but to share the inadequate living space. Their food rations were limited and they were often hungry.

There were hardships from the time the work began. At the time, dredges had not been invented, so all the digging was done with hand shovels. Mud had to be hauled out of the ditch in wheelbarrows, which were then rolled to the top of the bank over wooden planks laid on the incline. The mud was then dumped onto the banks of the canal. The thick roots of Cypress trees had to be hacked through with hand axes because dynamite had also not yet been invented. Water had to be constantly pumped out of the ditch using crude pumps. Setting the pilings for wharves in the gooey soil proved to frustrating and tedious, as the workers had to load tons of stones on top of the pilings in order to set them solidly into the ground.

It took six years to finish the canal, six years of working year round in difficult weather conditions including the devastatingly hot Louisiana summers. As expected, the work was hazardous. By the time the New Basin Canal was completed, 8,000 Irishmen had died. Most fell victim to epidemics of cholera and yellow fever caught while digging in the mosquito-infested swamps. Quite a few were accidentally buried alive in the canal. Others died from scorching heat and were simply buried on the banks of the canal within a short distance from where they died. Nevertheless the canal was completed in 1838. The total cost of the project greatly exceeded the original speculated costs. The total cost came to $1,119,000 -- and 8,000 lives that could not be priced in terms of money.

In 1946 the order came to fill in the New Basin Canal to make way for the Pontchartrain Expressway. The work was completed in 1961.

http://www.yatcom.com/neworl/naborhud/uptown/irishchannel/stmarys.html

Instead of draining swamps and installing sewage systems to end the epidemic deaths among the irish and german less-than-slave labor, they built bigger churches to bury them from.

Yes, merely another example of the rulers contempt for the un-washed masses.Mentioned specifically in the account was the situation of slave holders hiring white laborers to do hazardous work in order to protect their investment (slaves), after all, the going price of slave at the time was the equivalent to purchasing a brand new automobile today. You could hire a white day laborer for a few hours atthe cost of a cheap meal.

One account I read was of the loading of a Mississippi cotton barge. The slaves brought the cotton bales to the vessel and threw the bales down to the temporary whites laboring in the hole loading the cargo. This was the more dangerous work, which was gleefully abetted by the Blacks doing their best to ensure that the bales were thrown down when the Whites were off balance and unprepared for the precipitous arrival of yet another few hundred pounds of dead weight landing on them, thus causing probable severe injury to the Whites. Hmm, things really haven't changed all that much, have they?

Two years ago, Prime Minister Paul Keating of Australia refused to show "proper respect" to Britain's Queen Elizabeth II during her state visit. In response, Terry Dicks, a Conservative member of the British Parliament said, "It's a country of ex-convicts, so we should not be surprised by the rudeness of their prime minister."

A slur such as this would be considered unthinkable if it were uttered against any other class or race of people except the descendants of White slavery. Dicks' remark is not only offensive, it is ignorant and false. Most of Australia's "convicts" were shipped into servitude for such "crimes" as stealing seven yards of lace, cutting trees on an aristocrat's estate or poaching sheep to feed a starving family.

The arrogant disregard for the holocaust visited upon the poor and working class Whites of Britain by the aristocracy continues in our time because the history of that epoch has been almost completely extirpated from our collective memory.

When White servitude is acknowledged as having existed in America, it is almost always termed as temporary "indentured servitude" or part of the convict trade, which, after the Revolution of 1776, centered on Australia instead of America. The "convicts" transported to America under the 1723 Waltham Act, perhaps numbered 100,000.

The indentured servants who served a tidy little period of 4 to 7 years polishing the master's silver and china and then taking their place in colonial high society, were a minuscule fraction of the great unsung hundreds of thousands of White slaves who were worked to death in this country from the early l7th century onward.

Up to one-half of all the arrivals in the American colonies were Whites slaves and they were America's first slaves. These Whites were slaves for life, long before Blacks ever were. This slavery was even hereditary. White children born to White slaves were enslaved too.

Whites were auctioned on the block with children sold and separated from their parents and wives sold and separated from their husbands. Free Black property owners strutted the streets of northern and southern American cities while White slaves were worked to death in the sugar mills of Barbados and Jamaica and the plantations of Virginia.

The Establishment has created the misnomer of "indentured servitude" to explain away and minimize the fact of White slavery. But bound Whites in early America called themselves slaves. Nine-tenths of the White slavery in America was conducted without indentures of any kind but according to the so-called "custom of the country," as it was known, which was lifetime slavery administered by the White slave merchants themselves.

In George Sandys laws for Virginia, Whites were enslaved "forever." The service of Whites bound to Berkeley's Hundred was deemed "perpetual." These accounts have been policed out of the much touted "standard reference works" such as Abbott Emerson Smith's laughable whitewash, Colonists in Bondage.

I challenge any researcher to study 17th century colonial America, sifting the documents, the jargon and the statutes on both sides of the Atlantic and one will discover that White slavery was a far more extensive operation than Black enslavement. It is when we come to the 18th century that one begins to encounter more "servitude" on the basis of a contract of indenture. But even in that period there was kidnapping of Anglo-Saxons into slavery as well as convict slavery.

In 1855, Frederic Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who designed New York's Central Park, was in Alabama on a pleasure trip and saw bales of cotton being thrown from a considerable height into a cargo ship's hold. The men tossing the bales somewhat recklessly into the hold were Negroes, the men in the hold were Irish.

Olmsted inquired about this to a shipworker. "Oh," said the worker, "the niggers are worth too much to be risked here; if the Paddies are knocked overboard or get their backs broke, nobody loses anything."

Before British slavers traveled to Africa's western coast to buy Black slaves from African chieftains, they sold their own White working class kindred ("the surplus poor" as they were known) from the streets and towns of England, into slavery. Tens of thousands of these White slaves were kidnapped children. In fact the very origin of the word kidnapped is kid-nabbed, the stealing of White children for enslavement.

According to the English Dictionary of the Underworld, under the heading kidnapper is the following definition: "A stealer of human beings, esp. of children; originally for exportation to the plantations of North America."

The center of the trade in child-slaves was in the port cities of Britain and Scotland:

"Press gangs in the hire of local merchants roamed the streets, seizing 'by force such boys as seemed proper subjects for the slave trade.' Children were driven in flocks through the town and confined for shipment in barns...So flagrant was the practice that people in the countryside about Aberdeen avoided bringing children into the city for fear they might be stolen; and so widespread was the collusion of merchants, shippers, suppliers and even magistrates that the man who exposed it was forced to recant and run out of town." (Van der Zee, Bound Over, p. 210).

White slaves transported to the colonies suffered a staggering loss of life in the 17th and 18th century. During the voyage to America it was customary to keep the White slaves below deck for the entire nine to twelve week journey. A White slave would be confined to a hole not more than sixteen feet long, chained with 50 other men to a board, with padlocked collars around their necks. The weeks of confinement below deck in the ship's stifling hold often resulted in outbreaks of contagious disease which would sweep through the "cargo" of White "freight" chained in the bowels of the ship.

Ships carrying White slaves to America often lost half their slaves to death. According to historian Sharon V. Salinger, "Scattered data reveal that the mortality for [White] servants at certain times equaled that for [Black] slaves in the 'middle passage,' and during other periods actually exceeded the death rate for [Black] slaves." Salinger 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.

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 says the Whites were "indiscriminately herded aboard the 'white guineamen,' often as many as 300 passengers on little vessels of not more than 200 tons burden--overcrowded, unsanitary...The mortality rate was sometimes as high as 50% and young children seldom survived the horrors of a voyage which might last anywhere from seven to twelve weeks."

Independent investigator A.B. Ellis in the Argosy writes concerning the transport of White slaves, "The human cargo, many of whom were still tormented by unhealed wounds, could not all lie down at once without lying on each other. They were never suffered to go on deck. The hatchway was constantly watched by sentinels armed with hangers and blunder busses. In the dungeons below all was darkness, stench, lamentation, disease and death."

Marcus Jernegan describes the greed of the shipmasters which led to horrendous loss of life for White slaves transported to America:

"The voyage over often repeated the horrors of the famous 'middle passage' of slavery fame. An average cargo was three hundred, but the shipmaster, for greater profit, would sometimes crowd as many as six hundred into a small vessel...The mortality under such circumstances was tremendous, sometimes more than half...Mittelberger (an eyewitness) says he saw thirty-two children thrown into the ocean during one voyage."

"The mercantile firms, as importers of (White) servants, were not too careful about their treatment, as the more important purpose of the transaction was to get ships over to South Carolina which could carry local produce back to Europe. Consequently the Irish--as well as others--suffered greatly...

"It was almost as if the British merchants had redirected their vessels from the African coast to the Irish coast, with the white servants coming over in much the same fashion as the African slaves." (Warren B. Smith, White Servitude in Colonial South Carolina).

A study of the middle passage of White slaves was included in a Parliamentary Petition of 1659. It reported that White slaves were locked below deck for two weeks while the slaveship was still in port. Once under way, they were "all the way locked up under decks...amongst horses." They were chained from their legs to their necks.

Those academics who insist that slavery is an exclusively Black racial condition forget or deliberately omit the fact that the word slave originally was a reference to Whites of East European origin - "Slavs."

Moreover, in the 18th century in Britain and America, the Industrial Revolution spawned the factory system whose first laborers were miserably oppressed White children as young as six years of age. They were locked in the factories for sixteen hours a day and mangled by the primitive machinery. Hands and arms were regularly ripped to pieces. Little girls often had their hair caught in the machinery and were scalped from their foreheads to the back of their necks.

White Children wounded and crippled in the factories were turned out without compensation of any kind and left to die of their injuries. Children late to work or who fell asleep were beaten with iron bars. Lest we imagine these horrors were limited to only the early years of the Industrial Revolution, eight and ten year old White children throughout America were hard at work in miserable factories and mines as late as 1920.

Because of the rank prostitution, stupidity and cowardice of America's teachers and educational system, White youth are taught that Black slaves, Mexican peons and Chinese coolies built this country while the vast majority of the Whites lorded it over them with a lash in one hand and a mint julep in the other.

The documentary record tells a very different story, however. When White Congressman David Wilmot authored the Wilmot Proviso to keep Black slaves out of the American West he did so, he said, to preserve that vast expanse of territory for "the sons of toil, my own race and color."

This is precisely what most White people in America were, "sons of toil," performing backbreaking labor such as few of us today can envision. They had no paternalistic welfare system; no Freedman's Bureau to coo sweet platitudes to them; no army of bleeding hearts to worry over their hardships. These Whites were the expendable frontline soldiers in the expansion of the American frontier. They won the country, felled the trees, cleared and planted the land.

The wealthy, educated White elite in America are the sick heirs of what Charles Dickens in Bleak House termed "telescopic philanthropy"--the concern for the condition of distant peoples while the plight of kindred in one's own backyard are ignored.

Today much of what we see on "Turner Television" and Pat Robertson's misnamed "Family Channel," are TV films depicting Blacks in chains, Blacks being whipped, Blacks oppressed. Nowhere can we find a cinematic chronicle of the Whites who were beaten and killed in White slavery. Four-fifths of the White slaves sent to Britain's sugar colonies in the West Indies did not survive their first year.

Soldiers in the American Revolution and sailors impressed into the American navy received upwards of two hundred whiplashes for minor infractions. But no TV show lifts the shirt of these White yeoman to reveal the scars on their backs.

The Establishment would rather weep over the poor persecuted Negroes, but leave the White working class "rednecks" and "crackers" (both of these terms of derision were first applied to White slaves), to live next door to the Blacks.

Little has changed since the early 1800s when the men of property and station of the English Parliament outlawed Black slavery throughout the Empire. While this Parliament was in session to enact this law, ragged five year old White orphan boys, beaten, starved and whipped, were being forced up the chimneys of the English parliament, to clean them. Sometimes the chimney masonry collapsed on these boys. Other times they suffocated to death inside their narrow smoke channels.