White Slavery Was Much More Common Than Believed (As in enslavement of whites, not prostitution)

Newswise ^ | March 8, 2004 | Ohio State University

[SeeRushToldU_So]

Me too........

[nolu chan]

SOURCE: Myths of American Slavery, Walter D. Kennedy, 2003, pp. 16-18, 46, 50

[p. 16]

So great was the enslavement of British subjects that in 1701 it was estimated that of 25,000 slaves in Barbados, 21,700 were white. Many of these "slaves" were indentured servants who had been ille­gally or at least "extra-legally" taken from their English homeland. Speaking of the indentured servant, Dr. Hilary Beckles, a contem­porary English authority, states that "the ownership of which could easily be transferred, like that of any other commodity ... as with slaves, ownership changed without their participation in the dia­logue concerning transfer." [13] Describing the indentured servant as a "White proto-slave," Beckles gives modern readers a more accurate picture of indentured servitude in early America. Early in the his­tory of the English colonies in America, the institution of white slav­ery provided the bulk of the labor supply. For the most part, prior

[p. 17]

to 1640 most of the sugar grown in English colonies was produced by forced white labor. With life expectancy reduced for the inden­tured servant, a five- to seven-year indentureship was often tanta­mount to slavery for life.

White slavery was not anything new for the English. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England, as more and more people were removed from their land, a class of poor whites grew at an alarming rate. So great did their numbers become that laws were passed to "control" these poor whites. From these laws, many poor white folks were sold into actual slavery or proto-slavery both in England and the Americas. The most degraded and offen­sive (to modern sentimentalities) of this class were the children of poor white people. Many of these urchins were "sold" to work­houses, where they worked from twelve to sixteen hours each day. In one 1765 report, it was established that the workhouses in one district had a 90 percent mortality rate for children. It should be noted that these children ranged in age from five to sixteen years. How much abuse and criticism would have been placed upon a Southern plantation that had such a record? The lack of a moral outcry by the abolitionist crowd caused many English labor leaders to question the sincerity of abolitionists' criticisms of the evil institution of slavery. Bemoaning the lack of sympathy for the white slave children of England, Rev. Richard Oastler, a Methodist minis­ter in York, England, stated,

Thousands of our fellow creatures... are this very moment... in a state of slavery more horrid than are the victims of that hell­ish system 'colonial slavery'... the very streets which receive the droppings of the 'Anti-Slavery Society' are every morning wet by the tears of innocent victims at the accursed shrine of avarice, who are compelled, not by the cartwhip of the negro slave-driver, but by the dread of the equally appalling thong, or strap, of the overlooker [in the South an overlooker was known as an overseer] to hasten, half-dressed, but not half-fed, to those mag­azines of British infantile slavery -- the worsted mills in the town of Bradford! [14]

Thanking Rev. Oastler for his efforts on behalf of the slave chil­dren of Bradford, a delegation of labor leaders questioned the "conduct of those pretended philanthropists and canting hyp­ocrites who travel to the West Indies in search of slavery, forgetting there is a more abominable and degrading system of slavery at

[p. 18]

home." [15] In yet another account of the horrors of white child slav­ery, there is the account by Charles Shaw, a former child labor slave, who managed to live through the experience:

Fortunes were piled up on the pitiless toiling of little chil­dren, and thousands of them never saw manhood or woman­hood. Their young life was used as tillage for the quick growth of wealth . . . these little White slaves were flogged at times as brutally, all things considered, as Legree flogged Uncle Tom. Nearly all England wept about thirteen years later for Uncle Tom, especially the 'classes,' but no fine lady or gentleman wept for the cruelly-used [English] children. [16]

Although white slavery, both in ancient and more modern times, is a provable fact, Africa has the dubious distinction of being the continent from which more slaves have been taken than any other continent. In antiquity, all the major civilizations have taken their share of slaves from Africa. In more modern times Arab slave traders carried on a brisk traffic in black slaves during the days of the Trans-Sahara slave trade. From the ninth century until the advent of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, around the middle of the fourteenth century, Arab Moslem slave traders were responsible for an estimated ten million slaves taken from Sub-Sahara Africa. Most of these slaves were transported to areas around the Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean. [17] Although the Trans-Sahara slave trade did decrease after the commencement of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, it never ceased. In 1840 the ruler of Egypt, a Moslem, carried on a brisk traffic in slaves from Nubia. A virtual army of more than twenty-seven hundred men armed with rifles, lances, and cannons, struck into the interior of Africa, destroying crops and making slaves out of more than a thousand Africans.

In this way, the men carrying the sheba (a wooden instru­ment attached to the neck of one slave then to another], the boys tied together by the wrists, the women and children walk­ing at their liberty, and the old and feeble tottering along lean­ing on their relations, the whole of the captives are driven into Egypt, there to be exposed for sale in the slave-market. Thus negroes and Nubians are distributed over the East, through Persia, Arabia, India, & Co. [18]

[p. 46]

Although this is the first account of the legislature of Massachusetts passing a law for the whipping of Negroes, it should be pointed out that the practice of whipping was not confined to black people. Moore records that as early as 1658, the inhabitants of Massachusetts were imposing whipping and slavery as a punish­ment for white people. Having been caught attending a meeting of Quakers, the family of Lawrence Southwich was ordered to pay a fine. Refusing to pay the fine or work as payment of their fine, the general court took action.

Moore relates:

This they did, after due deliberation, by resolution empow­ering the County Treasurers to sell the said persons to any of the English nation at Virginia or Barbadoes [white slavery] -- in accordance with the law for the sale of poor and delinquent debtors.... Provided Southwick [daughter of Lawrence Southwich] was subsequently in the same year, in the company of several other Quaker ladies, "whipt with tenn stripes," and afterwards "committed to prison to be proceeded with as the law directs."

The indignant Quaker historian, in recounting these things, says, "After such a manner ye have done to the Servants of the Lord, and for speaking to one another,... and for meeting together, ransacking their Estates, breaking open their Land; and when ye have left them nothing, fell them for this which ye call Debt. Search the Records of former Ages, go through the Histories of Generations that are past; read the Monuments of the Antients, and see if ever there were such a thing as this since the Earth was laid, and the Foundations thereof in the Water, and out of the Water... O ye Rulers of Boston, ye Inhabitants of the Massachusetts! What shall I say unto you? Indeed, I am at a stand, I have no Nation with you to compare, I have no people with you to parallel, I am at a loss with you in this point. [59]

[p. 50]

In 1641, the General Court of Massachusetts condemned a while indentured ser­vant to slavery for assaulting his master. Even white children were the objects of the "tender" mercy of the Massachusetts court when, in 1658, two white children were sold into slavery by order of the court. [66]

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[13] Dr. Hilary Beckles, The Americas (Routhledge Press, New Yor, NY: 1994), Vol. 41, No. 2, p. 21.

[14] Rev. Richard Oastler, as cited in Michael A. Hoffman, They Were White and They Were Slaves (Ruffin House Publishers, Dresden, NY: 1991), p. 25.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Charles Shaw, When I Was a Child (Harper and Brothers, New York, NY: 1842), pp. 18, 20, 22

[17] Ibid., 40

[18] W. O.Blake, The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade, Ancient and Modern (1858, Haskell House Publishers Ltd., New York, NY: 1969), p. 106

[59] George H. Moore, Notes on the History of Slavery in Massachusetts (D. Appleton and Company, New York, NY: 1866), p. 34

[66] Moore, pp. 32-33

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