Posted on 12/16/2006 6:01:23 PM PST by scouse
by Michael A. Hoffman II ©Copyright 1999. All Rights Reserved
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.
QUITE A LONG READ.....CAN BE READ AT URL GIVEN.
My earliest American ancestors were indentured servants. Where are my reparations?
Will you take a self winding Timex watch?
I have read that the average life span of the white servants who came to the New World, until the new society learned to adapt to the new conditions, was about 7 or 8 years. During the 18th Century, however, after the population became acclimated, the population. began to grow at a phenomenal rate. The populastion boombs--among whites and black alike--was surely one cause for the American revolt. And we were healthier. The average American in the continental army was about 2 inches taller than his British counterpart, who, contrary to what has be said were not city dweller pressed into service but usually countrymen like their American opponents.
Hey, if that's the best offer. I could use 40 acres, but I don't want a damn mule.
I've always been a little irritated that the Brits get a pass on the slave guilt. Many times I hear it from Brits who wish to trash America.
The simple fact is that slavery lasted much longer in the colonies under British rule than it did under American rule.
In my opinion, the Brits only declared the slaves free because they needed a ready made army to fight the revolution.
Accurate, well-researched historical scholarship presents a different picture.
While indentured servitude existed, it was limited to 7 years for volunteers and 10 years for convicts. In no case was it hereditary.
Some of the convicts had it rough in isolated mining camps and large plantations, but the big market demand was for skilled labor. A good carpenter or bricklayer could get away with a 4-year indenture.
Those who found their deal irksome often ran away. Since they were white and spoke English, they were usually never found.
The Brits ended slavery(including indentured slaves) in their far flung empire at least 40 years before us; and, they didn't need a war to do it.
But they let it continue here when they still ruled.
I was under the impression that indentured servitude was (for the most part) voluntary. Generally, slavery was not something that one volunteered for.
Thanks for this article!!!
My family history is that when we first came from Germany in 1732, (Rudolf with his wife, two parents, two of his sisters), the sisters were indentured when they arrived to pay for part of the passage. They apparently wre not heard from again.
This is the first confirmation I've had that this was even possible!
We didn't have a war to do it either, it was a convenient excuse after the war started.
And I hereby further declare all indented servants, Negroes, or others (appertaining to Rebels) free, that are able and willing to bear arms, they joining His Majesty's Troops, as soon as may be, for the more speedily reducing the Colony to a proper sense of their duty, to this Majesty's crown and dignity.
-- Lord Dunmore's Proclamation
" Hey, if that's the best offer. I could use 40 acres, but I don't want a damn mule. "
I will take your damn mule, then I wll have a team for MY 40 acres
btt
If you happened to be born into servitude (parent was the slave), it was hereditary. What else are you going to be allowed to do? White's didn't get an allotment when slavery was "emancipated".
There was also a lot of white slavery/servitude after the civil war. Lots of poor orphans who took the place of freed slaves to have food and shelter. They just happened to be invisible.
The problem was: runaway to where? Certainly not to the frontier, which in 1750 was still a howing wilderness. Nearer the coast land was hard to get. Granted, everywhere better than England where status was more or less fixed for life.
Let's get real here.
Cracker propaganda.
Just sayin'...
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