Thanks to reader Chicken@hit

I would like a check in a substantially greater amount for my English, Welsh and Irish ancestors who were subjected to similar indignities.

by

Paul L. Williams, Ph.D.

Snip

African Americans were not brought here in chains by the Pilgrims and the Puritans. Nor did they number among the Spanish at St. Augustine, the Dutch in New Amsterdam, or the French at Parris Island.

The first black slaves arrived in America in the early years of the 17th Century.

At the time of the ratification of the Constitution in 1788, there were less than 50,000 slaves in America – – and the vast majority of them were white.

This fact has been verified by forensic evidence from archaeological digs and historical documents uncovered by contemporary scholars, including Don Jordan and Michael Walsh in 'White Cargo' (New York University Press: 2009).

The white slaves (not indentured) who began to arrive here in 1618, included hundreds upon hundreds of children – – teen waifs and strays – – who had been rounded up from streets of London (and Wales) to serve wealthy farmers in Virginia.

Other slaves came from the ranks of the homeless and the poor, whom King James I held responsible for spreading the plague, and from England’s swelling prison population.

The scheme was supported by James I, who believed the homeless and itinerant of London were spreading plague.

Of the first 300 white slaves to land in Virginia, only 12 managed to survive four years. The others died of ill-treatment, disease, lack of food, attacks by native Americans or overwork.

Contemporary records show that one child victim, Elizabeth Abbott, was beaten to death when her master ordered her to be given 500 lashes for attempting to run away.

At least 470,000 white men, women, and children from England and Ireland were shipped to the colonies to be sold as slaves on the auction block during the 170 years of British rule. The slaves were routinely bred to make more white slaves and also later bred with black slaves to make Mulatto sex slaves.

White slaves transported to the colonies suffered a staggering loss of life in the 16th, 17th and 18th century. During the voyage to America, the white slaves were kept below deck for the entire nine to twelve week journey. They were 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, including cholera and dysentery.

Ships carrying white slaves to America often lost half their slaves to death. According to historian Sharon V. Salinger of the University of California, Riverside.

Ms. Salinger affirms a death rate of ten to twenty percent over the entire 18th century for black slaves on board ships en route to America compared with a death rate of 25% for white slaves.

Foster R. Dulles in Labor in America writes that 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 guinea men,’ 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.”

In the past, white slavery was acknowledged as having existed in America only as “indentured servitude.” Now we know the hidden truth that they were America's first slaves and it happened over hundreds of years.

Indentured servants were, for the most part, convicts, who served a term of four to seven years laboring on the farms, plantations, and estates in Virginia, Georgia, Maryland, and the Carolina's in exchange for their freedom. But they represented only a small fraction of the hundreds of thousands of whites who remained slaves for life. Such slavery was hereditary: children of the white slaves also became chattel without hope of gaining freedom. Ever!

In George Sandy’s laws for Virginia, Whites were enslaved “forever.” The service of Whites bound to Berkeley’s Hundred was deemed “perpetual.”

Throughout the colonial period, white slaves remained the main labour force on the Virginia and Maryland plantations, outnumbering Africans by as many as four to one.

Benjamin Franklin suggested the American authorities should send rattlesnakes back to England in return for such unwelcome imports.

Whites remained slaves until the Emancipation Proclamation. 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 ship worker. “Oh,” said the worker, “the blacks are worth too much to be risked here; if the Paddies are knocked overboard or get their backs broke, nobody loses anything.”