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Post by Deleted on Oct 25, 2021 16:10:52 GMT
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION - IN THE SHADOW OF THE MYTH
CHAPTER ONE - A PLACE FOR THE UNWANTED
Elizabethan adventurers dreamed of an American empire that would give them gold and
glory. Others saw the New World as a dumping ground for England’s unwanted poor.
CHAPTER TWO - THE JUDGE’S DREAM
A highwayman who became Lord Chief Justice planned to colonise America with
criminals. He began to empty England’s gaols and set a precedent.
CHAPTER THREE - THE MERCHANT PRINCE
The mastermind behind the first successful English colony in America was reputedly
Britain’s richest man. He kept a fledgling Virginia going and paved the way for the first
white slaves.
CHAPTER FOUR - CHILDREN OF THE CITY
The Virginia Company wanted youngsters to work in the tobacco fields. The burghers of
London wanted rid of street children. So a bargain was struck and hundreds of children
were transported.
CHAPTER FIVE - THE JAGGED EDGE
The New World was a magnet for the poor. To get there, they had to mortgage their labour
in advance. They were not to know that they had contracted into slavery and might well
die in bondage.
CHAPTER SIX - ‘THEY ARE NOT DOGS’
Virginia was run by planters who pushed through laws that relegated ‘servants’ and
‘apprentices’to the status of livestock. Notionally they had rights but planters were
literally allowed to get away with murder
CHAPTER SEVEN - THE PEOPLE TRADE
In the 1630s, almost 80, 000 people left England for the Chesapeake, New England and
the Caribbean, most of them indentured servants. A ruthless trade in people developed in
which even a small investor could make money.
CHAPTER EIGHT - SPIRITED AWAY
Untold numbers were kidnapped or duped onto America-bound ships and sold as servants.
The ‘spiriting’ business became as insidious and organised as the cocaine racket today.
Even magistrates took a cut of the proceeds.
CHAPTER NINE - FOREIGNERS IN THEIR OWN LAND
Ethnic and religious cleansing in Ireland became a model for Native Americans being
cleared from the Chesapeake. During the Cromwell era, still more were displaced and
Ireland became a major source of slaves for the New World.
CHAPTER TEN - DISSENT IN THE NORTH
Until the 1650s, Scotland fought shy of transporting its unwanted to any English colony.
Then religious and political dissent were made punishable by transportation to the
Americas. Sometimes more died on the way than ever reached the New World.
CHAPTER ELEVEN - THE PLANTER FROM ANGOLA
The idea that Africans were Virginia’s first slaves is revealed as a myth through the story
of one who became a planter himself and went on to own whites as well as blacks.
CHAPTER TWELVE - ‘BARBADOSED’
In the 1640s, Barbados became the boom economy of the New World. The tiny island’s
sugar industry would outperform all its rivals in profits - and in its ruthless use of slave
labour.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN - THE GRANDEES
A planter aristocracy emerged in the Chesapeake. Its members dealt in men, land and
influence, creating dynasties that dominated America for centuries. But stories of brutality
deterred would-be settlers from emigrating.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN - BACON’S REBELLION
The planters’ nightmare of a combined uprising by blacks and whites came true when a
charismatic young aristocrat turned an Indian war into a campaign against his own class,
the English grandees. Swearing never again, the grandees set out to divide the races.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN - QUEEN ANNE’S GOLDEN BOOK
Bogus promises of free land persuaded hordes of Europeans to sell up and leave for
America. They began a nightmare journey that left some so impoverished they sold their
children to pay the fare. But some outfoxed their exploiters.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN - DISUNITY IN THE UNION
Scottish clansmen were sold as servants in the Americas while their chieftains were
allowed a comfortable exile in France - two dif erent fates for Jacobites after 1715.
Merchants made fortunes selling the clansmen in six dif erent colonies.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - LOST AND FOUND
The tide of kidnapping continued under the Hanoverians. In two famous instances, victims
returned, as if from the dead, to denounce their abductors. One claimed to be heir to an
earldom, kidnapped by the man who stole his birthright.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - ‘HIS MAJESTY’S SEVEN-YEAR PASSENGERS’
After 1718, England subsidised the convict trade and America was deluged with British
jailbirds. Paranoia grew, with soaring crime rates and epidemics blamed on convicts.
Only employers were happy: a convict servant was half the price of an African slave.
CHAPTER NINETEEN - THE LAST HURRAH
Having won their liberty in the War of Independence, Americans had no intention of
allowing their country to serve as a penal colony ever again. Britain had other plans and
an astonishing plot was born.
NOTES
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
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Post by Deleted on Oct 25, 2021 16:15:23 GMT
INTRODUCTION
IN THE SHADOW OF THE MYTH
Slavery they can have everywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil.
- Edmund Burke
That man who is the property of another, is his mere chattel, though he continue a man.
- Aristotle, A Treatise on Government
In the summer of 2003, archaeologists excavated a seventeenth- century site outside
Annapolis, Maryland, and discovered the skeleton of a teenage boy. Examination showed
the boy to have died sometime in the 1660s. He was about sixteen years old and had
tuberculosis. His skull showed evidence of a fearful mouth infection, and herniated discs
and other injuries to his back were synonymous with years of hard toil.
The youth was neither African nor Native American. He was northern European,
probably English. His remains were found in what had been the cellar of a seventeenth-
century house, in a hole under a pile of household waste. It was as if the boy was of so
little account that after he died he was thrown out with the rubbish.
Forensic anthropologists believe the youth was probably an indentured servant - the
deceptively mild label commonly used to describe hundreds of thousands of men, women
and children shipped from Britain to America and the Caribbean in the 150 years before
the Boston Tea Party in 1773. Most of these servants paid their passage to the Americas by
selling the rights to their labour for a number of years. Others were forcibly exiled and
sold in the colonies as servants for up to fourteen years. Many were effectively enslaved.
While the Spanish slaughtered in America for gold, the English in America had to plant
for their wealth. Failing to find the expected mineral riches along the eastern seaboard,
they turned to farming, hoping to make gold from tobacco. They needed a compliant,
subservient, preferably free labour force and since the indigenous peoples of America
were difficult to enslave they turned to their own homeland to provide. They imported
Britons deemed to be ‘surplus’ people - the rootless, the unemployed, the criminal and the
dissident - and held them in the Americas in various forms of bondage for anything from
three years to life.
This book tells the story of these victims of empire. They were all supposed to gain their
freedom eventually. For many, it didn’t work out that way. In the early decades, half of
them died in bondage. This book tracks the evolution of the system in which tens of
thousands of whites were held as chattels, marketed like cattle, punished brutally and in
some cases literally worked to death. For decades, this underclass was treated just as
savagely as black slaves and, indeed, toiled, suffered and rebelled alongside them.
Eventually, a racial wedge was thrust between white and black, leaving blacks officially
enslaved and whites apparently upgraded but in reality just as enslaved as they were
before. According to contemporaries, some whites were treated with less humanity than
the blacks working alongside them.
Among the first to be sent were children. Some were dispatched by impoverished
parents seeking a better life for them. But others were forcibly deported. In 1618, the
authorities in London began to sweep up hundreds of troublesome urchins from the slums
and, ignoring protests from the children and their families, shipped them to Virginia.
England’s richest man was behind this mass expulsion. It was presented as an act of
charity: the ‘starving children’ were to be given a new start as apprentices in America. In
fact, they were sold to planters to work in the fields and half of them were dead within a
year. Shipments of children continued from England and then from Ireland for decades.
Many of these migrants were little more than toddlers. In 1661, the wife of a man who
imported four ‘Irish boys’ into Maryland as servants wondered why her husband had not
brought ‘some cradles to have rocked them in’ as they were ‘so little’.
A second group of forced migrants from the mother country were those, such as
vagrants and petty criminals, whom England’s rulers wished to be rid of. The legal ground
was prepared for their relocation by a highwayman turned Lord Chief Justice who argued
for England’s gaols to be emptied in America. Thanks to men like him, 50, 000 to 70, 000
convicts (or maybe more) were transported to Virginia, Maryland, Barbados and
England’s other American possessions before 1776. All manner of others considered
undesirable by the British Crown were also dispatched across the Atlantic to be sold into
servitude. They ranged from beggars to prostitutes, Quakers to Cavaliers.
A third group were the Irish. For centuries, Ireland had been something of a special case
in English colonial history. From the Anglo-Normans onwards, the Irish were
dehumanised, described as savages, so making their murder and displacement appear all
the more justified. The colonisation of Ireland provided experience and drive for
experiments further afield, not to mention large numbers of workers, coerced, transported
or persuaded. Under Oliver Cromwell’s ethnic-cleansing policy in Ireland, unknown
numbers of Catholic men, women and children were forcibly transported to the colonies.
And it did not end with Cromwell; for at least another hundred years, forced transportation
continued as a fact of life in Ireland.
The other unwilling participants in the colonial labour force were the kidnapped.
Astounding numbers are reported to have been snatched from the streets and countryside
by gangs of kidnappers or ‘spirits’ working to satisfy the colonial hunger for labour. Based
at every sizeable port in the British Isles, spirits conned or coerced the unwary onto ships
bound for America. London’s most active kidnap gang discussed their targets at a daily
meeting in St Paul’s Cathedral. They were reportedly paid £2 by planters’ agents for every
athletic-looking young man they brought aboard. According to a contemporary who
campaigned against the black slave trade, kidnappers were snatching an average of around
10, 000 whites a year - doubtless an exaggeration but one that indicates a problem serious
enough to create its own grip on the popular mind.
Along with the vast numbers ejected from Britain and forced to slave in the colonies
were the still greater multitudes who went of their own free will: those who became
indentured servants in the Americas in return for free passage and perhaps the promise of
a plot of land. Between 1620 and 1775, these volunteer servants, some 300, 000,
accounted for two out of three migrants from the British Isles.
Typically, these ‘freewillers’, as they came to be called, were the poor and the hopeful who agreed to sacrifice
their personal liberty for a period of years in the eventual hope of a better life. On arrival,
they found that they had the status of chattels, objects of personal property, with few
effective rights. But there was no going back. They were stuck like the tar on the keels of
the ships that brought them. Some, of course, were bought by humane, even generous,
masters and survived their years of bondage quite happily to emerge from servitude to
build a prosperous future. But some of the most abused servants were from among the
free-willers.
It invites uproar to describe as slaves any of these hapless whites who were abused,
beaten and sometimes killed by their masters or their masters’ overseers. To do so is
thought to detract from the enormity of black suffering after racial slavery developed.
However, black slavery emerged out of white servitude and was based upon it. As the
African-American writer Lerone Bennett Jr has observed:
When someone removes the cataracts of whiteness from our eyes, and when we look
with unclouded vision on the bloody shadows of the American past, we will
recognize for the first time that the Afro-American, who was so often second in
freedom, was also second in slavery.
Of course, black slavery had hideous aspects that whites did not experience, but they
suffered horrors in common, many of which were first endured by whites. In crude
economic terms, indentured servants sold their labour for a set period of time; in reality
they sold themselves. They discovered that they were placed under the power of masters
who had more or less total control over their destiny.
The indentured-servant system evolved into slavery because of the economic goals of
early colonists: it was designed not so much to help would-be migrants get to America and
the Caribbean as to provide a cheap and compliant workforce for the cash-crop industry.
Once this was established, to keep the workforce in check it became necessary to create
legal sanctions that included violence and physical restraint. This is what led to slavery:
first for whites, then for blacks.
It has been argued that white servants could not have been truly enslaved because there
was generally a time limit to their enforced labour, whereas black slavery was for life.
However, slavery is not defined by time but by the experience of its subject. To be the
chattel of another, to be required by law to give absolute obedience in everything and to be
subject to whippings, brandings and chaining for any show of defiance, to be these things,
as were many whites, was to be enslaved. Daniel Defoe, writing in the early 1700s,
described indentured servants as ‘more properly called slaves’. Taking his cue, we should
call a slave a slave.
How many of those whites who migrated from Britain were subject to the abuses we
associate with slavery - 100,000, 200,000, 300,000? It is impossible to know. No one did
compile, nor could they have compiled, such statistics. All we can be sure of is that the
numbers were considerable. Time and again, the evidence shows this to be the case. Too
many white servants ran from their masters, too many instances of ill treatment surfaced,
and there were too many damaging admissions throughout the years of British rule for
white slavery to be a rarity or a localised aberration that was quickly corrected. In 1663,
about the time the wretched sixteen year old buried in that Annapolis cellar breathed his
last, the Virginia Assembly warned that ‘the barbarous usage of some servants by cruel
masters’ was giving the colony such a bad name that immigrants would stop coming
voluntarily. As the cases in this book confirm, that barbarous usage was widespread and
prolonged on the American mainland and in Britain’s Caribbean colonies.
Throughout the colonial period, those who were sold into servitude or who sold
themselves as servants formed the majority of immigrants, but they have often had short
shrift from historians. In the words of the social historian Gary B. Nash, ‘Most depictions
of early America as a garden of opportunity airbrush indentured servants out of the picture
while focusing on the minority who arrived free.’
A creation myth has flourished in
which early American settlers are portrayed as free men and women who created a
democratic and egalitarian model society more or less from scratch.
The truth could not be more different. The freedoms of modern American society
evolved only gradually from enforced labour and penal servitude. Many of those
instrumental in planning the earliest colonies were, like the reputedly richest man in
Elizabethan England, Sir Thomas Smythe, ruthless and oblivious to the misery they
caused. They were nonetheless often men of vision and extraordinary resilience. The tale
of the white slave trade unfolds through their exuberant lives no less than through those
who were their victims. European slavery in early America is contained within two
centuries and between three continents: from the tiny band of Englishmen who established
Jamestown in 1607, to the slave ports of Africa and finally to Captain Cook feeling his
way along the shores of what was to become New South Wales in 1770.
The 1607 expedition laid the foundations for English settlement in America and when
American independence closed the mainland colonies to the dumping of convicts and
undesirables, Australia provided a new penal colony. In between, the stream of humanity
flowed in a vast current across the Atlantic but has since been diverted from its place in
the histories of the British Empire and of the United States.
As soon as the new nation of America was born, it became commonplace to deny the
central part played in its establishment by key sections of founding fathers, mothers, sons
and daughters.
Those who chose to ignore the place of both the villain and the ill- used in this new
country’s history included contemporary apologists whose motivation was to create both
social cohesion and status. In Virginia, the Old Dominion, where ideals of freedom
flourished and where America’s aristocracy was rooted, it was unacceptable for jailbirds to
be discovered lurking in the family tree. Just ten years after the Declaration of
Independence, this is what Thomas Jefferson wrote about convicts:
The malefactors sent to America were not sufficient in number to merit enumeration
as one class out of three which peopled America … I do not think the whole number
sent would amount to two thousand, and being principally men, eaten up with
disease, they married seldom and propagated little. I do not suppose that themselves
and their descendants are at present four thousand, which is little more than onethousandth part of the whole inhabitants.
In fact, at the time of the Declaration nearly 1,000 convicts a year were being dumped
in America, mostly in Maryland and Virginia. A convict dealer intimated that in the 1700s
more than 30,000 convicts had been sold in Maryland alone.
The numbers of convicts and their descendants in the period when Jefferson was writing
were not, as he would have it, ‘one- thousandth part of the whole inhabitants’ but in reality
the much more significant one in a hundred. However, there continued to be those who
denied that large-scale dumping of the vicious, the irredeemable, the wicked and the plain
unlucky had gone on in anything like either the numbers or over the period that we know
occurred. Sydney George Fisher, writing in 1898, claimed that Virginia had avoided
‘convicts, paupers and inferior nationalities’.
The very different reality has been exposed
by the pioneering work of leading American historians such as Edmund S. Morgan, David
W. Galenson and A. Roger Ekirch. Nevertheless, right up to the present day, many
Americans have difficulty reconciling themselves to the true nature of their antecedents.
The truth is that in Virginia and Maryland a significant proportion of the early settlers was
composed of convicts. The fact that wealth and nobility could grow from such material is
testimony not to the importance of bloodstock but to social evolution.
This book features some of the great names of American history who were the masters
of white slaves as well as black. It tracks the ruthless kingpins of the white servant trade
who bought and sold their human wares, sometimes disguising convicts as regular
servants, sometimes hawking servants from settlement to settlement. And it tells the
stories of those they sold and of those who sold themselves. Some refused to be victims
and fought the system by running away, by rebellion and even by murder. Many others
succumbed to disease or exploitation or to attack from Native Americans. Some thrived
and laid down roots.
The book has mainly been designed along simple chronological lines; here and there,
however, the reader will discover occasional digressions or side-steps to take a closer look
at particular fields of inquiry.
We have chosen to limit what would otherwise be quite a lengthy work to describing
what occurred in a small but important group of geographic areas. We concentrate on
Virginia and Maryland, for example, where the indentured-servant system was created and
where its poisonous bloom flowered most widely. The very many colonies in the
Caribbean are largely ignored in favour of dealing in detail with Barbados, so providing a
clear account of one important colony, unencumbered by multitudes of regional variations.
We hope that this approach also helps to clarify the defining difference between the
enterprise carried out on the sugar islands and the colonisation of the American mainland.
Broadly, the primary purpose of the settlements on Caribbean islands was to make money.
There was little thought of Empire. This role fell to the enterprises in America, where
profit and empire building went hand in hand. In the great open spaces of America,
indentured servants were theoretically expected to survive bondage and prosper in a
growing society; on the island of Barbados, freed workers became an embarrassment.
The Oxford Dictionary defines as slaves persons who are the legal property of another
or others and bound to absolute obedience: in short, ‘human chattels’. By this definition
white servants were the first slaves in America and it is upon their labour, and later that of
African-American slaves, that the nation was initially built. Today, tens of millions of
white Americans are descended from such chattels. It is a shame that few in America
claim these largely forgotten men and women of the early frontier as their own.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 25, 2021 16:37:23 GMT
The Anglo-Norman expeditions into Ireland marked the start of a sorry and drawn-out history of enmity and struggle. The Irish would be cut off from their own laws and at the same time not allowed recourse to the laws of the colonisers. A group of Irish noblemen complained to the Pope that under the English laws no Englishman could be punished for killing an Irishman. The Irish were made into second-class citizens without the rights accorded to others. The ‘compelling parallels’ between this and in the way in which the slave-labour system in America accorded rights to some but not to others has been highlighted by Theodore Allen in The Invention of the White Race.
As Allen relates, under Anglo-American slavery, ‘the rape of a female slave was not a crime, but a mere trespass on the master’s property’. It is interesting to compare this with Ireland in 1278, when two Anglo-Normans were brought into court and charged with raping one Margaret O’Rorke. They were found not guilty because ‘the said Margaret is an Irishwoman’. We can see that from the twelfth until the sixteenth century, Ireland was a laboratory in which social ideas and legal conventions would be forged and which found their echo in the labour systems of the American colonies.
A law enacted in Virginia in 1723 provided that ‘manslaughter of a [black] slave is not punishable’. Under Anglo-Norman law in Ireland, for someone standing accused of manslaughter to be acquitted he had only to show that the slain victim was Irish. Anglo-Norman priests granted absolution on the grounds that it was ‘no more sin to kill an Irishman than a dog or any other brute’.
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A nightmare vision was conjured up of armed blacks and whites rising in unity against the planters. The support Bacon inspired brought home to the elite their basic vulnerability. They had no sizeable yeoman class as a barrier to servile revolt. European colonies in parts of the Caribbean had created a yeoman class by encouraging planters to parent children with slave or servant women. The Chesapeake colonies had not done this; in fact, they had positively discouraged inter-racial coupling. The task facing Virginia’s rulers now was to fashion a class that gave them ‘as many Virginians with a stake in suppressing servile insurrection as there were in fomenting it’. 20 They played the race card The status of the European servile class was upgraded and a sense of racial superiority instilled. Meanwhile, the process of degrading non-whites was accelerated. Law after law deprived Africans and Native Americans of rights, while bolstering the legal position of European servants. In the space of twenty years, nonwhites lost their judicial rights, property rights, electoral rights and family rights. They even lost the right to be freed if their master wanted to free them. In parallel, whites gained rights and privileges. Masters were forbidden from whipping their white servants ‘naked without an order from a justice’. They were told to provide real freedom dues: corn, money, a gun, clothing and fifty acres of land. And the notion of a ‘white race’ was promoted. Hitherto, the English had never applied colour to distinguish race. Now white servants, whose daily condition was little different from that of Africans, were taught that they belonged to a superior people. On the big plantations, white and black began to be given different clothing. Living quarters were segregated. Sometimes the races ate separately. But whites remained chattels and when they ran away they were pursued as ferociously as ever. White slavery went on. Not only that, as the eighteenth century advanced, a vast new pool of potential white slaves materialised as the peoples of central Europe began to share the American dream. But they wouldn’t prove easy to handle.
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(...) the Africans appear to have been treated as indentured servants, no different from the English servants. Racism may well have existed, but in the rush to profit, the colour of a field labourer was a secondary consideration. Having enough hands to hoe the next 10,000 tobacco hills was paramount. Black mixed with white in the tobacco labour gang and would continue do so into the next century in some places. As the African-American writer Lerone Bennett Jr puts it: Not only in Virginia but also in New England and New York, the first Blacks were integrated into a forced labor system that had little or nothing to do with skin color. That came later. But in the interim, a fateful 40-year period of primary importance in the history of America, Black men and women worked side by side with the first generation of Whites, cultivating tobacco, clearing the land, and building roads and houses.
Between the servants themselves, there appears to have been little if any racism. According to the African-American historian Audrey Smedley: ‘Early references to blacks reveal little clear evidence of general or widespread social antipathy on account of their colour.’ Professor Smedley writes: ‘Records show a fairly high incidence of co-operation among black and white servants and unified resistance to harsh masters.’ The earlier historian of servitude Edmund S. Morgan found hints ‘that the two despised groups initially saw each other as sharing the same predicament’.
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