The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America

Discussion in 'History & Past Politicians' started by Wehrwolfen, Jul 28, 2017.

  1. Wehrwolfen

    Wehrwolfen Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    July 28, 2017
    The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America


    By Janet Levy
    28 July 2017

    Slavery in America, typically associated with blacks from Africa, was an enterprise that began with the shipping of more than 300,000 white Britons to the colonies. This little known history is fascinatingly recounted in White Cargo (New York University Press, 2007). Drawing on letters, diaries, ship manifests, court documents, and government archives, authors Don Jordan and Michael Walsh detail how thousands of whites endured the hardships of tobacco farming and lived and died in bondage in the New World.

    Following the cultivation in 1613 of an acceptable tobacco crop in Virginia, the need for labor accelerated. Slavery was viewed as the cheapest and most expedient way of providing the necessary work force. Due to harsh working conditions, beatings, starvation, and disease, survival rates for slaves rarely exceeded two years. Thus, the high level of demand was sustained by a continuous flow of white slaves from England, Ireland, and Scotland from 1618 to 1775, who were imported to serve America's colonial masters. Black slaves received better treatment than Europeans on plantations, as they were viewed as valuable, lifelong property rather than indentured servants with a specific term of service.

    These indentured servants represented the next wave of laborers. They were promised land after a period of servitude, but most worked unpaid for up to15 years with few ever owning any land. Mortality rates were high. Of the 1,200 who arrived in 1619, more than two thirds perished in the first year from disease, working to death, or Indian raid killings. In Maryland, out of 5,000 indentured servants who entered the colony between 1670 and 1680, 1,250 died in bondage, 1,300 gained their right to freedom, and only 241 ever became landowners.

    [**Snip**]

    Several uprisings in the American colonies awakened slave owners to problems, exposing their vulnerability within the caste-like master-servant social system they had created. In 1676, Nathaniel Bacon, an aristocrat from England who became a Virginia colonist, instigated an insurrection, referred to as Bacon's Rebellion, that changed the course of white slavery.


    Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/arti...ns_white_slaves_in_america.html#ixzz4oAVygMJg

    ______
    Ms. Levy has written an accurate account of British cruelty and their use of slaves to occupy and colonize the Americas in the late 16th and 17th Centuries. Please note that the same methods were used to colonize Australia and New Zealand.
    "The Roots of Slavery -- The term "Slave" has its origins in the word "Slav". Slavs, inhabited a large part of Eastern Europe, were taken as slaves by the Muslims during the ninth century AD." Just one of many of the contributions of the Religion of Peace.
    American blacks believe they're the only ones ever enslaved. That is the only history taught today in school. It's called victimization and the Progressive Socialist Left uses it well. The Progressive Socialist Left conveniently omits that every culture since the beginning of man had slavery including modern day slavery. It's the old "keep them ignorant and on the plantation" mentality. It appears that white slave ancestors have had the capability that eludes blacks, they can get over it. Move on.
    Most forget or never have been made to know that many Americans like Ben Franklin ware indentured servants with a nine year or longer contracts. Blacks and Progressive Socialist non-blacks like to remind us that the Founding Fathers were old white slave owners. I consider Ben Franklin as one of the most important Founding Father.
    Please note, Britain stopped slavery for economic reasons it was never due to moral objections, and they had James Watt.
     
    Last edited: Jul 28, 2017
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  2. Diuretic

    Diuretic Well-Known Member

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    Thankfully progressives hammered those in power so that we got away from this. And in the future people will look at us and describe us in the same terms - barbaric, exploitative, racist, inhuman. Or we could go backwards I suppose, if the reactionaries had their way then we would head back to those dark times.
     
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  3. Wehrwolfen

    Wehrwolfen Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    ______
    Those dark times you write about are written in the histories from the dawn of civilization.
     
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  4. ThirdTerm

    ThirdTerm Well-Known Member

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    White slaves from Britain were formally called indentured servants who were eventually freed after around 6 years of bondage. It was like a business contract known as an indenture or a covenant signed in exchange for transportation to America, which was prohibitively expensive at the time for ordinary Britons. Former indentured servants became landowners or successful businessmen after being freed from their contracts.
     
    Last edited: Jul 29, 2017
  5. Wehrwolfen

    Wehrwolfen Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Obviously you did not read the complete essay, if you had you would have read the following:

    "These white slaves in the New World consisted of street children plucked from London's back alleys, prostitutes, and impoverished migrants searching for a brighter future and willing to sign up for indentured servitude. Convicts were also persuaded to avoid lengthy sentences and executions on their home soil by enslavement in the British colonies. The much maligned Irish, viewed as savages worthy of ethnic cleansing and despised for their rejection of Protestantism, also made up a portion of America's first slave population, as did Quakers, Cavaliers, Puritans, Jesuits, and others."

    "Around 1618 at the start of their colonial slave trade, the English began by seizing and shipping to Virginia impoverished children, even toddlers, from London slums. Some impoverished parents sought a better life for their offspring and agreed to send them, but most often, the children were sent despite their own protests and those of their families. At the time, the London authorities represented their actions as an act of charity, a chance for a poor youth to apprentice in America, learn a trade, and avoid starvation at home. Tragically, once these unfortunate youngsters arrived, 50% of them were dead within a year after being sold to farmers to work the fields."

     
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  6. Wehrwolfen

    Wehrwolfen Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Deleted ---- Duplicate.
     
    Last edited: Jul 29, 2017
  7. ThirdTerm

    ThirdTerm Well-Known Member

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    Don Jordan, the main author of the book, is a documentary filmmaker and the co-author was a TV presenter. The authors have a distorted view on indentured servants, arguing that slavery applies to any person who is bought and sold, chained and abused. Neither of them are learned historians but the book is deceptively published by NYU Press. In a way, indentured servitude offered social mobility for Britain's lower classes as their contract may have included at least 25 acres of land.

     
    Last edited: Jul 29, 2017
  8. Wehrwolfen

    Wehrwolfen Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Of course Film makers and authors never ever slant history.
    "Before the Civil War, slaves and indentured servants were considered personal property, and they or their descendants could be sold or inherited like any other personality. Like other property, human chattel was governed largely by laws of individual states.
    Around the middle of the seventeenth century, colonial laws began to reflect differences between indentured servants and slaves. More important, the laws began to differentiate between races: the association of “servitude for natural life” with people of African descent became common".
    https://memory.loc.gov/ammem/awhhtml/awlaw3/slavery.html
     
  9. reallybigjohnson

    reallybigjohnson Banned

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    I love how people constantly bemoan how awful slavery was in the West yet it pales in comparison to slavery in the East where millions was the standard unit of measurement. Europeans were regarded as the ones that modernized slavery to new levels but they were amateurs compared to South East Asia.
     
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  10. DennisTate

    DennisTate Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Here is an article that verifies this basic idea.

    https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-irish-slave-trade-the-forgotten-white-slaves/31076

    The Irish Slave Trade – The Forgotten “White” Slaves
    The Slaves That Time Forgot
    By John Martin

    [/quote]
     
    Last edited: May 5, 2018
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  11. Wehrwolfen

    Wehrwolfen Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    ~~~~
    Only if they lived long enough to survive the conditions and harsh work they were forced to do.
     

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