American Thinker: 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.
A female convict, transported from an English prison to Jamestown, Virginia, as an indentured servant, sold for a wife to a male settler for 100 pounds of tobacco. Wood engraving, 19th century.
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. more
Those kids in the photo are in a cotton field, not a tobacco field.
Where do I sign up for reparations?
“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.”
Kinda hard to find a photograph of kids in a tobacco field from those years wouldn’t you think?
“But,but, but, BLACK people only were slaves!” – BLM/SJW/PROG/LIB
CFM990@
According to the Africans, you are already blessed with white privilege and that should be enough of a benefit! Besides you get to work and pay taxes for their black privilege and that is an added white privilege bonus!
My grandfather came here from Sweden in the early 1900’s, but I’m white and I want my reparations, dammit!
I Wonder Does White Privelege, Mean We Prove Superior ? If so is it because We See Well Beyond our Villages, and Even to the Stars !!!
I was born a Poor Black Child.
When my mother was in junior high she picked cotton for $1 / day in order to buy a coat for the winter. They kept their perishable food items in the well.
My dad dropped out of the fifth grade when his father died to join his brothers working as a carpenter to support their mother.
White privilege, my shiny white ass.
Cotton Pic’n Honkeys !
So Obama could have some ancestors who were slaves, it’s just that they’d be white.
Yep, my family on both sides came over in late 1700’s early 1800’s as bond slaves, both Irish and Scottish and from England.
I guess I got me some reparations coming too.
…and one of those Obama phones, and some free health care.
Maybe an EBT card that works at Olive Garden
“Indentured servitude” was the polite term for temporary slavery. Terms of servitude would run 5 to 10 years. If you lived, you were free to leave.
I’m part Scottish and Irish. Heck, throw in my 1/16th Native American and I’M DUE! Where’s my check, dammit!
Excellent article. Summer reading for students, for sure.
Years ago My oldest sister was stationed in England. she is the genealogist in the family.
She found a multitude of my mother’s ancestors were sent to Australia as convicts.
Today there is a sizable population there who can be traced back to the same bunch who immigrated to America, at the same time.
Apparently the designation of being an indentured servant isn’t treated the same as a convict in records.
It stands to reason, with all my relatives deported as convicts, the other ne’er-do-wells who came over to America were low on the social register as well.
Australia has embraced it’s convict history and today it’s a social status to be a convict descendant.
They weren’t slaves. If the government allows you to sign a paper, or they’ll kill you — that is a valid contract, entered into of your own free will. If the government abducts you, and uses a body (no longer your body) — that is the rule of law, not slavery.
Dey filed lawsuits, ‘n shit.
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/05/did-you-know-the-first-legal-slave-owner-in-america-was-black/
Hold on Anonymous, I guess it depends on who’s ox is getting gored.
Anonymous; of all the stupid things I’ve read today that takes the cake.
@Anonymous ~ you mean like forcing you to buy things …. like health care?
wait …. this means Blacks have ‘Culturally Appropriated’ the victimhood of slavery from the White
… sonuvabitch! …….. I demand reparations for appropriations!
“Sign this or die a horrible death in prison” is pretty much slavery. Todays prisons are social clubs compared to what it was 200 years ago.
Take a look at the German “Hessian” slaves that were absconded by Britain and shipped to Ontario to become Hessian enlisted soldiers.
They don’t talk about that shit much either.
Von Huyn Regiment- Hecker, and yes, I’m a descendant of a slave.