FINAL CONFLICT Special Feature
14 March
2004 === Issue 27>>> www.politicalsoldier.net <<<
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The
Forgotten Slaves: Whites in Servitude in Early America and Industrial
Britain
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The
Forgotten Slaves: Whites in Servitude in Early America and Industrial
Britain
by Michael A. Hoffman II ©Copyright 1999. All Rights ReservedThe Campaign
for Radical Truth in History http://www.hoffman-info.com
P.O. Box 849, Coeur
d'Alene, Idaho 83816
The following article is a brief synopsis of the
extensive research found in Michael A. Hoffman II's ground-breaking history
book, "They Were White and They Were Slaves," which may be ordered from
http://www.politicalsoldier.net/cgi-bin/cart/index.cgi 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.
Foster R. Dulles writing in Labor in America: A History, states
that whether convicts, children 'spirited' from the countryside or political
prisoners, 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 guineamen,' 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."
Marcus Jernegan describes the greed of the shipmasters which led
to horrendous loss of life for White slaves transported to America:
"The
voyage over often repeated the horrors of the famous 'middle passage' of slavery
fame. An average cargo was three hundred, but the shipmaster, for greater
profit, would sometimes crowd as many as six hundred into a small vessel...The
mortality under such circumstances was tremendous, sometimes more than
half...Mittelberger (an eyewitness) says he saw thirty-two children thrown into
the ocean during one voyage."
"The mercantile firms, as importers of
(White) servants, were not too careful about their treatment, as the more
important purpose of the transaction was to get ships over to South Carolina
which could carry local produce back to Europe. Consequently the Irish--as well
as others--suffered greatly...
"It was almost as if the British merchants
had redirected their vessels from the African coast to the Irish coast, with the
white servants coming over in much the same fashion as the African slaves."
(Warren B. Smith, White Servitude in Colonial South Carolina).
A study of
the middle passage of White slaves was included in a Parliamentary Petition of
1659. It reported that White slaves were locked below deck for two weeks while
the slaveship was still in port. Once under way, they were "all the way locked
up under decks...amongst horses." They were chained from their legs to their
necks.
Those academics who insist that slavery is an exclusively Black
racial condition forget or deliberately omit the fact that the word slave
originally was a reference to Whites of East European origin -
"Slavs."
Moreover, in the 18th century in Britain and America, the
Industrial Revolution spawned the factory system whose first laborers were
miserably oppressed White children as young as six years of age. They were
locked in the factories for sixteen hours a day and mangled by the primitive
machinery. Hands and arms were regularly ripped to pieces. Little girls often
had their hair caught in the machinery and were scalped from their foreheads to
the back of their necks.
White Children wounded and crippled in the
factories were turned out without compensation of any kind and left to die of
their injuries. Children late to work or who fell asleep were beaten with iron
bars. Lest we imagine these horrors were limited to only the early years of the
Industrial Revolution, eight and ten year old White children throughout America
were hard at work in miserable factories and mines as late as
1920.
Because of the rank prostitution, stupidity and cowardice of
America's teachers and educational system, White youth are taught that Black
slaves, Mexican peons and Chinese coolies built this country while the vast
majority of the Whites lorded it over them with a lash in one hand and a mint
julep in the other.
The documentary record tells a very different story,
however. When White Congressman David Wilmot authored the Wilmot Proviso to keep
Black slaves out of the American West he did so, he said, to preserve that vast
expanse of territory for "the sons of toil, my own race and color."
This
is precisely what most White people in America were, "sons of toil," performing
backbreaking labor such as few of us today can envision. They had no
paternalistic welfare system; no Freedman's Bureau to coo sweet platitudes to
them; no army of bleeding hearts to worry over their hardships. These Whites
were the expendable frontline soldiers in the expansion of the American
frontier. They won the country, felled the trees, cleared and planted the
land.
The wealthy, educated White elite in America are the sick heirs of
what Charles Dickens in Bleak House termed "telescopic philanthropy"--the
concern for the condition of distant peoples while the plight of kindred in
one's own backyard are ignored.
Today much of what we see on "Turner
Television" and Pat Robertson's misnamed "Family Channel," are TV films
depicting Blacks in chains, Blacks being whipped, Blacks oppressed. Nowhere can
we find a cinematic chronicle of the Whites who were beaten and killed in White
slavery. Four-fifths of the White slaves sent to Britain's sugar colonies in the
West Indies did not survive their first year.
Soldiers in the American
Revolution and sailors impressed into the American navy received upwards of two
hundred whiplashes for minor infractions. But no TV show lifts the shirt of
these White yeoman to reveal the scars on their backs.
The Establishment
would rather weep over the poor persecuted Negroes, but leave the White working
class "rednecks" and "crackers" (both of these terms of derision were first
applied to White slaves), to live next door to the Blacks.
Little has
changed since the early 1800s when the men of property and station of the
English Parliament outlawed Black slavery throughout the Empire. While this
Parliament was in session to enact this law, ragged five year old White orphan
boys, beaten, starved and whipped, were being forced up the chimneys of the
English parliament, to clean them. Sometimes the chimney masonry collapsed on
these boys. Other times they suffocated to death inside their narrow smoke
channels.
Long after Blacks were free throughout the British Empire, the
British House of Lords refused to abolish chimney-sweeping by White children
under the age of ten. The Lords contended that to do so would interfere with
"property rights." The lives of the White children were not worth a farthing and
were considered no subject for humanitarian concern.
The chronicle of
White slavery in America comprises the dustiest shelf in the darkest corner of
suppressed American history. Should the truth about that epoch ever emerge into
the public consciousness of Americans, the whole basis for the swindle of
"Affirmative action," "minority set-asides" and proposed "Reparations to
African-Americans" will be swept away. The fact is, the White working people of
this country owe no one. They are themselves the descendants, as Congressman
Wilmot so aptly said, of "the sons of toil."
There will only be racial
peace when knowledge of radical historical truths are widespread and both sides
negotiate from positions of strength and not from fantasies of White working
class guilt and the uniqueness of Black suffering.
Let it be said, in
many cases Blacks in slavery had it better than poor Whites in the antebellum
South. This is why there was such strong resistance to the Confederacy in the
poverty-stricken areas of the mountain south, such as Winston County in Alabama
and the Beech mountains of North Carolina. Those poor Whites could not imagine
why any White laborer would want to die for the slave-owning plutocracy that
more often than not, gave better care and attention to their Black servants than
they did to the free white labor they scorned as "trash."
To this day,
the White ruling class denigrates the White poor and patronizes
Blacks.
If this seems admirable from the pathological viewpoint of
Marxism or cosmopolitan liberalism, the Black and Third World "beneficiaries" of
White ruling class "esteem" ought to consider what sort of "friends" they
actually have.
The Bible declares that the man who does not take care of
his own family is "worse than an infidel." This also applies to one's racial
kindred. The man who neglects his own children to care for yours has true love
for neither.
White, self-hating liberals and greed-head conservatives who
claim to care for the "civil rights" of Black and Third World people, discard
the working class of their own people on the garbage heap of history. When they
are finished with their own they shall surely turn on others.
Those who
care for their own kind first are not practicing "hate" but kindness, which is
the very root of the word.
http://www.hoffman-info.com/forgottenslaves.html
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