CITIZENS NEWS

America's buried history of White slavery

By newseditors // 2023-03-07

The best way to forget history is to rewrite it. And in the rewriting, to carefully delete references to any historical events or circumstances we find uncomfortable. Thus, American history books are totally silent on the matter of these white slaves, mostly of European stock with a great number of Irish, but also English and Scottish, who were kidnapped or otherwise forcibly deported to the US as slave labor. In fact, an examination of available documentation indicates that white slavery in the Americas was a much more extensive operation than was black slavery, and the numbers may be severely under-estimated.[1] (Article by Larry Romanoff republished from Unz.com) Several authors have claimed, and I have seen reports that appear credible, that white slaves in America outnumbered the black. In his book, They Were White and They Were Slaves,[2] Michael Hoffman wrote, “Negro slavery was efficiently established in colonial America because Black slaves were governed, organized and controlled by the structures and organization that were first used to enslave and control Whites. Black slaves were late-comers fitted into a system already developed.”

The new nation had a need for cheap labor since the settlers were in the process of exterminating the inhabitants of a large country and taking possession of the lands, but lacked the workers to develop it. These white slaves were more important than the blacks, in both number and economic advantage. One white slave owner, Virginia planter John Pory, stated that white (not black) slaves were the nation’s “principal wealth”. It was due in large part to the overwhelming majority of white slaves that America built its foundations of wealth, since slavery was exclusively a matter of economics and profit. American capitalism was viciously predatory from the days of its birth. One eyewitness to the mass kidnapping of poor Whites estimated that from his personal knowledge alone, at least 10,000 were sold into slavery every year from throughout Great Britain for perhaps two centuries.

American history texts make reference to what is called indentured servitude, as a kind of “benignly paternalistic system whereby colonial immigrants spent a few years working off their passage and went on to better things”. The myth is that overseas passage was expensive and British and European civilians willingly signed indentures requiring them to work for a few years to pay off the cost of their passage, after which time they would be given land and their freedom to pursue a glorious future in the New World. But it was no such thing. There may indeed have been a few such indentured persons fitting this description, but they were a minuscule minority with their conditions not better than that suffered by all slaves. In fact, their indentures most often amounted to a life sentence at hard labor, and with a life that would be preciously short when we look at the hideous mortality rates. There are documented records of white convicts asking to be hanged in Britain rather than sent to the gulag that was America.

It is only the elite establishment in America today who present a disingenuously impassioned propaganda to soften the brutality. The fact is that if this indenture process were really the standard, then thousands of the contracts would have survived and our museums would be full of them. There is no evidence of this. Some Jewish and other sympathetic historians pretend that this system of indentures, a kind of privileged form of bound labor, was representative of the entire experience of White bondage in America. But this definition would apply only to those voluntarily binding themselves to service, and of these there were very few, with the contracted indenture being maintained only as a spurious cover for plain and simple lifetime chattel slavery. Even the Whites referred to themselves as slaves who were not better than cattle, and who were by all accounts degraded chattels on a par with farm animals. There is evidence of many hopeful but illiterate migrants who were duped into signing indentures, ignorant of the actual content of the documents that legally designated them as personal property that could be bought and sold, gambled away, or killed without concern like any other animals. In any event, the indentures provided countless excuses for the slave-owners to extend the period of servitude indefinitely, often by 7 years for the most minor of offenses and 10 or 15 years for others. Few escaped.

The slave traders exerted grand efforts in inducing free whites to sign indentures, supposedly placing themselves in ‘temporary’ slavery with the promise of 50 acres of farmland at the end of the indenture term, but this was nothing more than a despicable racket. The promised lands were entrusted to the slave-owner on the understanding the land titles would later pass to the slaves, but these land rights could be forfeited for almost any reason, including laziness, with the land titles then becoming the master’s rightful property. Many slave-owners purchased large numbers of these so-called indentured persons and quickly concocted excuses to seize all the entrusted lands, occasionally with a gift and a wink to the relevant authorities. Certainly, hundreds of thousands and potentially millions of acres of fertile land were obtained in this manner, with many slave-owners accumulating vast estates and great wealth, which is precisely why this “benignly paternalistic” system was created. Indentured servitude was never more than an immense and cruel fraud.

One author wrote that historians deliberately maintain the fallacy that “wherever White ‘servants’ constituted the majority of servile laborers, they worked in privileged or even luxurious conditions which were forbidden to Blacks. In truth, White Slaves were often restricted to doing the dirty, backbreaking field work while Blacks and even Indians were taken into the plantation mansion houses to work as domestics.” A Major named Mordecai Manuel Noah, who was described as “the most distinguished Jewish layman of his time”, promoted slavery by equating it with freedom. Incredibly, he made pronouncements like this: “There is liberty under the name of slavery. A field Negro has his cottage, his wife, and children, his easy task, his little patch of corn and potatoes, his garden and fruit, which are his revenue and property. The house servant has handsome clothing, his luxurious meals, his admitted privacy, a kind master, and an indulgent and frequently fond mistress.”

David W. Galenson wrote a treatise titled ‘White Slavery entitled White Servitude in Colonial America’, in which he stated, “European men and women could exercise choice both in deciding whether to migrate to the colonies and in choosing possible destinations.” These comments, and so many more like them, are pure fiction, very large lies meant to erase the evil of centuries. White slaves were obtained from the poorest levels of British society who were regarded as expendable by the ruling class. Economists advocated the enslavement of poor Whites because they saw them as the cheapest and most effective way to develop the colonies in the New World while ridding themselves of the surplus poor who were “unprofitable” to England. As American agriculture expanded, landowners demanded the legalisation of the practice of kidnapping poor Whites for slavery. Parliamentary legislation was passed to specifically permit the capture of White children, with this becoming what we can call an “open hunting season” on the poor of Great Britain as well as anyone the British aristocracy happened to despise.

Given the secrecy of the entire matter of white slavery, it isn’t surprising that few are aware that a great many of the slaves deported to the Americas or Australia were not convicts as the record states, but were actually political prisoners and political dissidents, and many more were prisoners of war. England in particular made a point of rounding up every political dissident of substance, imprisoning them, then deporting them as ‘convicts’. It was also a policy of England to cooperate with the slave traders in permitting what were called “slave-hunting gangs” who roamed freely throughout the country and vacuumed up virtually anyone not looking rich, this process viewed with much approval by the British aristocracy. It was Henry Cromwell who ordered all the homeless poor throughout Great Britain to be captured and deported by the slave traders, for being “unprofitable to the Realm”. Laws permitted the seizure of any persons in any part of England who appeared to be vagrant, or who were begging, and to have them conveyed to a British port and shipped to America to be sold. Accordingly, judges ordered the enslavement and shipping to America the total number of “those who made life unpleasant for the British upper class”. Westerners are generally aware that Australia was populated almost entirely with convicts from British prisons, but few are aware that the New World of America was initially populated in the same way from the same sources. The government of England virtually emptied its prisons, transporting most of its convicts, both men and women, to America to be sold to plantation owners and other industrialists, and brothels were forcibly emptied to provide unwilling human breeding stock for American slave-owners.

The historical record tells us that “American slave-owners quickly began breeding the white women for both their own personal pleasure and for greater profit”, but this expression denies a brutal truth. The white women, especially the Irish, were simply stripped naked and repeatedly raped until they were pregnant, then kept in that condition. Children of slaves were themselves slaves, which increased the size of the master’s free workforce. Even if an Irish woman managed to obtained her freedom, her children would remain slaves and she would seldom abandon them, thereby remaining in servitude. Other American masters found a better way to use these white women – who were in many cases girls as young as ten or twelve – to increase their market value by breeding them with African men to produce slaves with a “mulatto” complexion which brought a higher price than their Irish livestock.

This practice of interbreeding White females with African men became so long-term and widespread that legislation was passed forbidding the practice because this production of offspring interfered with the profits of a large Jewish slave trader. The more perverse versions of Judaism also played a part. One of the reasons the African slave trade began was that African slaves were “not tainted with the stain of the hated Catholic theology” that infected the Irish. In part because of this, African slaves became more expensive to purchase and were often treated far better than their White counterparts. Black slaves were indeed cruelly used but not often worked to death as were the Whites who were available for almost nothing and were fully expendable. Upon arrival in America, these White British would be stripped naked, put in chains, and paraded on the auction floor where they were probed, examined and sold like livestock.

The trade in White slaves was a natural one for Jewish merchants in England who imported sugar and tobacco from the American colonies. Whites kidnapped in Britain could be exchanged for these goods in America, permitting the merchant ships to convey cargo in both directions. But the disposability of these humans in the minds of these inhuman merchants, staggers the heart. There are documented reports that one ship dumped more than 1,300 white slaves into the Atlantic Ocean to ensure an adequate food supply for the crew. Other documented reports tell of 20 or 30 children at a time being tossed into the ocean to drown. There was also a provision in many contracts that white slaves were sold in advance to plantation owners who would be responsible for full payment “if the slaves survived beyond the halfway point of the journey”. Apparently ship captains regularly stocked sufficient food for only the first half of their ocean voyage with the intention of starving the slaves for the remainder of the trip. One documented record stated, “Jammed into filthy holds, manacled, starved and abused, they suffered and died during the crossings in gross numbers.” Nobody bothered to record the number of deaths.

Even those fortunate enough to land in the New World would fare little better, suffering a shocking mortality rate. Sixty percent of all white slaves reaching the Americas did not survive their first year. One clergyman visited a plantation outpost and described the scene as “a land of the living dead, a vault full of living corpses”. A policeman referred to them as “vermin-haunted heaps of rags”. He claimed that when he opened a door into one of their hovels, he saw, “Ten, twenty, thirty, who can count them? Men, women, children, for the most part naked, heaped upon the floor like maggots in a cheese factory, a spectral rising, unshrouded, from a grave of rags”. White slaves who rebelled or became disobedient were punished in the most savage and inhuman ways. Owners would hang their slaves by their hands and set their feet on fire. Often, they were burned alive, with their severed heads then placed on pikes in a public marketplace to serve as a warning to other slaves.

Particularly shocking was the abduction and enslavement of a great many white children who were openly seized from orphanages, workhouses and the streets, and shipped to America to labor in factories and plantations. There were countless shipments of these doomed children to America for perhaps 300 years, with very few living to become adults. In one case, when a census was taken in Virginia only seven children were listed as alive from the many thousands kidnapped that year. All the rest were dead, and statistics for other years are equally grim, with sometimes only three or four surviving that year. Orphan children as well as the children of poor parents were targeted for the White slave trade, these latter being described as a “plague” and a “rowdy element”. The London police were instructed to seize any children found on the street and take them to a containment facility where they would await shipment to America. Often, their only crime was being in the street when a constable happened to pass by. The Jewish slave-traders specifically targeted poor families, demanding they surrender their children for sale on threat of being starved into submission by the withdrawal of all relief assistance from any source. They could give up their children to the slave-traders, or be forced to starve and die. This centuries-long inhuman use of “disposable” children was the beginning of the American fondness for child labor which began with the agricultural plantations, but which was soon extended to American factories.

Read more at: Unz.com

society slavery history liberty white slaves