The Irish Slave Trade – The Forgotten “White” Slaves The Slaves That Time Forgot http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-irish-slave-trade-the-forgotten-white-slaves/31076 They came as slaves; vast human cargo transported on tall British ships bound for the Americas. They were shipped by the hundreds of thousands and included men, women, and even the youngest of children. Whenever they rebelled or even disobeyed an order, they were punished in the harshest ways. Slave owners would hang their human property by their hands and set their hands or feet on fire as one form of punishment. They were burned alive and had their heads placed on pikes in the marketplace as a warning to other captives. We don’t really need to go through all of the gory details, do we? We know all too well the atrocities of the African slave trade. But, are we talking about African slavery? King James II and Charles I also led a continued effort to enslave the Irish. Britain’s famed Oliver Cromwell furthered this practice of dehumanizing one’s next door neighbor. The Irish slave trade began when James II sold 30,000 Irish prisoners as slaves to the New World. His Proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies. By the mid 1600s, the Irish were the main slaves sold to Antigua and Montserrat. At that time, 70% of the total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves. Ireland quickly became the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants. The majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white. From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English and another 300,000 were sold as slaves. Ireland’s population fell from about 1,500,000 to 600,000 in one single decade. Families were ripped apart as the British did not allow Irish dads to take their wives and children with them across the Atlantic. This led to a helpless population of homeless women and children. Britain’s solution was to auction them off as well. During the 1650s, over 100,000 Irish children between the ages of 10 and 14 were taken from their parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and New England. In this decade, 52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to Barbados and Virginia. Another 30,000 Irish men and women were also transported and sold to the highest bidder. In 1656, Cromwell ordered that 2000 Irish children be taken to Jamaica and sold as slaves to English settlers. Many people today will avoid calling the Irish slaves what they truly were: Slaves. They’ll come up with terms like “Indentured Servants” to describe what occurred to the Irish. However, in most cases from the 17th and 18th centuries, Irish slaves were nothing more than human cattle. As an example, the African slave trade was just beginning during this same period. It is well recorded that African slaves, not tainted with the stain of the hated Catholic theology and more expensive to purchase, were often treated far better than their Irish counterparts. African slaves were very expensive during the late 1600s (50 Sterling). Irish slaves came cheap (no more than 5 Sterling). If a planter whipped or branded or beat an Irish slave to death, it was never a crime. A death was a monetary setback, but far cheaper than killing a more expensive African. The English masters quickly began breeding the Irish women for both their own personal pleasure and for greater profit. Children of slaves were themselves slaves, which increased the size of the master’s free workforce. Even if an Irish woman somehow obtained her freedom, her kids would remain slaves of her master. Thus, Irish moms, even with this new found emancipation, would seldom abandon their kids and would remain in servitude. In time, the English thought of a better way to use these women (in many cases, girls as young as 12) to increase their market share: The settlers began to breed Irish women and girls with African men to produce slaves with a distinct complexion. These new “mulatto” slaves brought a higher price than Irish livestock and, likewise, enabled the settlers to save money rather than purchase new African slaves. This practice of interbreeding Irish females with African men went on for several decades and was so widespread that, in 1681, legislation was passed “forbidding the practice of mating Irish slave women to African slave men for the purpose of producing slaves for sale.” In short, it was stopped only because it interfered with the profits of a large slave transport company. England continued to ship tens of thousands of Irish slaves for more than a century. Records state that, after the 1798 Irish Rebellion, thousands of Irish slaves were sold to both America and Australia. There were horrible abuses of both African and Irish captives. One British ship even dumped 1,302 slaves into the Atlantic Ocean so that the crew would have plenty of food to eat. There is little question that the Irish experienced the horrors of slavery as much (if not more in the 17th Century) as the Africans did. There is, also, very little question that those brown, tanned faces you witness in your travels to the West Indies are very likely a combination of African and Irish ancestry. In 1839, Britain finally decided on it’s own to end it’s participation in Satan’s highway to hell and stopped transporting slaves. While their decision did not stop pirates from doing what they desired, the new law slowly concluded THIS chapter of nightmarish Irish misery. But, if anyone, black or white, believes that slavery was only an African experience, then they’ve got it completely wrong. Irish slavery is a subject worth remembering, not erasing from our memories. But, where are our public (and PRIVATE) schools???? Where are the history books? Why is it so seldom discussed? Do the memories of hundreds of thousands of Irish victims merit more than a mention from an unknown writer? Or is their story to be one that their English pirates intended: To (unlike the African book) have the Irish story utterly and completely disappear as if it never happened. None of the Irish victims ever made it back to their homeland to describe their ordeal. These are the lost slaves; the ones that time and biased history books conveniently forgot.
Interesting. Makes you wonder how going through that experience allowed so many to be racist or did the experience create a lot of sympathy.
Thanks BB, for enlightening us by posting these atrocities that I never even knew about. Why don't we know about this? Why are we just learning these horrific truths? Slavery on any continent, put upon any people, at any time in history, is deplorable, inhumane, abhorrent! This part is so bizarre...
I read about White slaves from the books by J.A.Rogers. There was a scene from the flick Band of Angels where Ava Gardner was at a slave auction along with the slaves.
Check out the mini-series called Human Trafficking with Mira Sorvino, Donald Sutherland and Robert Carlyle. This mini-series was interesting because it shows the tricks used in trapping unsuspecting people into this ordeal. The logic is this, drugs and firearms can be sold only once in a while, but a human being can be sold over and over again. This practice continues to this day. It is available on DVD
You think this is bad, I got something more interesting and fucked up that happened in America and Europe. Stay tuned........
Sounds interesting. I know in Haiti, they have slaves. The Haitians do, that is. Saw a 20/20 piece on the dirty open secret. They don't find it wrong, either. Was so sad, the pain and depression the young Haitian slaves were expressing when interviewed. :smt085
Oh wow, don't know what could top rape and slavery... But thanks for the insights..a lot is kept out of the mainstream, so we remain clueless. This is why the uncensored Net is so valuable (though that is about to change, unfortunately.)
History already answered your question...the irish did not sympathize with the African slaves in the US. Most AA's have Irish slavenames. An Irish immigrant sent fire to a Black orphanage his very first day in the Country.
Most of these White slaves were indentured servants who were allowed to earn their freedom. They never were a permanent slave class. This is a mis-reading of history IMO. Indentured servitude for practical purposes wasn't much different than being a slave, except that it was temporary and many indentured servants to the New World were given their own land in the colonies once the terms of their work contracts were completed. You'll be hard pressed to find in the historical record of the American colonies plantations stocked with dozens of Irish slave workers.
Very interesting reading..kinda makes you wonder if they got caught and how they ended up.. THE ADS ARE IN OLD ENGLISH AND FOR WHATEVER REASON THEY USE AN "F" LOOKING SYMBOL for "S"... SO IF YOU ENCOUNTER A WORD THAT MAKES NO SENSE JUST REPLACE THE F WITH S..EXAMPLE: FUBFCRIBER = SUBSCRIBER I know..don't ask
My Mom was always talking about how the Irish were viewed as the "low man on the totem pole" (for lack of a better phrase) in relation to the different European ethnicities. This is no surprise to me. The Irish have been looked down upon for a very long time in this country.
True story. Interesting how an oppressed group like that can be amongst the most racist in this country. Its like humans are ok with suffering as long as they aren't the ones suffering
HOW THE IRISH BECAME WHITE page 87 The ordinary Irish were undoubtedly reluctant to abandon the community ties they had established in the Eastern cities, which helped them survive in a hostile Protestant world. However, the most important reason so few of them them took up farming was likely to have been that they simply could not afford it. Free Soil did not imply free soi1. Taking into account the costs of land purchase, clearing and fencing, implements, seed, and livestock, as well as travel costs and the cash needed to survive until the first crop was brought in and sold, a minimum of $1,000 was required to equip a family farm in the West-a sum so far beyond the reach of the savings possible on a laborer's wage that the available land for settlement might as well have been located on the moon. Representative Orlando B. Ficklin of Illinois, arguing in 1852 in favor of the Homestead Bill, predicted that if the bill were passed, the actual settlers "will be generally of the middle, or rather not of the very poorest class, and ... the number will not be so large by a great deal as is anticipated by some gentlemen." Whatever the reason, "free soil, free labor, and free men" held little appeal for the Catholic Irish population. Unable or unwilling to avail themselves of the white-skin privilege of setting themselves up as independent farmers, the vast majority clung to the Democratic Party, which continued to protect them from the nativists and guarantee them a favored position over those whom they regarded as the principal threat to their position, the free black people of the North (the only group as "free" of either property or marketable skills as the Irish). Although when war broke out, large numbers of Irish in the North volunteered to fight for the Union, Irish loyalty to the Democratic Party persisted even after it began to skate along the border of treason to the Union. "The Irish know," wrote an 1860 correspondent in the New York Evening Day Book, "that the Republicans would give the ****** preference over them-witness Massachusetts, the ****** is elevated, the Irishman is degraded."88 As the needs of war pushed the Union toward emancipation, the Irish expressed growing disillusion. One soldier in the field wrote back: It has turned out to be an abolition war, and ninety-nine soldiers out of one hundred say that if the abolitionists are going to have to carryon this war, they will have to get a new army. They say they came out here to fight for the Union, and not for a pack of -- ******s. Get a new army, of course, is precisely what Lincoln did, with his decision to recruit black troops. Shortly after the first Afro-Americans appeared in uniform, verses began to circulate under the name "Private Miles O'Reilly" Some tell us 'tis a bumin' shame To make the naygurs fight; And that the thrade of bein' kilt Belongs but to the white: But as for my, upon my sow!! So liberal are we here, I'll let Sambo be murthered instead of myself, On every day in the year. The verse had little effect, because the Irish, like everyone else in the country, knew that the enlistment of black soldiers would inevitably lead to the emancipation of the slaves. The Irish were rejecting not the rigors but the aims of the War. On February 28, 1863, the Metropolitan Record, newspaper of the Catholic archdiocese of New York, suggested that "since fight we must, may it not be necessary yet to fight for the liberty of the white man rather than the freedom of the Negro?". This sentiment found expression in the New York City riots of July of 1863. Misnamed "draft riots," they were an insurrection against the government that was waging the war, at a moment when the military forces of the enemy were a hundred-odd miles from the City.The number of Irish who took part in the riots was not less than the number who wore the blue uniform. Given that every rioter was a volunteer against official policy and all respectable opinion, it is likely that the riots expressed Irish attitudes at least as much as Irish service in the Union army. The Irish had two aims in the war: to establish their claim to citizenship, and to define the sort of republic they would be citizens of.Whether in the Army or on the barricades, they took up arms for the White Republic, and their place in it. As we shall see, their stance was rooted in the desire to escape their miserable conditions.
pages 96-102 America was well set up to teach new arrivals the overriding value of the white skin. Throughout the eighteenth century, the range of dependent labor relations had blurred the distinction between freedom and slavery. The Revolution led to the decline of apprenticeship, indenture, and imprisonment for debt. These changes, together with the growth of slavery as the basis of Southern society, reinforced the tendency to equate freedom with whiteness and slavery with blackness. At the same time, the spread of wage labor made white laborers anxious about losing the precarious independence they had gained from the Revolution. In response, they sought refuge in whiteness. Republican ideology became more explicitly racial than it had been during the Revolutionary era. The result was a new definition of citizenship, what Alexander Saxton has labeled the "White Republic." Blackness was the badge of the slave, and in a perfect inversion of cause and effect, the status of the Afro-Americans was seen as a function of their color rather than of their servile condition.18 The Connecticut Colonization Society summarized the situation in 1828: In every part of the United States, there is a broad and impassibleline of demarcation between every man who has one drop of African blood in his veins, and every other class in the community. The habits, the feelings, all the prejudices of society-prejudices which neither refinement, nor argument, nor education, nor religion itself can subdue-mark the people of colour, whether bond or free, as the subjects of a degradation inevitable and incurable. The African in this country belongs by birth to the lowest station in society; and from that station he can never rise, be his talents, his enterprise, his virtues what they may.19 The slaveholders had a special interest in maintaining the degradation of the free Negro. If the fugitive slave was the "Safety Valve of Slavery,"20 the subduing of the free black population of the North was what kept the safety valve from turning into a massive tear which would allow all the power to escape from the chamber. The slaveholders were aware that the harsh conditions faced by free Negroes in the North helped keep their laborers down on the farm; hence they did their best to publicize the cold reception that awaited any slave so foolish as to run away from the security of the plantation. They did more than observe events in the North: because they had a strong interest in maintaining the free Negro there in a condition as much like slavery as possible, they sought an alliance with Northern white labor based on the defense of color caste.21 "It is a curious fact," wrote John Finch, an English Owenite who traveled the United States in 1843, "that the democratic party, and particularly the poorer class of Irish immigrants in America, are greater enemies to the negro population, and greater advocates for the continuance of negro slavery, than any portion of the population in the free States."22 Finch attributed this attitude to labor competition, noting that ten or twelve years ago, the most menial employments, such as scavengers, porters, dock-labourers, waiters at hotels, ostlers, boot cleaners, barbers, etc., were all, or nearly all, black men, and nearly all the maid servants, cooks, scullions, washerwomen, etc., were black women, and they used to obtain very good wages for these employments; but so great has been the influx of unskilled labourers, emigrants from Ireland, England, and other countries, within the last few years, into New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and other large towns in the eastern States, who press into these menial employments (because they can find no other), offering to labour for any wages they can obtain; that it has reduced the wages of the blacks, and deprived great numbers of them of employment, hence there is a deadly hatred engendered between them, and quarrels and fights among them are daily occurring. Some modern scholars have joined Finch in pointing to labor competition as the cause of intergroup animosities within the working class, and in particular animosity between Irish- and Afro-Americans, who together made up the bulk of America's unskilled proletariat.23 However, there is nothing distinctively racial in what Finch recounted of the relations among black and immigrant workers. He might have been describing conflicts between Irish and Germans, or among Irish from different counties, with no assumption of racial favoritism. While labor competition explains some things, unless its operation is specified, identifying it as the source of intergroup tensions raises more questions than it answers. In the ideal situation, workers contracting for the sale of their labor power compete as individuals, not as groups. And this is even true to some extent in the real world: no employer ever hired "the Irish" or "the Afro-Americans"; individual persons compete to fill specific openings. Under the capitalist system, all workers compete for jobs. The competition gives rise to animosity among them; but normally it also gives rise to its opposite, unity. It is not free competition that leads to enduring animosity, but its absence. Race becomes a social fact at the moment "racial" identification begins to impose barriers to free competition among atomized and otherwise interchangeable individuals. To the extent it does so, the greatest individual competition takes place not between groups but within each group. In the period under consideration the most intense and desperate labor competition was not between Irish and free Negroes, but within each of the two groups, and no one has ever suggested that it presented an insurmountable obstacle to the cohesion of either. If the experience of Cork and Longford men killing each other on the canal projects taught them that it was to their mutual advantage to come together, and if the rivalry among Irish and Germans eventually gave way to cooperative relations, why did the competition among Irish- and Afro-American laborers fail to lead to a mutual appreciation of the need for unity? The answer is that the competition among these two groups did not take place under normal circumstances, but was distorted by the color line, what O'Connell called something in the "atmosphere" of America. Finch himself recognized that what was going on was more than simple labor competition. "The working people reason thus," he continued. Competition among free white working men here is even now reducing our wages daily; but if the blacks were to be emancipated, probably hundreds of thousands of them would migrate into these northern States, and the competition for employment would consequently be so much increased, that wages would speedily be as low, or lower here, than they are in England; better, therefore, for us, that they remain slaves as they are. Hence we see why the American abolitionists of slavery are more unpopular among these parties in America, than Socialists are among the priests and upperclasses in England-hence we see why the repeal associations in Cincinnati wrote to O'Connell in defence of slavery, and why many repeal associations in the United States, particularly in the south, broke up and refused to give any more assistance to the repealers in Ireland, after receiving his denunciations of that accursed system. Finch here located the source of the tensions between Irish immigrants and Afro-Americans in the slavery question. That is getting close, but it is necessary to be even more specific. Slavery has existed for thousands of years without prejudice of color, language, or tribe. Even the singling out of one group to be enslaved does not require that nonslave members of the designated group be branded as inferior. What distinguished nineteenth-century America was not the existence of slavery, but the way it was enforced: In parts of the West Indies, by contrast, people who in the United States would have been identified as "black" were enlisted in the policing of the slaves. In those places color prejudice did not take the same form as in the United States, nor did free people of color commonly show solidarity toward the slaves.24Slavery in the United States was part of a bipolar system of color caste, in which even the lowliest of "whites" enjoyed a status superior in crucial respects to that of the most exalted of "blacks."25As members of the privileged group, white workers organized to defend their caste status, even while striving to improve their condition as workers. They prohibited free Afro-Americans from competing with them for jobs, in effect curtailing their right to choose among masters (a right which contemporary labor activists declared the only essential distinction between the free worker and the slave).
During the eighteenth century, Africans and Afro-Americans in Pennsylvania had produced a substantial group of slave artisans, including bakers, blacksmiths, bricklayers, carpenters, coopers, distillers, refiners, sailmakers, shoemakers, tailors, and tanners.26 "When white Philadelphians were furiously debating the Stamp Act in 1765, their city contained about 100 free blacks and 1,400 slaves." The Revolutionary crisis contributed to the ending of slavery; by 1783 the number of slaves had fallen to 400, while the free black population had grown to more than 1,000.27For many former slaves, emancipation was followed by a period of servitude and apprenticeship, during which they continued to labor at the occupations they had pursued under slavery.28 One scholar has characterized the period from 1790 to 1830 as one of "considerable advancement" for black people ended by "growing hostilities from whites in general and increased competition from immigrants in particular."29Others believe that the decline began earlier, pointing to the increasing appearance of pauperism among them and manifestations of street violence against them.30Whatever the truth of the matter, it is universally agreed that there was "a remarkable deterioration in the socioeconomic conditions of blacks from 1830 to the CivilWar."31 One of the marks of the deterioration was the gradual elimination of the black artisan. A survey by the Pennsylvania Abolition Society in 1838 noted that thirty percent of the 506 male black mechanics and tradesmen in Philadelphia in 1838 did not practice their trades because of "prejudices."32 An 1856 survey recorded that, while the number of those claiming trades had gone up, "less than two-thirds of those who have trades follow them ...on account of the unrelenting prejudice against their color."33White artisans and mechanics were able to gain control of the labor market by withholding apprenticeships and training from black youth. In 1834, students from Lane Seminary, near Cincinnati, investigated the conditions of free Negroes in that city: A respectable master mechanic stated to us ... that in 1830 the President of the Mechanical Association was publicly tried by the Society for the crime of assisting a colored young man to learn a trade. Such was the feeling among the mechanics that no colored boy could learn a trade, or colored journeyman find employment. A young man of exceptional character and an excellent workman purchased his freedom and learned the cabinet making business in Kentucky. On coming to this city, he was refused work by every man to whom he applied. At last he found a shop carried on by an Englishman, who agreed to employ him-but on entering the shop, the workmen threw down their tools and declared that he should leave or they would ....The unfortunate youth was accordingly dismissed. In this extremity, having spent his last cent, he found a slaveholder who gave him employment in an iron store as a common laborer. Here he remained two years, when the gentleman finding he was a mechanic, exerted his influence and procured work for him as a rough carpenter. This man, by dint of perseverance and industry, has now become a master workman, employing at times six or eight journeymen. But, he tells us, he has not yet received a single job of work from a native born citizen of a free state.34 "If a man has children," asserted A Colored Philadelphian in 1830, "it is almost impossible for him to get a trade for them, as the journeymen and apprentices generally refuse to work with them, even if the master is willing, which is seldom the case."35An 1832 Memorial from the People of Color to the State Legislature complained of "the difficulty of getting places for our sons as apprentices, to learn mechanical trades, owing to 102 of the prejudices with which we have to contend."36James Forten, a wealthy Afro-American sailmaker and employer of black and white labor, complained in a series of public letters of the lack of opportunities for Negroes in the trades, as shown in the difficulty he had in obtaining apprenticeships for his sons.37Frederick Douglass observed that prejudice against the free colored people had shown itself nowhere in such large proportions as among artisans and mechanics.38
