Slavery Truths
 
From: johough@swbell.net
 
SLAVERY TRUTHS AS PRESENTED in Jordan and Walsh’s White Cargo:
 
"To be the chattel of another, to be required by law to give absolute obedience in everything and to be subject to whippings, brandings and chaining for any show of defiance, to be these things, as were many whites, was to be enslaved.  Daniel Defoe, writing in the early 1700s, described indentured servants as ‘more properly called slaves’" Don Jordan and Michael Walsh. White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America. New York University Press, NY. p. 15).
 
English and Americans dressed up white slavery with the terms such as "indentured" and "bondsman," but those words, for the most part, were lies!
 
"English colonies on the mainland had begun edging in different ways towards racial slavery and at a different pace, with the men in power quite possibly having little idea of where they were heading.  Massachusetts, for instance goes down in history as the first colony to legalise slavery – but no race was targeted when it did so" ( Ibid. p. 172).
 
They were whites, they were: :"victims of the empire.  They were all supposed to gain their freedom eventually. . . In early decades, half of them died in bondage.  . . . tens of thousands of whites were held as chattels, marketed like cattle, punished brutally and in some cases literally worked to death (Ibid. p. 12).
 
"Lifetime black slaves were becoming the norm and all the colonies had passed laws either recognising slavery in principle or specifically legalising it.  Massachusetts led the way in 1641, followed by Connecticut in 1650, Virginia in 1661, Maryland in 1663, and New York and New Jersey in 1664. Others followed later."  (ibid. p. 175).
 
"Among the first to be sent [to America] were children. . . .  In 1618 , the authorities in London began to sweep up hundreds of troublesome urchins from the slums and, ignoring protests from the children and their families, shipped them to Virginia. . . they were sold to planters to work in the fields and half of them were dead within a year.  shipments of children continued from England and then from Ireland for decades.  Many of these migrants were little more than toddlers" (Ibid. pp. 12-13).
 
In 1278, "when two Anglo-Normans were brought into court and charged with raping one Margaret O’Rorke.  They were found not guilty because ‘the said Margaret is an Irishwoman’.   "…from the twelfth until the sixteenth century, Ireland was a laboratory in which social ideas and legal conventions would be forged and which found their echo in the labour systems of the American colonies."  [WHAT WAS DONE TO BLACK SLAVES WAS FIRST DONE TO THE IRISH.] (ibid. p. 140).
 
White slaves were "used" in America long before black ones were brought here. When blacks were finally brought in,   "some whites were treated with less humanity than the blacks working alongside them" (ibid. p.  12).