America's white slaves were 10 times cheaper than blacks

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

On August 1, 1619, the first batch of black slaves was delivered to the British colonies of North America: the British recaptured them from the Portuguese. Slavery will pass "by inheritance" to the United States, and will be abolished only in 1863.

They were brought in as slaves. English ships transported many human goods to both America. They were transported by hundreds of thousands: men, women and even small children.

When they rebelled or simply did not obey orders, they were severely punished. The slave owners hung them up by the arms and set them on fire as punishment. They were burned alive, and the remaining heads were put on pikes that stood around the markets as a warning to the rest of the captives.

We don't need to list all the bloody details, do we? We know all too well the atrocities of the African slave trade.

But are we talking about African slaves now? Kings James II and Charles I also made a lot of efforts to develop slavery - by enslaving the Irish. The famous Englishman Oliver Cromwell developed the practice of dehumanizing his immediate neighbors.

The Irish trade began when Jacob II sold 30,000 Irish prisoners to American slavery. His proclamation of 1625 proclaimed the need to send Irish political prisoners abroad and sell them to English settlers in the West Indies. By the mid-1600s, Irish slaves were the most sold in Antigua and Montserrat. At the time, 70% of the Montserrat population were Irish slaves.

Ireland soon became the largest source of human goods for British businessmen. Most of the early slaves of the New World were white.

From 1641 to 1652 the British killed more than 500 thousand Irishmen and sold another 300 thousand into slavery. During this decade alone, the population of Ireland fell from 1,500 thousand to 600 thousand people. Families were divided, since the British did not allow Irish men to take their wives and children with them to America. This left a population of homeless women and children helpless. But the British also sold them through slave auctions.

During the 1650s, more than 100,000 Irish children aged 10-14 were taken from their parents and sold into slavery in the West Indies, Virginia and New England. During the same decade, 52,000 Irish men and women were trafficked to Barbados and Virginia. Another 30,000 Irish were auctioned elsewhere. In 1656, Cromwell ordered 2,000 Irish children to be sent to Jamaica and sold into slavery by the English conquistadors.

Many people today avoid referring to the truthful term "slaves" for Irish slaves. The term "contract servants" is used in relation to them. However, in most cases, in the 17th and 18th centuries, the Irish were sold as slaves, like livestock.

At this time, the African slave trade was just beginning. There is documentary evidence that African slaves, not stained by the hated Catholic faith and more expensive, were treated much better than the Irish.

In the late 1600s, African slaves were very expensive at £ 50. Irish slaves were cheaper - no more than 5 sterling. It was not a crime if a planter whipped, clumbered and beat an Irish slave to death. Death was an expense item, but less significant than the murder of a dear negro. The English slave owners used Irish women for their pleasure and profit. Slave children were slaves who increased the wealth of their master. Even if an Irish woman got freedom in some way, her children remained the master's slaves. Therefore, Irish mothers, even having received freedom, rarely left their children and remained in slavery.

The British wondered about the best ways to use these women (often just girls 12 years old) to increase profits. Settlers began interbreeding Irish women and girls with African men to obtain slaves of a different skin color. These new mulattoes were worth more than Irish slaves and allowed settlers to save money by not buying new African slaves. This practice of interbreeding Irish women with blacks continued for several decades and was so widespread that in 1681 a law was passed "prohibiting the practice of mating Irish female slaves with African male slaves in order to produce slaves for sale." In short, it was discontinued only because it prevented the slave trading companies from making a profit.

England continued to transport tens of thousands of Irish slaves for over a century. History says that after the Irish Rebellion of 1798, thousands of Irish slaves were sold to both America and Australia. Both African and Irish slaves were treated terribly. One English ship threw 1,302 living slaves into the Atlantic Ocean, as there was little food on board.

Few doubt that the Irish have experienced the full nightmares of slavery - on par with the negroes (and even worse in the 17th century). And also, there is little doubt that the brown mulattos in the West Indies were mainly the fruits of African-Irish crossbreeding. Only in 1839 did England decide to turn off the satanic road and end the slave trade. Although this thought did not prevent the English pirates from continuing to do this. The new law marks the first step towards ending this chapter of Irish suffering.

But if anyone, black or white, thinks that slavery concerned only Africans, he is completely wrong.

Irish slavery must be remembered; it cannot be erased from our memory.

But why isn't it spoken about in our public and private schools ?! Why is this not in the history books? Why is this rarely talked about in the media?

The memory of the hundreds of thousands of Irish victims deserves more than the mere mention of an unknown writer.

Their history was rewritten by English pirates. Irish history is almost completely forgotten, as if it never existed.

None of the Irish slaves returned to their homeland, and could not tell about the experiences they experienced. They are forgotten slaves. Popular history books avoid mentioning them.

From the book by A. V. Efimov “Essays on the history of the United States. 1492-1870"

… The first slaves in America were white slaves, or, as they were called, contracted or bonded servants. If someone wanted to move to America, and he did not have 6-10 pounds sterling needed to pay for travel, he signed a contract with the entrepreneur in duplicate and was obliged to reimburse the costs of transportation overseas to work five years in the position of a servant-slave … It was brought to America and sold at auction. It was believed that after serving five years, he should receive freedom, but sometimes such people ran away earlier. In other cases, due to new debt, the bonded servant remained in slavery for the second and third terms. Convicted criminals were often brought from Europe. They were also sold. This category of indentured servants usually had to work not 5, but 7 years in order to gain freedom after this period.

Regular trade in contracted servants took place during the 17th and 18th centuries. But in the 18th century. its importance gradually began to decline in connection with the development of slavery of blacks. The bulk of the contracted servants were English and Irish poor peasants and artisans, ruined, deprived of the means of production during the fencing and industrial revolution in England. Poverty, hunger, and sometimes religious persecution drove these people to a distant overseas country, the living and working conditions in which they had little idea.

Recruiting agents of American landowners and entrepreneurs scoured Europe and lured poor peasants or unemployed people with stories of the "free" life overseas. Kidnapping has become widespread. The recruiters would solder the adults, and lure the children. Then the poor were collected in the port cities of England and transported to America in the same conditions as the cattle were transported. The ships were cramped, food was scarce; in addition, it often deteriorated, and the settlers were doomed to starvation during the long journey to America.

“The horror of what is happening on these ships,” says one of his contemporaries, who himself survived such a trip, “stench, fumes, vomiting, various stages of seasickness, fever, dysentery, fever, abscesses, scurvy. Many die a terrible death."

In colonial newspapers one could often find such announcements: “A party of young, healthy workers has just arrived from London, consisting of weavers, carpenters, shoemakers, blacksmiths, masons, sawmen, tailors, coachmen, butchers, furniture makers and other craftsmen. They are sold at a fair price. It is also possible in exchange for wheat, bread, flour. Sometimes slave traders and brokers carried on a brisk trade at the same time as black slaves, captive Indians and contracted servants brought from Europe.

A Boston newspaper reported in 1714 that a wealthy merchant, Samuel Sewall, "was selling several Irish maids, most of them for five years, one Irish servant a good barber, and four or five handsome Negro boys." In the same newspaper, a few days later, the following announcement appeared: “An Indian boy about 16 years old, a Negro about 20 years old for sale. Both speak good English and are suitable for any job."

There were many cases when contracted servants were beaten to death. The owner lost only the labor of the slave for the period of the contract. The laws of the colonies only in individual cases provided that the owner was obliged to release the servant if he disfigured or disfigured him. Escapes of white slaves were a mass phenomenon in the colonies. The captured servants were severely punished, they were branded, their contracts were extended, and sometimes they were sentenced to death. Nevertheless, individual white slaves managed to escape to the border settlements, to the West. Here they joined the ranks of the poor squatters, who secretly seized land belonging to large landowners or land speculators. Squatters cleared a section of the forest, raised virgin soil, built a log cabin and repeatedly rose up against the colonial authorities with weapons in their hands when they tried to drive them out of the occupied areas. Sometimes contracted servants revolted. In some cases, white slaves conspired with blacks and jointly opposed their masters and slave owners.

Gradually, the slavery of blacks supplanted the system of contracted labor. The negro slave was more profitable. The maintenance of a slave was half the price. The slave owner could exploit the slave for the entire life of the latter, and not just for the period of time stipulated by the contract. The slave's children also became the owner's property. It was also found that the use of Negro slave labor was more beneficial for the colonialists than the enslavement of Indians or poor white people. The Indians who were enslaved received help from the Indian tribes who were at large. It was more difficult to turn into slaves the Indians who did not know exploitation and were not accustomed to forced labor, or the poor white people brought from Europe, where slavery had long ceased to exist, was more difficult than using the labor of Negro slaves who were imported from Africa, where among the Negro peoples agriculture became widespread, and the development of social relations led to the emergence of slavery among many tribes, where entire slaveholding states existed. In addition, the Negroes were stronger and more enduring than the Indians.

Although in the colonial period the plantation economy was partially subsistence, serving the needs of the plantation itself, providing it with food, home-made fabrics, etc., but even then, in the 17th-18th centuries, the plantation produced for the foreign market; tobacco, for example, was largely exported to England, and through it it got to other European countries. Slaves for the plantation were bought, of course, also on the foreign market, and partly "bred" on the plantation itself. The slave owners said, for example, that it was more profitable to buy a woman than a man, “since a woman can be sold“with offspring”in a couple of years …

Slaves were imported mainly for the tobacco plantations of the southern states. They were kicked out to work in batches; they worked up to 18-19 hours a day, driven by the scourge of the overseer. At night, the slaves were locked up and the dogs were released. It is believed that the average life span of a Negro slave on plantations was 10 years, and in the 19th century. even 7 years …

The role of Jews in the slave trade. Shocking truth. Part 1

In 1992, the American Muslim Mission published The Secret Ties Between Blacks and Jews, which caused an uproar. It cited prominent Jewish historians who argued that the basis of the African slave trade, and indeed of the entire slave trade over the past 2 thousand years in the Western world, lay Jewish roots …