(Following from TWWATWS)
There is a history of White people that
has never been told in any coherent form, largely because
most modern historians have, for reasons of politics or
psychology, refused to recognize White slaves in America
as just that.
Today, not a tear is shed for the sufferings
of millions of our enslaved forefathers. 200 years of White
slavery in America have been almost completely obliterated
from the collective memory of the American people.
Writer Elaine Kendall asks "Who
wants to be reminded that half - perhaps as many as two-thirds
- of the original American colonists came here, not of their
own free will, but kidnapped, shanghaied, impressed, duped,
beguiled, and yes, in chains - ? ...we tend to gloss over
it... we'd prefer to forget the whole sorry chapter."
A correct understanding of the authentic
history of the enslavement of Whites in America could have
profound consequences for the future. Most of the books
on White labor (Labour) in early America use words like
"White indentured servitude," "White bondservants,"
"White servants," etc. Few are now aware that
the majority of these so-called "servants" were
bound to a condition more properly called permanent chattel
slavery unto death. The papers legally allowing the enslavement,
called indentures, were often forged by kidnappers and press-gangs;
and in cases where these papers did not literally specify
a life term of servitude, the slave-owner had the legal
right to unilaterally increase the length of the term on
the flimsiest pretexts. The so-called "apprentices"
or "indentured servants" had no say in the matter.
These enslaved White people are, however, never called slaves
by establishment academics and media spokesmen. To do so
would destroy the myth of unique Black victimhood and universal
White guilt.
Today, with the massive concentration
of educational and media resources on the Black experience
of slavery, the unspoken assumption has been that only Blacks
have been enslaved to any degree or magnitude worthy of
study or memorial. The historical record reveals that this
is not the case, however. The word "slave" itself
is derived from the word "slav," a reference to
the Eastern European White people who, among others, were
enslaved by their fellow Whites, by the Mongols, and by
the Arabs over a period of many centuries.
According to Thomas Burton's Parliamentary
Diary 1656-1659, in 1659 the English parliament debated
the practice of selling British Whites into slavery in the
New World. In the debate, these Whites were referred to
not as "indentured servants" but as "slaves."
In the Calendar of State Papers, Colonial
Series, America and West Indies of 1701, we read of a protest
over the "encouragement to the spiriting away of Englishmen
without their consent and selling them for slaves, which
hath been a practice very frequent and known by the name
of kidnapping." In the British West Indies, plantation
slavery was instituted as early as 1627. In Barbados by
the 1640s there were an estimated 25,000 slaves, of whom
21,700 were White.
This document records that while White
slaves were worked to death, as they cost next to nothing,
there were Caribbean Indians brought from Guiana to help
propagate native foodstuffs who were well-treated and received
as free persons by the wealthy planters.
The Englishman William Eddis, after observing
White slaves in America in the 1770s wrote: "Generally
speaking, they groan beneath a worse than Egyptian bondage."
Governor Sharpe of the Maryland colony compared the property
interest of the planters in their White slaves, with the
estate of an English farmer consisting of a "Multitude
of Cattle."
Lay historian Col. A. B. Ellis, writing
in the British Newspaper Argosy for May 6, 1893, said: "Few,
but readers of old colonial state papers and records, are
aware that between the years 1649 to 1690 a lively trade
was carried on between England and the plantations, as the
colonies were then called, [a trade] in political prisoners...
they were sold at auction... for various terms of years,
sometimes for life, as slaves."
Sir George Sandys' 1618 plan for Virginia
referred to bound Whites assigned to the treasurer's office
to "belong to said office forever." The service
of Whites bound to Berkeley's Hundred was deemed "perpetual."
Numerous documents from the seventeenth,
eighteenth, and even nineteenth centuries reveal that these
Whites in bondage certainly referred to themselves as slaves,
and there are even records of Blacks referring to them as
"White slaves."
Did you know that the expression "kidnapping,"
(originally kid-nabbing) had its origin in the abduction
of poor White children to be sold into factory slavery in
Britain or plantation slavery in America? Did you know that
the expression "spirited away" likewise originated
with the White slavers, who were also called "spirits"?
The White slavery in America was but
an extension of the White slavery in the mother country,
Britain, where the legal form of contracted indentured servitude
and apprenticeship was maintained as a spurious cover for
plain and simple lifetime chattel slavery. Particularly
shocking was the enslavement of White children for factory
labor (Labour). Children were openly seized from orphanages
and workhouses and placed in the factories.
In Brian Inglis' Poverty and the Industrial
Revolution we read: "Here then was a ready source of
labor (Labour) - and a very welcome one. The children were
formally indentured as apprentices... What happened to them
was nobody's concern. A parish in London, having got rid
of a batch of unwanted pauper children, was unlikely to
interest itself in their subsequent fate... The term 'apprenticeship'
was in any case a misnomer...."
In Marjorie Cruikshank's Children and
Industry: "many employers imported child apprentices,
parish orphans from workhouses far and near. Clearly, overseers
of the poor were only too keen to get rid of the orphans...
children were brought (to the factories) like 'cartloads
of live lumber' and abandoned to their fate... poor children,
taken from workhouses or kidnapped in the streets of the
metropolis, used to be brought down by... coach to Manchester
and slid into a cellar in Mosley Street as if they had been
stones or any other inanimate substance."
White children worked up to sixteen hours
a day and during that period the doors were locked. Children
- and most of the mill workers were children - were allowed
out only to 'go to the necessary.' In some factories it
was forbidden to open the windows... The child 'apprentices'
who were on night shift might have to stay on it for as
long as four or five years. They were lucky if they were
given a half penny an hour.
This was labor (Labour) without any breaks
- unceasing labor (Labour). When the children fell asleep
at the machines, they were lashed into wakefulness with
a whip. If they arrived late to the factory, talked to another
child, or committed some other infraction they were beaten
with an iron bar known as a "billy-roller," eight
feet long and one inch and a half in diameter. Many were
thus murdered, often for trifling offenses such as calling
out names to the next child.
Thousands of children were mangled or
mutilated by the primitive factory machinery every year.
They were often disfigured or disabled for life, then abandoned,
receiving no compensation of any kind. Similar conditions
obtained for enslaved White children on this side of the
Atlantic, as what William Blake called "these Satanic
Mills" spread to our shores.
Historian Oscar Handlin writes that in
colonial America, White servants could be bartered for a
profit, sold to the highest bidder for the unpaid debts
of their masters, and otherwise transferred like moveable
goods or chattels...
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