Monday, March 16, 2015
IRISH: THE FORGOTTEN WHITE SLAVES
They came as slaves: human cargo transported on 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.
Some 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 VI and Charles I also
led a continued effort to enslave the Irish. Britain’s Oliver Cromwell
furthered this practice of dehumanizing one’s next door neighbor.
The
Irish slave trade began when James VI 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,
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 mothers, even with this new found
emancipation, would seldom abandon their children and would remain in
servitude.
In
time, the English thought of a better way to use these women to
increase their market share: The settlers began to breed Irish women and
girls (many as young as 12) 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 the Irish experienced the horrors of slavery as much
(if not more, in the 17th Century) as the Africans did. There is also
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 its 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 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,
why is it so seldom discussed? Do the memories of hundreds of thousands
of Irish victims not merit more than a mention from an unknown writer?
Or is their story to be the one that their English masters intended: To 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 historical note: the last person killed at the Salem Witch Trials was Ann Glover.
She and her husband had been shipped to Barbados as a slave in the
1650's. Her husband was killed there for refusing to renounce
catholicism.
In the 1680's she was working as a housekeeper in Salem. After some of the children she was caring for got sick she was accused of being a witch.
At the trial they demanded she say the Lord's Prayer. She did so, but in Gaelic, because she didn't know English. She was then hung.
To learn more you can go to the following sources:
Political Education Committee (PEC)
American Ireland Education Foundation
54 South Liberty Drive, Suite 401
Stony Point NY 10980
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Bibliography
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Indies -- Analecta Hibernica
Page: 153
Note: 1
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A.E. and R.E. Ford, 1887
Page: 15 41 38,9
Note: 3 21 37
Arthur Percoval Newton, The European Nations in the West Indies
1493-1688, London, J. Dickens & Co, Reprint 1967
Page: 163
Note: 4
Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, Chapel Hill, NC, U of NC
Press, 1972
Page: 56, 122, 130 ? 133 160
Note: 5 13 24 25
Page: 327 ? 131 141
Note: 29 30 32 34
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Page: 668,9 669
Note: 6 26
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Dublin, ?, 1865
Note: 9 17
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Page: 19
Note: 7
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Papers, London, 1742
Note: 8
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Putnam, 1903
Page: 101, vol I 101, vol I 211,2
Note: 12 19 28
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Dial, MCMXXXII
Page: 17 17
Note: 10 11
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Note: 18
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Page: 336, vol X
Note: 20
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Smith, 1965
Page: 164 165 334 209 336
Note: 2 16 23 27 36
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Restoration, 1660-1688, London,
Cambridge, 1921
Page: 4 47
Note: 14 22
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Page: 44
Note: 31
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Page: 101
Note: 15
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Page: 55 58
Note: 33 35
