A Comment from JR:

You reminded me—Hoffman was just interviewed on Unz.com by (?),

Apologies...Hoffman makes a distinction between white slavery in the 17th Century and 18th C, becoming more indentured servitude into the early 19th C. I don't think you make that distinction, being as you could be flogged to death in your seven year term—a distinction without a difference. Maybe he means the slavery became more benign over time?

-JR

Herein I address the general question you posed and will leave a discussion of Hoffman’s interview and the colony by colony and race by race, trajectories for the final volume in this series, Plantation America: A History Denied.

JR, first off, Hoffman and I have just skimmed the surface of this vast well of information concerning our secret history. As recent as last month I had to change my perspective on slave revolts after doing a first of its kind chronology, which ran 85 pages!

Second, not only do we have multiple time periods which do not fit cleanly into our idea of 100 year periods, we also try and answer the question of white servitude according to our present national consciousness, when it was a plantation by plantation, colony by colony or state by state trajectory in the period under discussion.

In my 12th and final book in the Plantation America series I will present a colony by colony trajectory for slavery of all races. It simply was not a racial institution. But the movement of various races of people in and out of servitude offers a true perspective of the bestial economy that terminally infected these shores between 1585 and 1623. Ironically, by claiming that American slavery was purely an issue of white on black race hatred, the establishment historians have made this nation, in its gestation, birth and infancy, seem much less cruel, dehumanizing and soul devouring than it was. For most slaves of all races, slavery was worse than depicted in the most accurate [but still flawed] slavery movies, which are Unconquered, Cool Hand Luke, Mandingo and 12 Years a Slave. Note the two earlier movies treat white slavery and the two latter movies treat black slavery.

One should recall the term “soul driver” from black slavery narratives and understand that that was an English term first used by whites to describe their masters and inherited by their black co-chattel.

As far as the “indentured servitude” issue, that was more of a mid-18th Century phenomena and was rare in the 17th and 19th centuries. Most 19th century white slaves who escaped were not described in the wanted ads as indentures. The various types of slave or servant [two interchangeable terms] crossed all race lines and included, but were not limited to:

term slave of 3 to 31 years

headright

redemptioner

girl

boy

maid

captive husband [no shit, I’ll cover this in Paleface]

bondman

bondwoman

transport

hoe wife

wife

sailor

soldier

indented

apprentice

and slave for life.

Towards the middle of the 19th century, in Maryland, for instance, you had very few slaves for life, regardless of race, though David Holliday was a white man who did serve 37 years as a slave. My best guess is he was a bastard child of a servant woman who would have been surrendered by the mother for a 31 year term upon his birth in 1800, according to existing Maryland and Virginia statutes, at which point she would receive 30 lashes at the whipping post, and that he somehow accrued penalties that extended his term.

American Slavery over all was unbelievably cruel through its entirety. The cruelest periods were the first half of the 17th century, and the mid-19th century, both periods on the eve of massive civil wars. During the latter period, people who held whites in permanent slavery did it according to subterfuge, by tanning them or smoking them in tobacco sheds and claiming they were “colored,” while blacks were exclusively brutalized in the exact same way as whites had been in the first half of the 17th Century, that earlier period being a time when blacks were ALWAYS better treated than whites. Indeed, Samuel Wiseman’s book of record from 1777, indicates that the Governor of Virginia employed “the Negro” [a singular man] as a supervisor of his lowly white servants, such as the coachman and the hangman.

So, in the 1820s, 30s, 40s and 50s, white slaves lost value below the point where slave catchers did not bother nabbing them, and were consequently better treated, with some runaways in the 1800s bringing only 6 pence reward, at the same time that blacks were being sold for $1,000 and were being more cruelly treated when they attempted to break free. There have been isolation studies done showing that these expensive black slaves were better fed and housed than poor whites, and they were, if their master had the means. But small slaveholders, like Solomon Northup’s master, where being pinched by economy of scale, which made their slaves so valuable that to lose them was to go broke. To be the highly valued slave of a poor, cruel or stupid man generally brings the same hellish conditions.

So, the irony was, that, generally speaking, across time and space, the less valuable your slaves were, the more poorly they were fed and housed and the more frequent were the beatings intended to inspire productivity.

However, when slaves were highly valued and expensive, such as in 1680 or 1850 Virginia, 1670s New England or South Carolina in the mid-1700s, the more brutal were the repercussions suffered by slaves trying to break free. There were actually Negro runaways being burned alive in Virginia around 1850! That same treatment had been meted out to whites in various colonies in the 1600s, when whites as a group had immense labor value, even though individually they sold for far less than blacks, due to the more expensive African supply chain. By the 1840s black slaves were being burned to death and mutilated in the same fashion that white slaves had been treated exactly 200 years before, when the tiny number of black slaves had been trusted house servants who sometimes commanded white servants and even purchased whites for their own use when free.

The never-ending politics of pitting one race against the other by the class hierarchy resulted in very different patterns of evolution of the bondage system from colony to colony and state to state.

Generally speaking we have the following bondage trajectories listed in roughly chronological order:

-1 Virginia-Maryland

-2 New York

-3 New England

-4 Pennsylvania

-5 Carolinas

-6 Georgia

-7 Florida

-8 Kentucky-Tennessee

-9 Free Soil [Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan]

-10 Deep South [Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana]

-11 West [Arkansas, Missouri, Indian Territory, Texas]

-1 Irish

-2 British [English, Cornish, Scottish, Welsh]

-3 Indian

-4 African

-5 Asian [Yes, there were Chinese held in Maryland and Virginia as early as the 1690s!]

JR, slavery in Plantation America was so immensely vast and deep and multifaceted that it is beyond the comprehension of almost all American Academics, let alone media bots, and its study is a cursed plunge into infamy for any who publicly seeks the truth, which makes it clear that America remains a slave nation. Few slaves were ever shackled or locked behind bars, but rather lived as free-range livestock, kept close by the master through the naked threat of force, just as the modern taxpayer is kept producing for his masters out of fear. In both eras, only the tiny minority were shackled or locked away at night. Even delving into this issue has now made it impossible for me to live a comfortable life. My end will be the very feared eventuality that keeps tax payers toiling and groveling, to die broken and poor, which was the same price the so-called indentured servant paid if he or she failed to be re-purchased. Only I am a man with a half century of history here, with enough friends and family to make it certain that I will only die homeless if that is my wish, whereas the millions [1] of poor souls of European descent who died in or out of bondage after being trafficked to their master’s promised land were unlikely to have anyone to take them in should they break free of or be discarded by the system.

1. I have the preliminary demographics necessary to arrive at the numbers of European slaves shipped to and born in English North America, and will present that information in Plantation America, after I have had a person with some mathematic credentials check the numbers. It is a certainty that more Europeans were shipped to English North America in Bondage than were Africans.

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