Thanks to Nero the Pict for providing this very useful link to a history article coming from the very blind discipline of ancestor worship.
There are many useful citations within this document linked below. However, little use has been made of it by the authors due to numerous anachronistic assumptions:
1.That Pennsylvania was a place for personal improvement and liberty for all rather than exploitation and bondage of most for the profit of the elite.
2.That Indentured servitude was a recognized and many-faceted institution of contractual symbiosis rather than a facet of a many-faceted reality of human exploitation. To be clear, the term Indentured Servitude is a modern invention, something that was never uttered or written in Plantation America.
3.A general bias in favor of institutions and the elite and against the servant class.
4.A clear assumption that everyone sold in a documented transaction volunteered and that only kidnapping victims were involuntary servants, when in fact most sold humans were coerced, literally “bound” as property.
5.A naive assumption [or perhaps sloppy exposition] that the servants were paid when in fact their traffickers were paid, and that people auctioned for debt volunteered themselves to the courts rather than being arrested and sold.
6.That all of those auctioned as redemptioners had not paid their passage, when many did, but were sold to pay for the passage of relatives who had died in the excessively cruel conditions of misery aboard the over-crowded ships.
Overall, the blithe, banal naivete of this article and the excusing of European slave labor in the development of Pennsylvania, including a failure to critique the inhumanity of a law which was enforced in Pennsylvania, treating the homeless, insane, infants and impotent men as convicted felons to be sold into bondage as some kind of redemption for the sin of their condition, is simply ghastly.
Nevertheless, the assembly of this information has and will prove useful in this torturous search for the truth among the ornately dressed rubble of lies which is American History.
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I'd throw in that the author was "one of the most pompously platitudinous pork butchers of the english language who handled his subject with all the beery, leery frivolity of the red nosed music hall comedian." You gotta love Aleister Crowley's dressing down of A.E. Waite
Thanks for that sizzling quote.