Just Finished Stillbirth of a Nation, also Covenanters apocryphal trivia

James

Sun, Feb 16, 2:47 PM (12 days ago)

Hi James,

Hope all is well.

As a new reader of yours, I wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed Stillbirth of a Nation. I had no idea how big my knowledge gap was. I read Michael Hoffman’s book a couple years ago and wanted to learn more about the enslavement of huwhites in America. I first came across the subject, funnily enough, when I read Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States about 30 years ago.

Zinn pointed out that many major slave rebellions were led by whites, which led to miscegenation laws. Always made me a bit curious, but not enough to find out more directly.

Occasionally, through various dilettantish readings here and there, I would see hints of white slavery. Some of the history of Ulster and the Scots-Irish as well as the Scots from the borders, who made up a good part of the Ulster Plantation, mention this.

It seems at points in British history, Covenanters and Presbyterians (same thing?) were more oppressed by the powers that be than were Roman Catholics, and would find themselves shipped to plantations further away. I once saw it claimed that 70% of the people arriving in the colonies and the USA from Ireland were more likely Protestant Ulster Scots and that Catholics didn’t start arriving in big numbers until the 19th Century with the Potato Famine setting in.

I have also seen, in more than a couple of places, that the term ‘redneck’ was derived from the red kerchiefs that Covenanters wore around their necks. Not sure how apocryphal that is, but, there you go.

Next, I’m on to America in Chains, just bought the Kindle version. Will be catching up with those other two books you sent me soon after, but I’m inclined to plough through Plantation America first. I’ve already been able to pull out a few little known facts from Stillbirth of a Nation in passing conversations.

Funnily enough, my family only goes back 100 years in the US (and most of them are in the Midwest) so you wouldn’t think I have a dog in this race. I did spend a good part of my younger life in the South, so identify more culturally as a Southerner, and have been victim of the various narratives we are meant to feel responsible for. Your work takes me further down the road to not giving a shit about the narrative and to knowing the truth, which is a lot more complicated than most people think.

All the best,

James

James, thank you so much for this and sorry for taking so long to respond.

The Catholics were not subject to as much abuse in England and adjoining territories as were more radical protestants. Remember, that Anglican Church was a demystified catholic establishment intended to support the temporal state's authority, instead of the temporal state supporting the metaphysic authority of the Catholic Church. Protestants had more doctrinal disputes with the Anglicans than the Anglicans had with the cowed Catholics.

In Cracker-Boy I searched for word origins for the term Cracker and found numerous sources, so that the term as it came down to us seems to have been a conflation of various negative terms for poor European Americans. Plantation America is sold to us as Colonial America, an elite view not shared by inhabitants of the Pre-United States North America below the top 1%. No one better understood that it was better to rule in hell than serve in heaven than the Master Class of Plantation America, who created the legend of Colonial America as a cover story for the crimes of they and their patriarchs, as well as "the one-drop rule," and racial hatred as we know it along with the doctrine of "White Supremacy" as a way to play poor European and African Americans off against each other. The source terminology for red neck might also be multiplicitous, one of them being the vitamin deficiency pelegria which afflicted ill-fed Europeans exposed to the sun. So I will investigate that word origin further before the series closes.

Do note, that in Plantation Maryland and Plantation Virginia, the children of unwed mothers [with servants not permitted to wed, thus barred from sex and destined to produce a bastard off spring for master class monetization] were assigned to 31-year long terms of service to masters selected by the Anglican Church Wardens. The life expectancy of such children ranged from 18 to 35. This plan was the reverse of social security, with such enslavement calibrated to use all or most of the slave's productive years and then emancipate his master from the onerous burden of providing for his hospice—let the wretch die on the side of the road!

As for slave rebellions, many of them also involved free folk, almost all involved multiple races on the system side and the free-seeking side, and, for this lack of easily propagandized racial polarity, are rarely studied. I count roughly 400 servile American actions of rebellion of which only three are generally studied, all lead by African American leaders. The bare bones chronology for American Spartacus uprisings runs to 97 pages at current.

Since American history is used as a mirror with the latest reflecting back at us and blinding our perception of earlier foundational events, we cannot appreciate the Irish Plight, which is said to have been solely their idiot reliance on the potato and the dearth of 1850s Ireland resulting in immigration to America.

The Irish protestants you refer to were often real settlers that were not sold but given land grants and paid passage beginning with Oglethorpe's attempt to found a land for free white working men in the mid 1700s just as the idea of "white" as a racial designation came into vogue for the first time in human history. These Scotch-Irish were largely Scotsmen who had been used to displace Irish in Ireland and then given leave to do the same thing in The Plantations, where so many of the Irish had become Indians or their sworn enemies, the hillbillies and backwoodsmen and frontiersmen.

This is as far back as American Academic History reaches. However, virtually all listed runaways prior to 1776 were Irish of name often described as "thick with the brogue." In 1727 2,400 Irish Catholics were sold in New Castle and caused a panic in Pennsylvania, where a 16-shilling tax was henceforth placed on the sale of every catholic into Pennsylvania. This did not stop the trade, with slavers paying that tax on 4,000 Irish and German Catholics the very next year!

Further back, all the way back, we have Darby Gland being trafficked and sold by the English into North America in 1585, escaping and being recaptured and sold in 1587 and then being abducted by the Spanish and held as a slave in the West Indies until he finally gained his freedom and a paid post as a Spanish soldier in Florida: one Irishman sold three times by two other European races in North America 20 years before the first supposed English presence in North America.

Its a deep, dark well, My Friend.

Thanks for your thoughtful inquiry.