“human serpents”
-Benjamin Franklin, on white slaves and indentured servants
The Poor and the Pale
To say that American History is generally an exercise in ‘bullshit’ propagation would be to denigrate the quality of bovine fecal matter. Nowhere do lies run deeper than in a nation’s own written traditions. So, I would like to define our generally accepted canon of American history—both traditional and revisionist—as rat shit, by spending a few moments on this 4th of July remembering a handful of the poor and the pale.
I would like to remember these few damned souls on behalf of the tens of thousands of lost Americans who died as less than a cipher, who cannot have existed, for their existence, miserable and fleeting as it was, casts the shadow of the lie across every ethnic and ideological fraternity in America. No matter their race or their ideology, no group supports the idea that slavery in North America began with the enslavement of poor white children, that this remained the dominant form of slavery from 1620 [Duty Boys] through 1760, and that this practice continued along a declining curve as black bondage flourished until about 1835.
The Whipping
Beatings were the great constant in the life of the slave, black, white and brown, and were inflicted primarily with a knotted rope called a ‘cat-o’-nine-tails’ and had its origin in the British Navy. White slaves in Australia ‘called convicts’ were given the same treatment.
Joseph Mansbury had been whipped so much that his collar bones were exposed and ‘shined like two ivory polished horns.’
One overseer Down Under said while whipping convict slaves, “Another half pound mate, off the beggar’s ribs”
Overseers wore clothes so crusted with blood and bits of flesh that had flown from their victim’s backs, that the attire was described as looking like ‘a mincemeat chopper.’
Ten Driven Souls
“the ownership of one white man”
-1717, proposed qualification for election to the South Carolina Assembly
1. New England, Circa 1650, Nicholas Weekas and his wife cut the toes off of their ‘white boy servant,’ who died soon thereafter.
2. Circa 1650, Marylander John Dandy beat his ‘white slave boy’ to death and floated him down a river.
3. 1655, Plymouth Colony, a Mister Latham, starved, beat, and left his ’14-year-old boy servant’ to die out in the winter cold.
4. In 1663 Pope Avery beat his ‘white slave girl’ Alice Safford ‘to a jelly.’ [Note that for the first 75 years slaves had no names worthy of recording.]
5. In 1664 Joseph Fincher beat his ‘white slave’ Jeffery Haggman to death.
6. 1678, Charles Grimlin was pardoned for the murder of his ‘female white slave.’
7. July 2nd, 1685, Rappahannock County Court, Virginia, ‘a kidnapped white orphan boy’ complained that he was being held, tortured, and illegally worked by a certain Major Hawkins. Since the boy, being an orphan, had to have an owner, the court awarded him to Major Hawkins, who presumably named him before working him to death.
8. On September 1st 1731 an unnamed ‘white slave boy’ of New Jersey drowned himself to avoid more torture at the hands of his master.
9. Mistress Ward was fined 300 pounds of tobacco for murdering her ‘white girl slave’ with a whip.
10. In 1756 Elizabeth Sprigs wrote a letter to her father back in London from a Maryland plantation, where she claimed, ‘I am tied up and whipped to that degree that you’d not serve an animal’.
Only three of those ten poor pale people rated a name, but I thought they deserved a mention, however stark.
Kind of blows the myth of "white privilege" clear to hell, doesn't it? Most Americans have been indoctrinated to believe that there never was such a thing as white slavery, because it doesn't fit the current Leftist transformational narrative to acknowledge the fact that it did exist. Naturally. But of course European societies held white people in slavery long before they ever encountered black Africans. The Roman philosopher Cicero wrote in the first century B.C. that in his opinion slaves from Britannia were next to useless because they were so ignorant of basic civilization that you had to show them how to do everything. In 1000 A.D. half of the people living in England were in some sort of involuntary servitude, as chattel slaves, serfs, villains, convicts or as indentured servants. From the 14th to the 19th Century there millions more white Christian Europeans who were captured and sold into slavery by Muslim pirates than there were black Africans who were sold into slavery in the America’s. Some of these Christian captives were taken from as far away as Iceland. The first owner of black slaves in America was a black man himself, Anthony Johnson 1621, a former indentured servant. Once America became independent most forms of white slavery were abolished by law. Debt bondage persisted for quite some time after independence. Most of the northern colonies/states even went so far as to abolish African chattel slavery. The new American government suspended the trans-Atlantic African slave trade in 1783. In the southern states African (and Indian) chattel slavery persisted until it was abolished following the American Civil War in 1865. In 1537 Pope Paul III forbade slavery of the indigenous peoples of the Americas as well as of any other new population that would be discovered. Only Catholic countries applied the doctrine and even then stated that they could not possibly enforce what happened in distant colonies. Britain abolished slavery throughout the British Empire with the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. The French colonies abolished it in 1848. Brazil abolished slavery in 1888. Cuba abolished slavery in 1886. Russia abolished slavery in 1823 and serfdom in 1864. The Ottoman Empire abolished both white and black slavery in 1882. Korea officially abolished slavery in 1894, but it persisted in practice until 1930. Iran abolished slavery in 1928. Saudi Arabia and Yemen abolished slavery in 1962. Mauritania abolished slavery in 1981 and made it a crime to continue practicing it in 2007.
Jeremy,
Not to log ago you discussed the difference between red state republicans and Coastal republicans.
I am beginning to suspect that whites in the mid west and plains states are so much more conservative because they were descended from the rich creeps that spawned the coastal conservatives.
Thanks for the additional info on being owned.