The Rev. George Bourne, of Virginia, in his Picture of Slavery, published in 1834, relates the case of a white boy who, at the age of seven, was stolen from his home in Ohio, tanned and stained in such a way that he could not be distinguished from a person of colour, and then sold as a slave in Virginia.[1] At the age of twenty, he made his escape, by running away, and happily succeeded in rejoining his parents.

I have known worthless white people to sell their own free children into slavery; and, as there are good-for-nothing white as well as coloured persons everywhere, no one, perhaps, will wonder at such inhuman transactions: particularly in the Southern States of America, where I believe there is a greater want of humanity and high principle amongst the whites, than among any other civilized people in the world.

I know that those who are not familiar with the working of "the peculiar institution," can scarcely imagine any one so totally devoid of all natural affection as to sell his own offspring into returnless bondage. [2] But Shakspeare, that great observer of human nature, says:—

"With caution judge of probabilities.

Things deemed unlikely, e'en impossible,

Experience often shows us to be true." [3]

1. Virginia was renowned as the cruelest slave-owning region of the American Plantations, sanctioning judicial forms of slave discipline, torture and execution deriving from medieval English practices that continued well into the 1600s in Great Britain, and were first transferred to the English colonies via Jamestown, Virginia in the early 1600s. This was an age when an English King was beheaded before a mob, and when Dutch politicians had their genitals sawed off in public, as happened at the ascension of The Prince of Orange, [later the English King.] There was a trademark practice of smoking slaves alive called Virginia Fairplay attested to by William Wells Brown.

2. There are numerous allusions in the letters, memoirs and surviving court documents concerning poor whites selling their children. The most common situations involved widows selling their boys after the death of their husband [which was the fate of one American president as a boy, as described in the book, America in Chains], fathers selling daughters that refused to marry the man of his choice [which in and of itself was often a monetary transaction] and of orphaned older sisters selling younger brothers. There is a record in the Maryland Gazette of a Pennsylvania schoolteacher who sold his son to a Baltimore-based creditor in the mid 1700s. It is important to recall that debt, unemployment, homelessness and pennilessness were all crimes, punishable by imprisonment or enslavement, under English and Colonial law. Therefore the English roots of American plantation life insured a callousness toward children that people outside of urban America have not experienced and have difficulty imagining. Suffice it to say that I have interviewed two black women from Baltimore who, as children, were rented “pimped” out to male acquaintances of their mother. This sex-slavery practice stems directly from plantation society. In closing, before America won its freedom, it was not normally referred to by those bound here from England as “the colonies” but as “the plantations.”

3. One reason why a study of white slavery in America necessitates the reading of mixed race slave narratives is the fact that white slaves were almost always illiterate throughout their lives and that men such as Craft [Craft's education was post-slavery] were astonishingly well educated, as were a handful of female slaves. Where Frederick Douglas had to learn to read and write by playing word games with white boys, some house servants—although this was illegal—were sometimes well-educated by masters and mistresses who had no desire to spend their day conversing with unlettered people. This was a rarity and did account for two examples of slave verse, one by an African-American woman who was freed, and one by a Cuban man. The usual reason why mixed-race escaped slaves dominate the literature was that they had a better chance of escape—as the Craft's and Moses Roper demonstrate—and that they acquired the patronage of abolitionists who fulfilled their education dreams and coached them on oratory.