White Slavery in Early America

In They were White and they were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America, revisionist author Michael A. Hoffman II put together a remarkable record of White slavery in America from historical documents. What follows is only a small part of the evidence he presents.

White Slavery in Early America

David Brion Davis writing in the New York Review of Books, Oct. 11, 1990, p. 37 states:

“As late as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, continuing shipments of white slaves, some of them Christians, flowed from the booming slave markets on the northern Black Sea coast into Italy, Spain, Egypt and the Mediterranean islands... From Barbados to Virginia, colonists.., showed few scruples about reducing their less fortunate countrymen to a status little different from that of chattel slaves... The prevalence and suffering of white slaves, serfs and indentured servants in the early modern period suggests that there was nothing inevitable about limiting plantation slavery to people of African origin.”

L. Ruchames in “The Sources of Racial Thought in Colonial America,” states that “the slave trade worked in both directions, with white merchandise as well as black.” (Journal of Negro History, no. 52, pp. 251-273).

In 1659 the English parliament debated the practice of selling British Whites into slavery in the New World. In the debate the Whites were referred to not as “indentured servants” but as “slaves” whose “enslavement” threatened the liberties of all Englishmen. (Thomas Burton, Parliamentary Diary: 1656-59, vol. 4, pp. 253-274).

Foster R. Dulles in Labor in America quotes an early document describing White children in colonial servitude as “crying and mourning for redemption from their slavery.”

Dr. Hilary McD. Beckles of the University of Hull, England, writes regarding White slave labor, “...indenture contracts were alienable... the ownership of which could easily be transferred, like that of any other commodity... as with slaves, ownership changed without their participation in the dialogue concerning transfer.” Beckles refers to “indentured servitude” as “White proto-slavery” (The Americas, vol. 41, no. 2, p. 21).

In the Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series; America and West Indies of 1701, we read of a protest over the “encouragement to the spiriting away of Englishmen without their consent and selling them for slaves, which hath been a practice very frequent and known by the name of kidnapping.” (Emphasis added). In the British West Indies, plantation slavery was instituted as early as 1627. In Barbados by the 1640s there were an estimated 25,000 slaves, of whom 21,700 were White.

(“Some Observations on the Island of Barbados,” Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, p. 528). It is worth noting that while White slaves were worked to death in Barbados, there were Caribbean Indians brought from Guiana to help propagate native foodstuffs who were well-treated and received as free persons by the wealthy planters.

Of the fact that the wealth of Barbados was founded on the backs of White slave labor there can be no doubt. White slave laborers from Britain and Ireland were the mainstay of the sugar colony. Until the mid-1640s there were few Blacks in Barbados. George Downing wrote to John Winthrop, the colonial governor of Massachusetts in 1645, that planters who wanted to make a fortune in the British West Indies must procure White slave labor “out of England” if they wanted to succeed. (Elizabeth Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America, pp. 125-126).

“...white indentured servants were employed and treated, incidentally, exactly like slaves...” (Morley Ayearst, The British West Indies, p. 19).

“The many gradations of unfreedom among Whites made it difficult to draw fast lines between any idealized free White worker and a pitied or scorned servile Black worker... in labor-short seventeenth and eighteenth-century America the work of slaves and that of White servants were virtually interchangeable in most areas.” (David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, p. 25).

In the Massachusetts Court of Assistants, whose records date to 1633, we find a 1638 description of a White man, one Gyles Player, as having been “delivered up for a slave.”

The Englishman William Eddis, after observing White slaves in America in the 1770s wrote, “Generally speaking, they groan beneath a worse than Egyptian bondage” (Letters from America, London, 1792). Governor Sharpe of the Maryland colony compared the property interest of the planters in their White slaves, with the estate of an English farmer consisting of a “Multitude of Cattle.”

The Quock Walker case in Massachusetts in 1783 which ruled that slavery was contrary to the state Constitution, was applied equally to Blacks and Whites in Massachusetts.

Patrick F. Moran in his Historical Sketch of the Persecutions Suffered by the Catholics of Ireland, refers to the transportation of the Irish to the colonies as the “slave-trade” (pp. 343-346).

The disciplinary and revenue laws of early Virginia (circa 1631-1645) did not discriminate Negroes in bondage from Whites in bondage. (William Hening [editor], Statutes at Large of Virginia, vol. I, pp. 174, 198, 200, 243, 306. For records of wills in which “Lands, goods & chattels, cattle, moneys, ne-groes, English servants, horses, sheep and household stuff” were all sold together see the Lancaster County Records in Virginia Colonial Abstracts, Beverly Fleet, editor).

Lay historian Col. A.B. Ellis, writing in the British newspaper Argosy (May 6, 1893): “Few, but readers of old colonial State papers and records, are aware that between the years 1649-1690 a lively trade was carried on between England and the plantations, as the colonies were then called, in politi-cal prisoners... where they were sold by auction to the colonists for various terms of years, sometimes for life as slaves.”

Sir George Sandys’ 1618 plan for Virginia referred to bound Whites assigned to the treasurer’s of-fice to “belong to said office for ever.” The service of Whites bound to Berkeley’s Hundred was deemed “perpetual.” (Lewis Cecil Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, vol. I, pp. 316, 318).

Certainly the enslaved Whites themselves recognized their condition with painful clarity. As one White man, named Abram, who was accused of trying to agitate a rebellion stated to his fellows, “Wherefore should wee stay here and be slaves?”

In a statement smuggled out of the New World and published in London, Whites in bondage did not call themselves “indentured servants.” In their writing they referred to themselves as “England’s slaves” and England’s “merchandise.” (Marcellus Rivers and Oxenbridge Foyle, England’s Slavery, 1659).

Eyewitnesses like Pere Labat who visited the West Indian slave plantations of the 17th century which were built and manned by White slaves labeled them “White slaves” and nothing less (Memoirs of Pere Labat, 1693-1705, p. 125). Even Blacks referred to the White forced laborers in the colonies as “white slaves.” (Colonial Office, Public Records Office, London, 1667, no. 170)

Sot-Weed Factor, or, a Voyage to Maryland, a pamphlet circulated in 1708, articulates the plight of tens of thousands of pathetic young White girls kidnapped from England and enslaved in colonial America, lamenting that:

In better Times e’er to this Land
I was unhappily Trepan’d;
Not then a slave...
But things are changed... Kidnap’d and Fool’d...

The height of academic and media fraud is revealed in the monopolistic trademark status the official controllers of education and mass communications have successfully established between the definition of the word “slave” and the negro, while labeling descriptions of the historic experience of Whites in slavery a fallacy. Yet the very word “slave,” which the establishment’s consensus school of history pretends cannot legitimately be applied to Whites, is derived from the word Slav. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word slave is another name for the White people of eastern Europe, the Slavs. (Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, p. 2,858).

In other words, slave has always been a term for and a definition of a servile condition of White people. Yet we are told by the professorcrats that it is not correct to refer to Whites as slaves but only as servants, even though the very root of the word is derived from the historical fact of White slavery.