I must also add that there is much evidence pointing to the fact that the average Southern free worker was worse off then the average Southern chattel slave. Now I know that this statement will raise a number of eyebrows and will be outright condemned by some but the facts are there indicating that was so; but I will put this aside for the moment and touch on this later.

Now I gather from your comment on English convicts that you lack some knowledge on this subject as it was not only the English who were transported. A bit of research effort shows convicts were made up of English and Welsh – 70%, Irish - 24%, Scottish - 5%, and the remaining 1% from the British outposts in India and Canada, Maoris from New Zealand, Chinese from Hong Kong and slaves from the Caribbean.

Also your comments in regards to the transported convicts “after all these people were criminals” shows that you are rather a callous person or you lack knowledge regarding the era of transportation and the conditions that lead up to it.

By the end of the 1700's few people convicted of a capital crime were actually executed due to the increasing use of royal pardon, by which transportation was substituted for hanging upon the recommendation of judges.

Transportation had in fact first begun in 1654 and had continued during the rest of the seventeenth century. Before 1750, transportation had been used to send criminals who had been reprieved from a death sentence to work on plantations in the colonies in North America and the West Indies. It is a little known fact that four-fifths that is eighty percent of the white slaves sent to Britain’s sugar plantations in the West Indies did not survive their first year.

By the late 1760’s transportation had reached a high level. After American Independence, however, an alternative destination was available - this was Botany Bay in Australia. Over a period of eighty years spanning 1788 to 1868 about 164,000 convicts were transported to the Australian colonies. Up to 1834 it was an offence for a convict to return home from transportation - the punishment was death – but then in 1834 it was altered to penal servitude for life.

Until 1840 English Judges passed long and savage sentences of transportation for the most trivial offences. As an example in his book, In Punishments of Former Days by Ernest William Pettifer the author states: “In 1827 a youth of 18 who was sentenced to transportation for life for stealing a pocket handkerchief.” W. Eden Hooper in Newgate and the Old Bailey gives many instances of the sentences handed out. I give a few sentences taken at random. Stealing an apron, transported for life; bacon, life; worsted yarn, life; 2 lbs. of potatoes, 14 years; a pair of shoes, 14 years; a bottle of spirits, 14 years. In the book A Shepherd's Life by W.H. Hudson, the author states: “In 1830, the farm labourers, driven wild by grinding poverty, and the threat of unemployment owing to the introduction of machinery, rose, and there was some rioting. It was mercilessly put down and Special Commissions sat at Salisbury; 33 to be transported for life, ten for 14 years, and so on.”

We live in an age of deception where propaganda rules;
lies are presented as fact and the truth is distorted.

Now it may surprise some people but slavery and a slave trade existed in Africa before the arrival of the slave traders from Europe. Before the arrival of the slave buyers from Europe the African tribal kings and chieftains already had made alliances with other non-European slave traders to supply their fellow countryman for assorted commodities that lead to the exported of millions of sub-Saharan Africans to North Africa, the Middle East, and the Persian Gulf. When the slave traders from Europe turned up in Africa the wheels of slavery were already established and well-greased and it was only a matter of adapting itself to the increase demand.

In her publication Confronting the Legacy of the African Slave Trade [1] Zayde Gordon Antrim [2] also pointed out that African slavery was in existence well before the arrival of the Europeans:

Richard Hellie in Slavery in Russia 1450-1725 says:

In 1998, President Clinton visited Uganda and offered an apology to Africans for slavery. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni replied; "African chiefs were the ones waging war on each other and capturing their own people and selling them. If anyone should apologize, it should be the African chiefs. We still have those traitors here even today." [8]

Now I do not doubt the hardship and torment that Africans abducted into slavery suffered, but while this historical fact has been exploited for political and financial gain not many people are aware that huge numbers of Europeans were also abducted and sold into slavery.

To put into perceptive; you had a group of pale skinned Predators on one side of the world, that had no compunction about killing or treating their own their own pale skinned people as chattel, trading with a group of dark skinned Predators on the other side of the world who also had no compunction about killing or treating their own their own dark skinned people as chattel.

Is this belief consequential or has this perception been manipulated?

“The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly - it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over”
Joseph Goebbels

I remember reading a psychology article once that touched on a subject called "contiguity". Apparently from experiments done it was shown that if you pair one word or concept - stimulus one - with another word or concept - stimulus two - long enough, one by itself will automatically supply the other in the mind. A classic example is that of slavery; mention the subject of slavery and people automatically think of Africans or think of slaves as black.

Now am I paranoid? Paranoia is a thought process characterized by excessive anxiety or fear, often to the point of irrationality and delusion. Now am I being irrational or delusional…well let’s look at the facts and let the facts speak for themselves. Now I will have to refer to my notes I have on this subject…I will give you the references and links to my information to enable you to verify what I say.

Slavery in early medieval Europe was so common that the Roman Catholic Church repeatedly prohibited it - or at least the export of Christian slaves to non-Christian lands was prohibited at, for example, the Council of Koblenz in 922, the Council of London in 1102, and the Council of Armagh in 1171.

Old English law itself did have something of a slave code, based on the concept of villeinage from which we derive the words villain and villainy with their new pejorative connotations. With the emergence of English Common Law [1175-1225], the aristocrats drafted the writ of novel disseisin to establish a category of juridical un-freedom known as villein tenure which could defeat any English peasant's claim to land, no matter how long his family had held it. Later the Bracton [9] code equated the English villein with the Roman servus or slave, thus denying him all basic rights. It is interesting to note that during this time villeinage was considered a hereditary condition.

Not only were the people of Europe treated like chattel by their own predatory rulers but the Barbary Corsairs also thought them fair game for exploitation.

The Barbary Corsairs, also sometimes called Ottoman corsairs or Barbary Pirates, were Muslim pirates and privateers that operated from North Africa, from about 1500 to 1800. Their stronghold was along the stretch of northern Africa known as the Barbary Coast from which their reach extended throughout the Mediterranean, south along West Africa's Atlantic seaboard, and into the North Atlantic as far north as Iceland. They often made raids on European coastal towns to capture Christian slaves to sell at slave markets in places such as Algeria and Morocco. For most of this period the various European navies were too weak to put up more than token resistance.

In the book, White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and North Africa’s One Million European Slaves by Giles Milton, the author illuminates the less-well-known history of the Europeans who were captured for the North African slave markets by Barbary pirates. He asserts that there may have been one million such white slaves seized from Spain, France, England and even the fledgling American colonies. In a review of this book by English newspaper The Guardian it states: "Giles Milton's remarkable tale of 18th-century slavery, White Gold, is a hidden nugget from the treasure house of history." [LINK]

According to Professor Robert C. Davis in his book Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800 the trans-Atlantic trade in blacks was strictly commercial, but for Arabs, memories of the Crusades and fury over expulsion from Spain in 1492 seem to have fuelled an almost jihad-like Christian-stealing campaign. Professor Davis writes: "It may have been this spur of vengeance, as opposed to the bland workings of the marketplace, that made the Islamic slavers so much more aggressive and initially (one might say) successful in their work than their Christian counterparts,…” During the 16th and 17th centuries more slaves were taken south across the Mediterranean than west across the Atlantic. Some were ransomed back to their families, some were put to hard labour in North Africa, and the unluckiest were worked to death as galley slaves.

What is most remarkable about the Barbary slaving raids is their scale and reach. Pirates took most of their slaves from ships, but they also organized huge, amphibious assaults that practically depopulated parts of the Italian coast. Italy was the most popular target, partly because Sicily is only 125 miles from Tunis, but also because it did not have strong central rulers who could resist invasion.

According to Professor Davis when pirates sacked Vieste in southern Italy in 1554, for example, they took an astonishing 6,000 captives. Another 7,000 slaves were taken in the Bay of Naples in 1544, in a raid that drove the price of slaves so low it was said you could "swap a Christian for an onion." Spain also suffered large-scale attacks; after a raid on Granada in 1566 netted 4,000 men, women, and children, it was said to be "raining Christians in Algiers." Professor Davis points out that for every large-scale raid of this kind there would have been dozens of smaller ones.

Some Arab pirates were skilled blue-water sailors, and terrorized Christians 1,000 miles away. One spectacular raid all the way to Iceland in 1627 took nearly 400 captives. We think of Britain as a redoubtable sea power ever since the time of Drake, but throughout the 17th century, Arab pirates operated freely in British waters, even sailing up the Thames estuary to pick off prizes and raid coastal towns. In just three years, from 1606 to 1609, the British navy admitted losing no fewer than 466 British and Scottish merchant ships to Algerian corsairs. By the mid-1600s the British were running a brisk trans-Atlantic trade in blacks, but many British crewmen themselves became the property of Arab raiders.

Davis states: “One of the things that both the public and many scholars have tended to take as given is that slavery was always racial in nature - that only blacks have been slaves. But that is not true.” He goes on to say: “We cannot think of slavery as something that only white people did to black people.”

During the time period that Professor Davis studied, it was religion and ethnicity, as much as race, that determined who became slaves. Professor Davis also states that the vast scope of slavery in North Africa has been ignored and minimised; in large part because it is on no one’s agenda to discuss what happened. In regards to this he states: “The enslavement of Europeans doesn’t fit the general theme of European world conquest and colonialism that is central to scholarship on the early modern era.”

But while this saga was brought to an end you still had the continuing saga of Indentured Servitude that, throughout its history, brought much misery, suffering and premature death to many of the hundreds of thousands of whites shipped out to the English colonies.

Indentured servants were basically slaves and the courts enforced the laws that made it so.

According to the book White Cargo, by Don Jordan [10] and Michael Walsh [11], mainstream histories refer to these labourers as indentured servants, not slaves, because many agreed to work for a set period of time in exchange for land and rights. The authors argue, however, that slavery applies to any person who is bought and sold, chained and abused, whether for a decade or a lifetime. Many early settlers died long before their indenture ended or found that no court would back them when their owners failed to deliver on promises. And many never achieved freedom. This vividly written book tells the tale from both sides of the Atlantic. Its condemnation is aimed at both American planters and the English elite, who were blinded by greed, arrogance and a desire to get rid of their “society’s sweepings.” Horribly, one of the first groups sent to America was made up of street children, ages 8 to 16, who arrived in 1619. This slave trade, which the authors say was often “dressed up in bright humanitarian clothes” for the public, later extended to beggars, Gypsies, prostitutes, dissidents, convicts and anyone else who displeased the upper classes. I must add that this is an excellent book that covers this era in stark details.

Lay historian Col. A.B. Ellis, writing in the British newspaper Argosy, dated May 6, 1893, states: “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 political prisoners ... where they were sold by auction to the colonists for various terms of years, sometimes for life as slaves.”

Michael A. Hoffman II confirms white slavery in his book, They Were White and They Were Slaves. He wrote; “Plantation slavery was instituted in the British West Indies as early as 1627.” By the 1640s, 21,700 of 25,000 slaves in Barbados were white according to the Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series of 1701. Hoffman goes on to state: “A large number of the white slaves arriving in America were described as convicts, but were actually political prisoners. Of the Scottish troops captured at the Battle of Worcester, more than 600 were shipped to Virginia as slaves in 1651.”

George Downing wrote a letter to the honourable John Winthrop Colonial Governor of Massachusetts in 1645, “Planters who want to make a fortune in the West Indies must procure white slave labor out of England if they wanted to succeed.” [12] Lewis Cecil Gray’s History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860 vol.1 pp 316, 318 records Sir George Sandys’ 1618 plan for Virginia, referring to bound whites assigned to the treasurer’s office: “To belong to said office forever … The service of whites bound to Berkeley Hundred was deemed perpetual.”

In 1641, Ireland's population was 1,466,000 and in 1652, 616,000. According to Sir William Petty [13], 850,000 were wasted by the sword, plague, famine, hardship and banishment during the Confederation War of 1641-1652.

At the end of the war, vast numbers of Irish men, women and children were forcibly transported to the American colonies by the English government [14]. These people were rounded up like cattle, and, as John P. Prendergast reports on “Thurloe's State Papers” [15] in The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland: "In clearing the ground for the adventurers and soldiers (the English capitalists of that day)... To be transported to Barbados and the English plantations in America. It was a measure beneficial to Ireland, which was thus relieved of a population that might trouble the planters; it was a benefit to the people removed, which might thus be made English and Christians … a great benefit to the West India sugar planters, who desired men and boys for their bondsmen, and the women and Irish girls…To solace them."

J. Williams provides additional evidence of the attitude of the English government towards the Irish in an English law of June 26, 1657: "Those who fail to transplant themselves into Connaught (Ireland's Western Province) or (County) Clare within six months... Shall be attained of high treason... Are to be sent into America or some other parts beyond the seas..." [19] He also goes on to state that anyone banished who return are to "suffer the pains of death as felons by virtue of this act, without benefit of Clergy.” [20] [21]

In 1659 the English parliament debated the practice of selling British whites into slavery in the New World. In the debate whites were referred to not as Indentured Servants, but as slaves “whose enslavement threatened the liberties of all Englishmen.” [22]

Michael A. Hoffman II confirms white slavery in his book, They Were White and They Were Slaves. He wrote, “Plantation slavery was instituted in the British West Indies as early as 1627.” By the 1640s, 21,700 of 25,000 slaves in Barbados were white. [23]

The English government variously referred to Irish to be transported as rogues, vagabonds, rebels, neutrals, felons, military prisoners, teachers, priests, maidens etc. All historians call them servants, bondsman, indentured servants, slaves, etc., and agree that they were all political victims. The plain facts are that most were treated as slaves. After their land was confiscated by England, which drove them from their ancestral homes to forage for roots like animals, they were kidnapped, rounded up and driven like cattle to waiting ships and transported to English colonies in America, never to see their country again. They were the victims of what many called the immense Irish Slave Trade.

The following are but a few of the numerous references to those Irish transported against their will between 1651 and 1660.

Emmet asserts that during this time, more that: "100,000 young children, who were orphans or had been taken from their Catholic parents, were sent abroad into slavery in the West Indies, Virginia and New England, that they might lose their faith and all knowledge of their nationality, for in most instances even their names were changed... Moreover, the contemporary writers assert between 20,000 and 30,000 men and women who were taken prisoner were sold in the American colonies as slaves, with no respect to their former station in life." [24]

After reviewing the profitability of the slave trade, King Charles II chartered the Company of Royal Adventurers in 1662, which later became the Royal African Company. The Royal Family, including Charles II, the Queen Dowager and the Duke of York, then contracted to supply at least 3000 slaves annually to their chartered company. They far exceeded their quotas. It is interesting to note that from 1680 to 1688, the Royal African Company sent 249 shiploads of slaves to the Indies and American Colonies, with a cargo of 60,000 Irish and Africans. More than 14,000 died during passage. [30]

There are records of Irish sold as slaves in 1664 to the French on St. Bartholomew, and English ships which made a stop in Ireland en route to the Americas, typically had a cargo of Irish to sell on into the 18th century. Few people today realize that from 1600 to 1699, far more Irish were sold as slaves than Africans. [31]

Then there were the Scots who were also sold into slavery. Kelly D. Whittaker writes in White Slavery: “There were hundreds of thousands of Scots sold into slavery during Colonial America…The judges of Edinburgh Scotland during the years 1662-1665 ordered the enslavement and shipment to the colonies a large number of rogues and others who made life unpleasant for the British upper class.” [32]

It is interesting to note the early ancestors of the Scots, Alba and Pics were enslaved as early as the first century BC. Julius Caesar enslaved as many as one million whites from Gaul. Varro, a Roman philosopher stated in his agricultural manuscripts that white slaves were only things with a voice or instrumenti vocali. [33]

The Irish and Scots would differently fall into the category of being of those who have been most oppressed peoples over the last millennium; in fact what these people endured must be summed-up as a genuine holocaust that has been buried in the past and never mentioned by those who promote the distorted propaganda that is presented as history.

Amazingly, kidnapping was in many cases a legally sanctioned practice. A 1618 Parliamentary bill allowed for constables to forcefully nab all orphaned children over eight years old and to detain them in prisons awaiting shipment to colonial plantations. [35]

n 1618 the London authorities began rounding up beggar children between the ages of eight and sixteen. This was urban renewal that paid for itself because the children, like convicts, brought a good price from American planters. In the WHITE CARGO: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America by Don Jordan and Michael Walsh the authors note that "of the first 300 children shipped between 1619 and 1622, only twelve were still alive in 1624." At least one is known to have died after she was subjected to 500 strokes for skipping work. Over the years, towns all over England gathered up young beggars judged to be a burden, and sold them in the colonies.

Other laws allowed for the bodily capture of debtors and criminals. A 1652 Commonwealth law permitted officials to identify “begging or vagrant” subjects and cause them to be “seized on and detained” in order to be schlepped in shackles to the colonies [36]. Similar initiatives arose throughout the British Isles as local officials realized it was cheaper to sail their lumpen proles [37] [38] westward than to continue doling out poor relief. Hoping to send their underclass en masse to New York, the Scottish Privy Council in 1669 issued orders for local officials to round up “strong and idle beggars, vagabonds, egyptians, common and notorious whoores, theeves, and other dissolute and lousy persons.” [39]

In his book Bound Over the author, John Van der Zee, states the following: “Press gangs in the hire of local merchants roamed the streets, seizing ‘by force such boys as seemed proper subjects for the slave trade.’ Children were driven in flocks through the town and confined for shipment in barns…So flagrant was the practice that people in the countryside about Aberdeen avoided bringing children into the city for fear they might be stolen; and so widespread was the collusion of merchants, shippers, suppliers and even magistrates that the man who exposed it was forced to recant and run out of town.”

An estimate published in 1670 alleged that 10,000 British subjects had been kidnapped that year [41]. A pamphlet issued ten years later reckoned that ten thousand Brits were still being captured per year, every year. [42] If those stats are reliable, this would total 100,000 British kidnapping victims in the 1670s alone. In the history of slavery in America, fewer than 400,000 black slaves were imported. [43]

Then there was the journey by sea, known as the Middle Passage, which often proved as traumatic and lethal as it had for African slaves. The British slaveships were often little more than floating coffins. Duncan Campbell, an English merchant who shipped white convicts to America until the Revolution broke out, chalked up a ten percent middle-passage death rate as a “moderate loss.” [44] One historian calculated that between ten and fifteen percent of all white bondsmen “commonly died during the voyage.” [45] Others peg the overall death quotient as murderously higher.

Ships carrying White slaves to America often lost half their slaves to death. According to historian Sharon V. Salinger, “Scattered data reveal that the mortality for [White] servants at certain times equaled that for [Black] slaves in the ‘middle passage,’ and during other periods actually exceeded the death rate for [Black] slaves.” [46] Salinger reports a death rate of ten to twenty percent over the entire 18th century for Black slaves on board ships enroute to America compared with a death rate of 25% for White slaves enroute to America.

In Journey to Pennsylvania [47] the author records his journey in 1790 by ship to the English colony of Pennsylvania. He states:

In his book America at 1750: A Social Portrait, in the chapter titled “White Servitude”, the author Richard Hofstadter states the following:

Barbados was barbaric. Not only was the flaming equatorial heat inimical to the European metabolism, Barbadian slave-drivers were said to be particularly cruel. One island commissioner reportedly petitioned Cromwell to switch over to black slavery, reasoning that since black slaves were a costlier, more permanent investment, the vicious overseers might “take more interest in their preservation and so work them with moderation.” [49]

All writers on the 17th century American colonies are in agreement that the treatment of white servants or white slaves in English colonies was cruel to the extreme, worse than that of black slaves; that inhuman treatment was the norm, that torture and branding FT, fugitive traitor, on the forehead was the punishment for attempted escape. Dunn stated: "Servants were punished by whipping, strung up by the hands and matches lighted between their fingers, beaten over the head until blood ran," - all this on the slightest provocation. Ligon, an eyewitness in Barbados from 1647-1650 said, "Truly, I have seen cruelty there done to servants as I did not think one Christian could have done to another." [51]

In Bound Over: Indentured Servitude and American Conscience by John Van Der Zee the author states:

Of course the white slaves in the Caribbean were no better of. Although 21,700 Irish slaves were purchased by Barbados planters from 1641 to 1649, there never seemed to have been more than about 8 to 10 thousand surviving at any one time. [53]

In 1688 a member of the nobility wrote from a British colony in the Caribbean islands to the British government, "I beg...care for the poor White Servants here, who are used with more barbarous cruelty than if in Algiers. Their bodies and souls are used as if hell commenced here and only continued in the world to come." [54]

Carl and Roberta Bridenbaugh write in No Peace Beyond the Line: The English in the Caribbean: "Twenty or more (White) servants laboring under the supervision of an overseer led the most wearisome and miserable lives...if a servant complained, the overseer would beat him; if he resisted, the master might double his time in bondage...the overseers act like those in charge of galley slaves...The cost in (White) lives of such inhuman treatment is incalculable, but it was very, very high."

Punitive violence, such as whippings, was liberally employed against Irish slaves, and was often used on them immediately upon their arrival in the colonies to brutally reinforce their enchained status, and as a warning against future disobedience. [56] The dehumanizing and degrading cattle-like physical inspections used to assess and showcase the "qualities" of each captive for prospective buyers, which reached infamy with the Black slave markets, was also practiced upon both White slaves and indentured servants in the colonies of the West Indies and North America. Irish slaves were marked off from their free White kinsmen through a branding of the owner’s initials applied to the forearm for women and on the buttocks for men by a red-hot iron. Irish women, in particular were seen as a desirable commodity by White slave owners who purchased them as sexual concubines. Others found themselves sold off to local brothels. This degrading practice of sex slavery made Irish men, women and children potential victims to perverse whims of many unsavoury buyers. [57]

In reality, White slaves fared no better a fate as unwilling human property than did contemporary captive Africans. At times they were even treated worse then their Black counterparts due to economic considerations. This was especially true throughout most of the 17th century, as White captives were far more inexpensive on the slave market than their African counterparts, and hence were mistreated to a greater extent as they were seen as a conveniently disposable labour force. It was not until later that Black slaves became a cheaper commodity. [58] An account dating back to 1667 grimly described the Irish of Barbados as “poor men, that are just permitted to live ... derided by the Negroes, and branded with the Epithite of white slaves.” [59] A 1695 account written by the island’s governor frankly stated that they laboured “in the parching sun without shirt, shoe, or stocking”, and were “domineered over and used like dogs.” It was common knowledge among the Irish of this era that to be deported, or “barbadosed”, to the West Indies meant a life of slavery. [60] In many cases, it was actually common for White slaves in Barbados to be supervised by mulatto or Black overseers, who often treated captive Irish labourers with exceptional cruelty. Indeed: “The mulatto drivers enjoyed using the whip on whites. It gave them a sense of power and was also a protest against their white sires. White women in particular were singled out for punishment in the fields. Sometimes, to satisfy a perverted craving, the mulatto drivers forced the women to strip naked before commencing the flogging and then forced them to continue working all day under the blistering sun. While the women were weeding in the fields in that condition, the drivers often satisfied their lust by taking them from the rear.” [61]

On the subject of slave breeding James F. Cavanaugh states the following:

How many tourists today who take winter vacations in such Caribbean islands as Jamaica and Barbados know that they are visiting the site of a gruesome holocaust against poor white slaves who died by the tens of thousands and were slaves in those islands long before blacks ever were? Historian Richard Dunn has stated that the early sugar plantations of the British West Indies were nothing more than mass graves for White workers. [66] Four-fifths of the White slaves sent to the West Indies didn't survive the first year. [67]

Upon release from bondage, white servants were legally entitled to “freedom dues.” The popular myth is that most servants received a fertile chunk of sod and lived happily ever after. This is an outright falsehood, as most states granted no land whatsoever as part of their freedom dues. Maryland was an exception. But a study of approximately 5,000 white indentured servants in Maryland during the 1670s reveals that only a quarter of them inherited the 50-acre headright; [68] in fact, a higher number of them had died in bondage than had received land. [69] Instead of land, most white ex-slaves were promised only clothing, tools, and/or a pittance of cash. A 1700 Pennsylvania law provided only for two suits, an axe, and two hoes. [70] In the mid-1700s, Virginia’s freedom dues for newly released servants amounted to a one-shot cash payment of three pounds, ten shillings. [71] In North Carolina around the same time, freedom dues were a trifling three pounds. [72]

So how far could a white ex-slave go on three pounds sterling? Would he be able to purchase livestock, land, or slaves - in short, any of the things which brought financial security, especially in the South? For the freed indentured servant, “[T]he statistical probability for rising to even middle-class position was very slight,” writes one historian [73]. The most commonly cited guesstimate, provided by indentured-servitude specialist Abbot Emerson Smith, is that only one in ten white ex-slaves would “wax decently prosperous.” Smith reckoned that maybe another one in ten would achieve some measure of self-sufficiency. Eight of ten servants, however, either “died during their servitude, returned to England after it was over, or became ‘poor whites.’” [74] A Maryland priest observed that “white servants, after their terms of bondage is out, are stroling [sic] the county without bread.” [75] Governor Bradford of Massachusetts lamented that “by one means or another, in 20 years time, it is question whether ye greater part be not growne ye worser.” [76] In South Carolina, Frederick Law Olmsted commented that “the poor white people, meaning those, I suppose, who bring nothing to market in exchange for money but their labor…are worse off in almost all respects than the [black] slaves.” [77]

Now I stated earlier many Southern free workers were worse off then the Southern chattel slaves. An excellent booklet entitled AMERICA FOR FREE WORKING MEN written by Charles Nordhoff in 1865 [LINK] gives an insight on how chattel slavery impacted on the free workers in the Southern states. I quote a few extracts from this publication:

“Another planter in Virginia employed a gang of Irishmen in draining some land. But mark the reasons he gave for this use of free labor. ‘It's dangerous work’ (unwholesome), said he; ‘and a negro's life is too valuable to he risked at it. If a negro dies, it is a considerable loss, you know.’ This slaveholder did not care how many Irishmen died in his malarious ditches. So, too, on the southwestern steamboats, slaves are employed to do the lightest and least dangerous labor, but Irish and German free workingmen are employed to perform the exhausting and dangerous work. Thus, on the Alabama River, Olmsted observed that slaves were sent upon the bank to roll down cotton bales, but Irishmen were kept below to drag them away. The mate of the boat said, by way of explanation, ‘The niggers are worth too much to be risked here ; if the Paddies are knocked over-board, or get their backs broke nobody loses anything.’ [Pages 7-8 Emphasis added]

“Alfred E. Matthews, of Starke county, Ohio, in his ‘Journal of his Flight’ from Mississippi, in 1861, remarks: ‘I have seen free white mechanics obliged to stand aside while their families were suffering for the necessaries of life, when slave mechanics, owned by rich and influential men, could get plenty of work; and I have heard these same white mechanics breathe the most bitter curses against the institution of slavery and the slave aristocracy.’ [Page 8 Emphasis added]

“These instances, culled from southern life, show the bearing of the slave system upon the free working population. The planters do not need the assistance of the free laboring class; they despise it, and discourage it. [Page 8]

“In another part of his address he said: ‘Eighteen or at most nineteen dollars will cover the whole necessary annual cost of a full supply of wholesome and palatable food, purchased in the market,’ for one person in South Carolina. It would seem, therefore, that so completely had the slave system robbed the free man of the opportunity to make an honest livelihood, that one-sixth of the free white population of South Carolina could not earn even the paltry sum of eighteen dollars per annum! So completely have the slaveholders monopolized the labor market for their slaves! [Page 9]

“The bitter hatred of the ‘free white’ in the South for the negro has been often spoken of. Does any one wonder at it, when he considers that these free men feel the wrongs they suffer, but are too ignorant to trace them to their sources? They hate the slaves, but if they were somewhat more intelligent they would hate the slaveholders, who are the authors of all their woes. [Page 9]

“The slaveholders have the political power; they look only to their own interests; and even where they have established manufactures, they have given work preference to slaves over free men and women. [Page 10]

“It matters nothing to him (the slaveholder) how low others can produce the article ; he can produce it lower still, so long as it is the best use he can make of his labor, and so long as that labor is worth keeping. That is to say, a free white mechanic is at the mercy of his neighbor, the capitalist, in a slave state, because, if the capitalist does not like his price, he can ‘go and buy a carpenter and sell him again when the work is done.’ Thus, while it is true that in the long run and on the average free labor is always cheaper than slave labor, the capitalist who monopolizes the slave labor is able to drive out or starve out the free laborer over whom he and his slaves have an unfair advantage. The slaveholders used to boast that there were no ‘strikes’ in the South - here we see the reason. [Page 11]

“The capitalist, in a slave state, is a man with a hundred black arms, all bare, all eagerly seeking work, all ready to work for less than a free man can support his family decently upon. The capitalist is a hundred-armed workman, with enough social influence to command work for all his hundred arms, to the exclusion of the honest free mechanic and laborer. The slave, in the hands of this capitalist, is the most dangerous enemy the free workman can have. Suppose a job of work for twenty mechanics is to be given out in a southern town - twenty free men offer themselves - but a slave-owner comes, with the prestige of great wealth, with his social influence and his political power, and he gets the preference for his twenty slaves, the profits of whose labor go to make him richer, while his free neighbors grow poorer. It is not strange that the southern free workingmen resent this monstrous wrong - but it is lamentable that they make the error of hating the tools with which the wrong is done, and not those who use these helpless tools, and the iniquitous system which permits it. It is as though a martyr should abhor only the thumb-screws which torture him, but regard kindly the executioner who applies them; it is as though a western traveller should complain of the scalping knife, but love the Indian savage who uses it. [Page 13]

“...the products of slave labor were also exempted from taxation. Tobacco, corn, wheat and oats were not taxed; but the product of free labor, consisting of cattle, hogs, sheep, etc., was heavily taxed; as were also the earnings of free laboring men, who were obliged to pay an income tax. It was asserted by Mr. Peirpoint, in 1860, that 'upwards of two hundred and thirty million dollars of the Virginia slaveholders' capital in slaves was exempted from taxation.’ [Page 15]

“But while the slave owner was so protected, see how it fared with the free laborer? Every free mechanic, artisan, or laborer of whatever kind, who was in the employment of any person, was obliged, by a special law, to pay an income tax...The Virginia slaveholders exempted only themselves! They taxed the poor, but left the rich to pay nothing. [Page 15]

“Thus was slave labor encouraged and free labor made penal in the South. Thus, to use Marion's words, the poor became poorer and the rich richer. Thus free mechanics were driven out of the slave states, taxed out, starved out, until, in 1859, Charleston, one of the chief seaports of the South, had not left so much as a single ship-carpenter.” [Page 16]

It was much better to have Irish do it, who cost nothing to the planter if they died, than to use up good field-hands in such severe employment.

Now a small minority of the population who were white owned slaves but this does not justify placing the blame and guilt of this slave era on the backs of all white people. The facts show that the white slave owner had no feelings of kith and kin towards his follow, non-slave owning, free workingmen and in fact evidence shows the opposite; he felt contempt towards them. The slave owners considered themselves to be an elite and acted accordingly; they controlled and welded the political power and owned most of the wealth.

It is interesting to note that the first blacks in the Virginia Colony were treated as indentured servants. As with white indentured servants, the blacks were freed after a stated period. Blacks gradually did sink to a status lower than whites, and a man who was a freed indentured servant helped push them in that direction. A full-blooded African from Angola, he took the English name of Anthony Johnson. After his term of indentured service he prospered mightily, accumulating more than 1,000 acres and a score of servants both black and white. He found fault with one of his blacks, an individual named John Casor, and in 1650, after a lengthy lawsuit, persuaded a court to make the man a servant for life. Casor, then, was one of the first blacks condemned to chattel slavery as we know it. It was only in 1671 that Virginia made all blacks coming into the colony slaves for life.

This subject was mentioned in AMERICAN HERITAGE, under the title "Selling Poor Steven". Citing the official US Census of 1830, there were 3,775 free blacks who owned 12,740 black slaves. [83]

Mr. Koger reports that by 1840, South Carolina boasted 454 Negro masters with 2,357 slaves. Although only about one in five white households in the South owned slaves, approximately 75 percent of the free black heads of household in the state owned slaves. Many former slaves did not regard slavery as a malevolent institution but as an economic opportunity, and had no qualms about buying other blacks once they were able to.

The reality is large numbers of free Negroes owned black slaves; in fact, in numbers disproportionate to their representation in society at large. In 1860 only a small minority of whites owned slaves. According to federal census reports, on June 1, 1860, there were nearly 27 million whites in the country; of that total some eight million of them lived in the slaveholding states. According to the authors Raymond Logan and Irving Cohen in their book The American Negro: Old World Background and New World Experience the census determined that there were fewer than 385,000 individuals who owned slaves. Now even if all slaveholders had been white, that would amount to only 1.4 percent of whites in the country or just 4.8 percent of southern whites owning one or more slaves.

According to these same census reports there were nearly 4.5 million blacks in the United States, with fewer than four million of them living in the southern slaveholding states. Of the blacks residing in the South, 261,988 were not slaves. Of this number, 10,689 lived in New Orleans. One of America’s leading African American historians, Duke University professor John Hope Franklin, records that in New Orleans over 3,000 free blacks, owned slaves, or 28 percent of the free blacks in that city.

Another interesting book on the same subject is Free Negro Owners of Slaves in the United States in 1830, by the noted black historian, Carter G. Woodson. This book lists the names and address of free blacks who owned slaves. The book is very readable, and outlines cases of free black women owning their husbands, free black parents selling their children into slavery to white owners, and absentee free black slave owners, who leased their slaves to plantation owners, among other things.

In conclusion I have to quote the author Larry Koger who writes in Chapter 6 of his book, Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790-1860 that: “By and large, Negro slaveowners were darker copies of their white counterparts.”

There will only be racial peace when knowledge of radical historical truths are widespread and all sides base their actions on ethical reasoning and not from fantasies of White guilt
and the uniqueness of Black suffering.

But what is amazing is when we rip the scab away covering the issue of slavery and peer deeply into the wound we see and discover facts that are rarely discussed or not mentioned at all; one subject which is certainly not mentioned in the propaganda about slavery is Jewish involvement in the slave trade.

The Predator has no conscience when it comes to exploitation; whether it be his own kind
or people of a different race.

On the BLACK & JEWS website [LINK] there is a review of the book, published in 1991, and entitled The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews by the Historical Research Department of the Nation of Islam which presents a multitude of compelling facts describing first hand accounts of a pernicious and extensive involvement of Jews in the African slave trade. This review states in part:

Then the review goes on to make the following interesting points:

Also on the same Radio Islam website they also have a number of "Quotes and Facts regarding Blacks and Jews" [LINK]. I give two of these quotes:

So based on a careful review of the scholarly literature on "New World" Jewish history by Jewish historians, here is what we do know about Jews in the slave trade: [LINK]

The truth will survive an unbiased interrogation but a lie will wither and die.

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