Him showing me this paper came after a long discussion about how I may or may not be funded for my second year of graduate study.  So my father says he has something to show me.

And he pulls out the page with this information about Tormut Rose on it, and we start to go through it.

And after realizing that this means that I just might be the descendant of slaves, I ask him how this is even in the least bit helpful.

And he says, "Life isn't fair, you could be a slave. Things could be worse remember that."

And somehow that made sense.  Pearls, mouth, swine.  Father of mine.

My middle name is Andrew, so is my father, and I have no idea why this is so.  Though I think it might have something to do with Tormut Rose and the land my ancestors were forced from.  Nearly 400 years if so.

And I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage-Billy Bragg

(I put contract in single quotes to indicate I don't know a better word to use.)  

Convict labor was also used and I vaguely remember there were white life-time slaves as well.  Eventually (white) people became uncomfortable about owning white slaves and the practice died out.

[Note: repost of comment from the Open Thread.]


She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

http://www.kavanaghfamily.com/articles/2003/20030618jfc.htm

In the 12 year period during and following the Confederation revolt, from 1641 to 1652, over 550,000 Irish were killed by the English and 300,000 were sold as slaves, as the Irish population of Ireland fell from 1,466,000 to 616,000. Banished soldiers were not allowed to take their wives and children with them, and naturally, the same for those sold as slaves. The result was a growing population of homeless women and children, who being a public nuisance, were likewise rounded up and sold. But the worse was yet to come.

In 1649, Cromwell landed in Ireland and attacked Drogheda, slaughtering some 30,000 Irish living in the city. Cromwell reported: "I do not think 30 of their whole number escaped with their lives. Those that did are in safe custody in the Barbados." A few months later, in 1650, 25,000 Irish were sold to planters in St. Kitt. During the 1650s decade of Cromwell's Reign of Terror, over 100,000 Irish children, generally from 10 to 14 years old, were taken from Catholic parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and New England. In fact, more Irish were sold as slaves to the American colonies and plantations from 1651 to 1660 than the total existing "free" population of the Americas!

But all did not go smoothly with Cromwell's extermination plan, as Irish slaves revolted in Barbados in 1649. They were hanged, drawn and quartered and their heads were put on pikes, prominently displayed around Bridgetown as a warning to others. Cromwell then fought two quick wars against the Dutch in 1651, and thereafter monopolized the slave trade. Four years later he seized Jamaica from Spain, which then became the center of the English slave trade in the Caribbean.

there are plenty of links

http://www.electricscotland.com/history/other/white_slavery.htm

Marcellus Rivers and Oxenbridge Foyle, England's Slaves 1659 consists of a statement smuggled out of the New World and published in London referring to whites in bondage who did not think of themselves as indentured servants but as "England's Slaves" and "England's merchandise."
Colonial Office, Public Records Office, London 1667, no. 170 records that "even Blacks referred to the White forced laborers in the colonies as "white slaves."  Pages 343 through 346 of Historical Sketch of the Persecutions Suffered by the Catholics of Ireland by; Patrick F. Moran refers to the transportation of the Irish to the colonies as the "slave-trade."

Ulrich B. Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South explain that white enslavement was crucial to the development of the Negro slave system.  The system set up for the white slaves governed, organized and controlled the system for the black slaves.  Black slaves were "late comers fitted into a system already developed."  Pp 25-26.  John Pory declared in 1619, "white slaves are our principle wealth."

The above quotations from various authors are just the tip of the iceberg on the white slave trade of the Americas.  People from the British Isles were kidnapped, put in chains and crammed into ships that transported hundreds of them at a time.  Their destination was Virginia Boston, New York, Barbados and the West Indies.  The white slaves were treated the same or worse than the black slave.  The white slave did not fetch a good price at the auction blocks.  Bridenbaugh wrote in his accounting on page 118, having paid a bigger price for the Negro, the planters treated the black better than they did their "Christian" white servant.  Even the Negroes recognized this and did not hesitate to show their contempt for those white men who, they could see, were worse off than themselves.

see even :

http://www.geocities.com/~sconemac/slavery.html

The Forgotten Slaves: Whites in Servitude in Early America and Industrial Britain
http://www.revisionisthistory.org/forgottenslaves.html
(this one has to be taken with caution for its value judgments)

Why do Welsh names seem to be so common within the African American community ?
http://www.data-wales.co.uk/plantations.htm

The Slave Trader, the White Slave, and the Politics of Racial Determination in the 1850s
http://www.historycooperative.org/cgi-bin/justtop.cgi?act=justtop&url=http://www.historycooperat ive.org/journals/jah/87.1/johnson.html

As usual, human behavior is messy and greedy and the rationalizations for bad behavior don't hold, even while its going on, so nothing is ever clear cut.

But in general, the Scots and Irish and Welsh were not made slaves to turn a profit (although I'm sure it happened), but to control and clear them off the land, usually by criminalization.

My grandparents' families still spoke of the Highland Clearances when I was young, as though it had just happened.  I think this happens in populations, not because they like to hold grudges, but when they haven't ever recovered, economically and otherwise.  

In any case, my grandfather was from Shetland and I was always told the story of how his ancestor and his brother were run off the land in the Scottish Highlands.  How their villages were burned, their people murdered, starved, and run off to the coasts.  The brothers refused to leave and were declared criminals.  They were hunted and captured and put on a ship to Canada.  The ship stopped for supplies in Shetland and somehow the brothers escaped and were hidden by the townspeople until the ship left.

My ancestor ended up staying and marrying a girl from home, who had been shipped to Shetland earlier, by less forcible means, because she couldn't learn English and her family was afraid for her so they found her a position as a servant there with a Gaelic speaking family.

If you're prone to getting pissed-off, I wouldn't delve too deeply into your Scottish history.  We don't want you ending up painted blue.


Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding. -Hobbes

Yes, Cromwell deported large numbers of people to the New World where they existed in brutal servitude, alongside many others who laboured in less-than-free conditions. Were they "slaves"? That's a thorny linguistic and legal problem.

In theory, England had no unfree labourers, serfdom having died out very early in the medieval period. All labourers were routinely called "servants" in the 17th century.

In practise, indenture temporarily robbed labourers of almost all legal rights, and was used extensively to solve the labour shortage in England's colonies. They might be kidnaped from the streets or duped into signing a contract. Orphans and the landless might be shipped out (to a tidy profit for parish authorities).
Or, in the case of Cromwell's retributions, they might be shipped out in punishment for  a crime (although the volume of the Cromwell cases are really exceptional).

Their contracts could be bought and sold, and their legal rights were few. Sometimes they rebelled, spectacularly. A group of servants bound for Virginia were shipwrecked on Bermuda in 1609. The settlers and the working sailors of the ship mutinied against their masters in the Virginia company, refusing to leave Bermuda. Virginia Company leaders had to  hang one man and execute another by firing squad in order to get them to leave and carry on to Virginia.

(Beware, by the way, of geography. In the 17th century, "New England" and "Virginia" were used vaguely by English sources, often simply meaning "the mainland continent." "America" to Englishmen and women often meant the Caribbean insular colonies, not the continent. People sold "to Virginia" might end up anywhere from Surinam to Nova Scotia.)

The first Africans sold in Virginia (the actual colony)in 1619 were probably treated as indentured servants; a black man, Antonio Johnson, is recorded as such. By the 1640s, he was a free man with his own "servants."

Race-based slavery of lifetime servitude reserved for non-whites alreay existed in the 17th century, having developed in the Iberian colonies with a basis in various Iberian laws. Gradually, various English-speaking colonies adopted a race-based definition of slavery, which made forced servitude both inheritable and lifetime, was a gradual process  over the course of the 17th century. (Unitary Moonbat and I did a brief history of this at dKos, btw.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/11/19/203156/38 ) By 1750, there's a hug difference between indentured servant and slave in England's colonies. In 1650, it's not so clear.

Much colonial labour was less than free(whether "slave" or "servant"); a nice consideration of some of the meanings of unfreedom in the English Atlantic world (and the resistance to such unfreedom by labouring peoples) can be found in
The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic by Peter Linebaugh and Maruc Rediker.

 I'm sorry, this has turned into an overlong comment.
I also want to add the caveat that French, Dutch, and Iberian definitions and practises all have their own unique histories; I'm restricting myself to the English cases here.

Progressive Historians and The Next Agenda