Historian
Roger D. McGrath takes issue with the fundamental argument of The 1619 Project.
For many years I taught a U.S. history survey course.
One of my lecture topics was American slavery. I made a real effort
to put the peculiar institution into historical perspective.
I noted that slavery was not something reserved for blacks here in
America
but was as old as man himself and recognized no racial bounds. There had been
slavery in Asia, slavery in Africa, slavery in Europe, and slavery in the
Americas. Yellow man enslaved yellow man, black man enslaved black man, white
man enslaved white man, and red man enslaved red man.
This shouldn’t have come as a surprise to college students, but, as
the years went by, more and more incoming freshmen were surprised to learn that
slavery was not uniquely American and not uniquely a black experience. Shortly
before I retired from teaching I began running into something more stupefying than
sheer historical ignorance:victimology.
I encountered black students whose worldview was formed by a sense
of victimhood. They were not willing to concede that suffering enslavement was
universal. If I were black, I would have been elated to learn that slavery was
not something reserved for blacks only—that my race had not been singled out as
deserving nothing better.
This was certainly the reaction, more often than not, of my black
students in my early years of teaching. Today, however, we are reaping the
bitter fruit of years of politically correct indoctrination in schools, and blacks
are outraged when the enslavement of other peoples is discussed.
The outrage deepens when white slaves are mentioned and becomes
near hysteria when it is pointed out that whites suffered far more severe forms
of slavery than that experienced by blacks in American colonies and the United
States.
Examples abound, but one of many from ancient Rome should suffice: The
average life expectancy for a slave in the Roman mercury mines was nine months.
Moreover, most of the slaves put to work in the mines were of Celtic or
Germanic stock—as white as one could get. They became slaves as a consequence
of Roman wars and therefore cost next to nothing.
They worked under brutal conditions and day by day absorbed more
and more mercury. They experienced terrible pain, mental confusion, loss of
eyesight and hearing, and died as their liver and kidneys failed. No matter. There
were thousands upon thousands of conquered folks waiting to replace them.
If ancient Rome is too distant, though, examples of white slaves in
the New World can be cited. Having grown up with Seumas MacManus’s The Story of
the Irish Race, I learned from a young age that tens of thousands of Irish were
enslaved and shipped to the West Indies to labor and die on sugar plantations.
There have been studies of recent vintage devoted entirely to the
subject, including Sean O’Callaghan’s To
Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland.
Such works have caused a near hysterical reaction in academe.
Politically correct professors are livid that the topic is even discussed. As
one of my teaching assistants, who was a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, said to another one of my TAs—30 years
ago now —
“There are some facts students
just shouldn’t know.”
It is difficult to determine exactly when the first Irish were shipped to the
West Indies, but by the mid-1630’s the trade was well underway. There were the
Free Willers, who voluntarily sold themselves for a term of indenture, usually
seven years.
There were also the Redemptioners, who were duped into signing
contracts of indenture. Once in the New World, they were sold for cash at
auctions. Then, there were the Spiriters, who were kidnapped and, like the
Redemptioners, sold at auctions.
Many of those kidnapped were children, some as young as eight. One
agent bragged he kidnapped and sold an average of 500 children a year (see
Robert Louis Stevenson “Kidnapped”) throughout the 1630’s. Another agent said he
also averaged hundreds of children annually, and one year sold 850.
The death toll for Africans shipped to the New World was high; so
too was the death
toll for the Irish. A loss of 20 percent during the voyage was considered normal,
a percentage of deaths equal to that suffered by Africans in the infamous
Middle Passage.
Typical was a ship carrying planter Thomas Rous and his 350 indentured
servants. Every day two or three died and were tossed overboard. By the time the ship arrived
in Barbados, 80 of the indentured had died. Most of the ships that carried the
Irish were the same ships used in the African slave trade, and the Irish were packed into the
holds of the ships in identical fashion to the blacks.
Once on the island, death came regularly to the survivors of the
voyage. They were forced to work no less than a 12-hour day and fed only
cornmeal and potatoes. The tropical sun blistered their white skin, and diseases
took a frightful toll.
Those who survived their term of indenture were a minority. Moreover,
various infractions allowed planters to extend the term of indenture, and for
many this meant life. Whipping and branding were common punishments. Maiming
was also practiced. When a plot to rebel was revealed in 1648, conspirators
were arrested and sentenced to death.
They were hanged and drawn and quartered. Their heads were mounted on pikes, which
were placed on the main streets of Bridgetown, the capital of Barbados.
Nonetheless, all of this was but a prelude to the trade in human
cargo that occurred following Cromwell’s rampage through Ireland, 1649-52. So
many Irish soldiers were killed or exiled to continental Europe that the
Emerald Isle was left with tens of thousands of widows and fatherless children.
This caused England’s ruling council in Ireland to pass one of
history’s most cynical orders: That Irishwomen, as being too numerous now—and
therefore,
exposed to prostitution—be sold to merchants, and transported to Virginia, New
England, or other countries, where they may support themselves by their labour.
Cromwell’s soldiers now rode about Ireland rounding up Irish women
and children, and some men, as if they were cattle being driven to market. The
captives were herded into holding pens and branded with the initials of the
ship that was to transport them to the New World.
Fetching the highest prices were young women, who were highly
prized by the Caribbean planters, who “had only Negresses and Maroon women to
solace them.” Estimates of how many women and children were transported and
sold vary widely, but 50,000 is a conservative number.
No less a figure than physician and attorney Thomas Addis Emmet, a
founder of the United Irishmen and a participant in the Rising of 1798, and later
the attorney general of the State of New York, put the figure at more than 100,000,
following a careful study.
After four years the horrific trade in women and girls was stopped
but only because, says John Patrick Prendergast in The Cromwellian Settlement
of Ireland, “the evil became too shocking and notorious, particularly when
these dealers in Irish flesh began to seize the daughters and children of the
English themselves, and to force them on board their slave ships.”
None of these women or children had signed contracts of indenture.
They were simply sold as servants for an indeterminate period of enslavement.
In Barbados they went on the auction block. The best looking of the young women
were bought as concubines by the wealthy English planters.
Occasionally, a planter would formally marry one of the young
women. Most of the Irish females were used as servants in the planters’
households, but many labored in the fields alongside men. Others were put to
work as prostitutes in brothels, and some, many of them no more than 13 years
of age, were forced to breed with black slaves. The mulatto offspring became
the property of the planter.
In this way a small planter could rapidly increase his slave population
without the expense of purchase. Boys could also fetch high prices at auctions
when homosexual planters and merchants wanted young playthings. English visitors
to the island worried not about the sufferings of the Irish, but that the
“slavery corrupts the morals of the master” and turns respectable Englishmen
into “the most debauched devils.”
By 1660, half or more of the white population of Barbados was made
up of indentured Irish. The same was true of St. Lucia, St. Christopher,
Jamaica, Antigua, St. Kitts, Nevis, and
Montserrat.
Those indentured servants
who were shipped to the American colonies were the lucky ones. For the most
part they were freed after their term of indenture, usually four or seven
years, although a number saw their indentures extended for minor infractions.
Many were worked to death long before their term was up.
The planters in Virginia, for example, had a vested interest in
keeping a black slave healthy and, as a result, might get 40 years of work out
of him. The planter had little similar concern for the Irish, Scot, Welsh, or
English servant who would usually be gone at the end of his indenture.
Overworked and malnourished, the servant often died young. In his weakened
condition, he fell prey to disease. The big killer in the tidewater regions of
the South was malaria, which arrived in the New World from Africa carried by
the Anopheles mosquito. Anywhere there were large bodies of standing water and
warm temperatures the Anopheles mosquito thrived.
If it hadn’t been for malaria, black slavery might not have
developed in the colonies. Blacks had protection—the sickle cell—from the
disease, while whites did not. Otherwise, free whites and white indentured
servants would have supplied all the labor needed. By 1700—80 years after the
first Africans had arrived—there were only some 6,000 black slaves in Virginia,
less than eight percent of the population.
Without malaria and other tropical diseases it is unlikely that
this percentage would have increased. During his term of indenture the servant was
a slave in all but name. He could be bought and sold and punished brutally. Some
were beaten to death. Women were often raped. Owners of the servants rarely
suffered any kind of penalty for their inhuman treatment of their property.
Nonetheless, there was an end date to this bondage, and this has
caused an almost hysterical reaction to the use of the term slave when
describing indentured servants, especially when discussing Irish in the West
Indies.
Academics now write articles about the “myth of Irish slavery.” The
authors of these articles argue that the Irish entered into servitude voluntarily
and signed contracts of indenture. That was true for only a minority of the
Irish shipped to the West Indies and clearly not true for the kidnapped women
and children. Moreover, it seems to me that the term slave is more accurate than
the euphemistic term servant.
The owner of such a servant had near-total control over his
destiny. If a master could put a servant on the auction block, then he owned not only the servant’s labor
but the servant himself. He was chattel.
The great English essayist, pamphleteer, and novelist Daniel Defoe, known best for Robinson Crusoe, had it right when he said
indentured servants are “more properly called slaves.” ◆
