IRISH: THE FORGOTTEN
WHITE SLAVES
They came as slaves: human cargo
transported on British ships bound for the Americas. They were shipped by the hundreds of thousands and included men,
women, and even the youngest of children.
Whenever they
rebelled or even disobeyed an order, they were punished in the harshest ways.
Slave owners would hang their human property by their hands and set their hands
or feet on fire as one form of punishment. Some were burned alive and had their
heads placed on pikes in the marketplace as a warning to other captives.
We don’t really
need to go through all of the gory details, do we? We know all too well the
atrocities of the African slave trade.
But are we
talking about African slavery? King James VI and Charles I also led a continued
effort to enslave the Irish. Britain’s Oliver Cromwell furthered this practice
of dehumanizing one’s next door neighbor.
The Irish slave
trade began when James VI sold 30,000 Irish prisoners as slaves to the New
World. His Proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners be sent
overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies.
By the mid
1600s, the Irish were the main slaves sold to Antigua and Montserrat. At that
time, 70% of the total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves.
Ireland quickly
became the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants. The
majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white.
From 1641 to
1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English and another 300,000 were
sold as slaves. Ireland’s population fell from about 1,500,000 to 600,000 in
one single decade.
Families were
ripped apart as the British did not allow Irish dads to take their wives and
children with them across the Atlantic. This led to a helpless population of
homeless women and children. Britain’s solution was to auction them off as
well.
During the
1650s, over 100,000 Irish children between the ages of 10 and 14 were taken
from their parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and New
England. In this decade, 52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to
Barbados and Virginia.
Another 30,000
Irish men and women were also transported and sold to the highest bidder. In
1656, Cromwell ordered that 2000 Irish children be taken to Jamaica and sold as
slaves to English settlers.
Many people
today will avoid calling the Irish slaves what they truly were: Slaves. They’ll
come up with terms like “Indentured Servants” to describe what occurred to the
Irish. However, in most cases from the 17th and 18th centuries, Irish slaves
were nothing more than human cattle.
As an example,
the African slave trade was just beginning during this same period. It is well
recorded that African slaves, not tainted with the stain of the hated Catholic
theology and more expensive to purchase, were often treated far better than
their Irish counterparts.
African slaves
were very expensive during the late 1600s (£50 Sterling). Irish slaves came
cheap (no more than £5 Sterling). If a planter whipped, branded or beat an
Irish slave to death, it was never a crime. A death was a monetary setback, but
far cheaper than killing a more expensive African.
The English
masters quickly began breeding the Irish women for both their own personal
pleasure and for greater profit. Children of slaves were themselves slaves,
which increased the size of the master’s free workforce.
Even if an
Irish woman somehow obtained her freedom, her kids would remain slaves of her
master. Thus, Irish mothers, even with this new found emancipation, would
seldom abandon their children and would remain in servitude.
In time, the
English thought of a better way to use these women to increase their market
share: The settlers began to breed Irish women and girls (many as young as 12)
with African men to produce slaves with a distinct complexion. These new
“mulatto” slaves brought a higher price than Irish livestock and, likewise, enabled
the settlers to save money rather than purchase new African slaves.
This practice
of interbreeding Irish females with African men went on for several decades and
was so widespread that, in 1681, legislation was passed “forbidding the
practice of mating Irish slave women to African slave men for the purpose of
producing slaves for sale.” In short, it was stopped only because it interfered
with the profits of a large slave transport company.
England
continued to ship tens of thousands of Irish slaves for more than a century.
Records state that, after the 1798 Irish Rebellion, thousands of Irish slaves
were sold to both America and Australia. There were horrible abuses of both
African and Irish captives. One British ship even dumped 1,302 slaves into the
Atlantic Ocean so that the crew would have plenty of food to eat.
There is little
question the Irish experienced the horrors of slavery as much (if not more, in
the 17th Century) as the Africans did. There is also little question that those
brown, tanned faces you witness in your travels to the West Indies are very
likely a combination of African and Irish ancestry.
In 1839,
Britain finally decided on it’s own to end its participation in Satan’s highway
to hell and stopped transporting slaves. While their decision did not stop
pirates from doing what they desired, the new law slowly concluded this chapter
of Irish misery.
But, if anyone,
black or white, believes that slavery was only an African experience, then
they’ve got it completely wrong. Irish slavery is a subject worth remembering,
not erasing from our memories.
But, why is it
so seldom discussed? Do the memories of hundreds of thousands of Irish victims
not merit more than a mention from an unknown writer?
Or is their
story to be the one that their English masters intended: To completely
disappear as if it never happened.
None
of the Irish victims ever made it back to their homeland to describe their
ordeal. These are the lost slaves; the ones that time and biased history books
conveniently forgot.
Interesting
historical note: the last person killed at the Salem Witch Trials was Ann Glover. She and her
husband had been shipped to Barbados as a slave in the 1650's. Her husband was
killed there for refusing to renounce Catholicism.
In the 1680's she was working as a housekeeper in Salem. After some of the
children she was caring for got sick she was accused of being a witch.
At the trial they demanded she say the Lord's Prayer. She did so, but in
Gaelic, because she didn't know English. She was then hung.
To learn more you can go to the following sources:
Political Education Committee (PEC)
American Ireland Education Foundation
54 South Liberty Drive, Suite 401
Stony Point NY 10980
