They came as slaves; vast human cargo transported on tall 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. They 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 II and Charles I also led a continued effort to enslave the Irish. Britain’s famed Oliver Cromwell furthered this practice of dehumanizing one’s next door neighbor.
The Irish slave trade began when James II 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.
More @ Global Research
Damn English.
ReplyDeleteMiss Violet
I didn't know about the Irish slaves, but we do know about the Scottish slaves, because Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a very famous novel (which is also a Walt Disney movie) describing it, called, "KIDNAPPED".
ReplyDeleteIn my own limited research on the Internet, I found that the practice of kidnapping Scottish orphans to be sold into slavery on the Carolina plantations persisted for several decades after England outlawed the traffic.
When helping The Church of JESUS CHRIST of Latter-day Saints with some genealogical research, I was perusing United States census records for Kentucky in 1870, and I found - - - ,
A WHITE boy from Ireland, living with a negro family!
Since this was only five years after the war, I'm guessing ALL of them (even the Irish kid?) were probably freed slaves.
Now, as for my own biological family, the Truebloods, who were Quakers who came from England to North Carolina in 1682 seeking religious freedom, some (or all?) of them did own slaves.
But, the Society of Friends forbade their members from owning slaves, and ordered the slaves to be freed.
Concerned that their freed slaves would then be emslaved by their less humane neighbors, many Quakers left North Carolina to settle in southern Indiana, where they helped operate the Underground Railroad.
According to my documented family history, one of the escaped slaves that my ancestors helped was a mysterious WHITE boy who never spoke.
I wonder if the reason the mysterious white boy never spoke, aside from being severely traumatized by the kidnapping, sailing the stormy Atlantic, and being enslaved, was because the only language he knew was Gaelic.
Now then, boys and girls, did you know about the Sir Sidney Smith and the Society of Knights Liberators of the White Slaves in Africa?
Kidnapping and enslavement of Europeans and Americans by Islamic Arabs went on for a couple of centuries before England finally put a stop to it by bombarding Algiers.
Numerically, there were actually more White slaves in Africa than there ever were of negro slaves in America.
Plus, the treatment of those White slaves was much worse, for the Muslims ruled the non-Muslims, the Arabs ruled the negroes, and at the very bottom of that pecking order were the White Christians.
Thanks for the info John.
ReplyDelete"Kidnapping and enslavement of Europeans and Americans by Islamic Arabs went on for a couple of centuries before England finally put a stop to it by bombarding Algiers."
ReplyDeleteI have actually read about such things and was aware it happened. Funny how no one ever brings that up....
Miss Violet
Funny how no one ever brings that up....
ReplyDeleteAww, I'm sure they just overlooked it........:)