The Irish Slave Trade – The Forgotten “White” Slaves
The Slaves That the Progressives and Race baiters conveniently forget.
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.
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 or 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 moms,
even with this new found emancipation, would seldom abandon their kids
and would remain in servitude.
In time, the English thought of a better way to use these women (in
many cases, girls as young as 12) to increase their market share: The
settlers began to breed Irish women and girls 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 that the Irish experienced the horrors of
slavery as much (if not more in the 17th Century) as the Africans did.
There is, also, very 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 it’s 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
nightmarish 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, where are our public (and PRIVATE) schools???? Where are the history books? Why is it so seldom discussed?
Do the memories of hundreds of thousands of Irish victims merit more than a mention from an unknown writer?
Or is their story to be one that their English pirates intended: To
(unlike the African book) have the Irish story utterly and 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.
SO THE NEXT TIME SOME PROGRESSIVE CHARLATAN TELLS YOU ABOUT BLACK SLAVERY.... TELL THEM SOMETHING THEY PROBABLY DO NOT KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT!!
..and for those who will say that the Irish were "just Indentured Servants..."
Slaves or Indentured Servants
There has been a lot of whitewashing of the Irish slave trade,
partly by not mentioning it, and partly by labeling slaves as indentured
servants. There were indeed indentureds, including English, French,
Spanish and even a few Irish. But there is a great difference between
the two. Indentures bind two or more parties in mutual obligations.
Servant indentures were agreements between an individual and a shipper
in which the individual agreed to sell his services for a period of time
in exchange for passage, and during his service, he would receive
proper housing, food, clothing, and usually a piece of land at the end
of the term of service. It is believed that some of the Irish that went
to the Amazon settlement after the Battle of Kinsale and up to 1612 were
exiled military who went voluntarily, probably as indentureds to
Spanish or Portuguese shippers.
However, from 1625 onward the Irish were sold, pure and simple as
slaves. There were no indenture agreements, no protection, no choice.
They were captured and originally turned over to shippers to be sold for
their profit. Because the profits were so great, generally 900 pounds
of cotton for a slave, the Irish slave trade became an industry in which
everyone involved (except the Irish) had a share of the profits.
Treatment
Although the Africans and Irish were housed together and were the
property of the planter owners, the Africans received much better
treatment, food and housing. In the British West Indies the planters
routinely tortured white slaves for any infraction. Owners would hang
Irish slaves by their hands and set their hands or feet afire as a means
of punishment. To end this barbarity, Colonel William Brayne wrote to
English authorities in 1656 urging the importation of Negro slaves on
the grounds that, "as the planters would have to pay much more for them,
they would have an interest in preserving their lives, which was
wanting in the case of (Irish)...." many of whom, he charged, were
killed by overwork and cruel treatment. African Negroes cost generally
about 20 to 50 pounds Sterling, compared to 900 pounds of cotton (about 5
pounds Sterling) for an Irish. They were also more durable in the hot
climate, and caused fewer problems. The biggest bonus with the Africans
though, was they were NOT Catholic, and any heathen pagan was better
than an Irish Papist. Irish prisoners were commonly sentenced to a term
of service, so theoretically they would eventually be free. In practice,
many of the slavers sold the Irish on the same terms as prisoners for
servitude of 7 to 10 years.
