White Cargo on This Day in History

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This Day In History: The ship "Speedwell" started its journey from Europe to transport pilgrims to America on this day in 1620, along with the Mayflower. The New York Times' 1619 Project has a certain narrative about slavery, but few know that these ships were carrying white slaves.

Hundreds of thousands of White people in colonial America were owned outright by their masters and died as slaves. They had no control over their own lives and were auctioned on the block and examined like livestock exactly like Black slaves. White slaves “found themselves powerless as individuals, without honor or respect and driven into commodity production not by any inner sense of moral duty but by the outer stimulus of the whip.” (Hilary Beckles, White Servitude, p. 5).

At the time, White slaves were cheaper than Black slaves and therefore were often mistreated to a greater extent. Having paid a bigger price for Black slaves, “the planters treated the black better than they did their ‘Christian’ white servant. Even the [Blacks] recognized this and did not hesitate to show their con-tempt for those white men who, they could see, were worse off than themselves...” (Carl Bridenbaugh)

Critics often point out that the Whites were servants, not slaves, but even Daniel Defoe in his classic book, Moll Flanders, points out in one section, “'They were of two sorts, first such as were brought over by masters of ships to be sold as servants. Such as we call them my dear,’ says she, ‘but they are more properly called slaves.'”

“...white indentured servants were employed and treated, incidentally, exactly like slaves... “(Morley Ayearst, The British West Indies, p. 19).

“In the North American colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries and subsequently in the United States, servant was the usual designation for a slave” (Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, p. 2,739)

See also: See also: They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America on Amazon

See also: When Blacks Owned Slaves, by Calvin Dill Wilson 1905
https://thebookshelf2015.blogspot.com/2017/02/when-blacks-owned-slaves-by-calvin-dill.html

See also: A History of White Slavery by Charles Sumner 1853 and When the Irish were Slaves, article in The Month 1890

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The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America