I can't make anyone believe anything. People choose what they wish to learn. They choose what to ignore. To say that Irish or English or Indian people were not enslaved is to ignore your own history. In order to progress, you have to understand what unifies you as a nation and who profits from dividing it. The USA was built on slavery - it was divided by politics.
You need only read up on the Black Irish - the breeding of young Irish girls with black slaves in order to get a better price for the light skinned babies. Profit from slavery.
Human bondage is slavery all the same. Power and wealth, profit on the backs of a human regardless of color is still inhumane. Until this is understood - you will not move forward. In England when slavery was finally abolished, the slaves were not just allowed to freely go into the night - they had to be bought from the owners by the government. That money came from the taxpayers of that day and the largest slave owners stood to profit immensely and still retain that wealth to this day. In America, initially some of the slave owners were also compensated for the freedom of the slaves - paid for by the public coffers. sammieswife
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THE IRISH SLAVES
At the beginning of the 17th Century, in the reign of James I of England, England faced a problem: what to do with the Irish. They had been practicing genocide against the Irish since the reign of Elizabeth, but they couldn't kill them all. Some had been banished, and some had gone into voluntary exile, but there were still just too many of them.
So James I encouraged the sale of the Irish as slaves to the New World colonies, not only America but Barbados and South America. The first recorded sale of Irish slaves was to a settlement along the Amazon in South America in 1612. However, before that there were probably many unofficial arrangements, since the Irish were of no importance and details of how they were dealt with were not deemed necessary.
In 1625, the King issued a proclamation that all Irish political prisoners were to be transported to the West Indies and sold as slave labor to the planters there. In 1637, a census showed that 69% of the inhabitants of Monsarrat in the West Indies were Irish slaves. The Irish had a tendency to die in the heat, and were not as well suited to the work as African slaves, but African slaves had to be bought. Irish slaves could be kidnapped if there weren't enough prisoners, and of course, it was easy enough to make Irish prisoners by manufacturing some petty crime or other. This made the Irish the preferred "livestock" for English slave traders for 200 years.
In 1641, one of the periodic wars in which the Irish tried to overthrow the English misrule in their land took place. As always, this rebellion eventually failed. As a result, in the 12 years following the revolt, known as the Confederation War, the Irish population fell from 1,466,000 to 616,000. Over 550,000 Irishmen were killed, and 300,000 were sold as slaves. The women and children who were left homeless and destitute had to be dealt with , so they were rounded up and sold, too.
But even though it did not seem that things could get worse, with the advent of Oliver Cromwell, they did. In the 1650's, thousands more Irish were killed, and many more were sold into slavery. Over 100,000 Irish Catholic children were taken from their parents and sold as slaves, many to Virginia and New England. Unbelievably but truly, from 1651 to 1660 there were more Irish slaves in America than the entire non-slave population of the colonies!
In 1652, Cromwell instigated the Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland. He demanded that all Irish people were to resettle west of the Shannon, in arid, uninhabitable land, or be transported to the West Indies. The Irish refused to relocate peaceably, for the most part, since they couldn't survive if they did.
A law, published in 1657, read:
"Those who fail to transplant themselves into Connaught
(Ireland's Western Province) or (County) Clare within six
months... Shall be attained of high treason... Are to be sent
into America or some other parts beyond the seas..."(1)
Any who attempted to return would
"suffer the pains of death as
felons by virtue of this act, without benefit of Clergy."(2)
The soldiers were encouraged to kill the Irish who refused to move; it was certainly not considered a crime. But the slave trade was so profitable that it was much more lucrative to round them up and sell them. Gangs went out to fill quotas by capturing whoever came across their path; they were so industrious that they accidentally captured a number of French and English and several thousand Scots in the process. By Cromwell's death, at least 100,000 Irish men, women, and children had been sold in the West Indies, Virginia, and New England. While most were sold to the sugar planters in Barbados, Jamaica and throughout the West Indies, some writers assert that at least 20,000 were sold to the American colonies. (3) The earliest record of Irish slaves in America was in 1620, with the arrival of
200 slaves. Most of the documentation, however, comes from the West Indies.
In 1742, a document entitled Thurloe's State Papers, published in London, opined that:
"..It was a measure beneficial to Ireland, which was
thus relieved of a population that might trouble the planters; it
was a benefit to the people removed, which might thus be made
English and Christians ... a great benefit to the West India
sugar planters, who desired men and boys for their bondsmen, and
the women and Irish girls... To solace them
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The enactment of 1652 in the British Isles:
“it may be lawful for two or more justices of the peace within any county, citty or towne, corporate belonging to the commonwealth to from tyme to tyme by warrant cause to be apprehended, seized on and detained all and every person or persons that shall be found begging and vagrant.. in any towne, parish or place to be conveyed into the Port of London, or unto any other port from where such person or persons may be shipped into a forraign collonie or plantation.”
The judges of Edinburgh Scotland during the years 1662-1665 ordered the enslavement and shipment to the colonies a large number of rogues and others who made life unpleasant for the British upper class. [B](Register for the Privy Council of Scotland, third series, vol. 1, p 181, vol. 2, p 101).
Historian Oscar Handlin writes that in colonial America,
White “servants (slaves) could be bartered for profit, sold to the highest bidder for the unpaid debts of their masters, and otherwise transferred like movable goods or chattels…The condition of the first Negroes in the continental English colonies must be viewed within the perspective of these conceptions and realities of White Servitude.”
(Michael A Hoffman, They Were White
This ship from London with people to sell will give credit to buy the “servants”
from the Virginia Gazette, March 28, 1771
Notice the advertisement, the ship, Roneta, just came from London with “a parcel of very likely Servant men and boys”
to be sold
White slaves were owned by Negroes and Indians to such an extent in the South that the Virginia Assembly passed a law against the practice!
“It is enacted that noe negro or Indian though baptized and enjoyned their owne ffreedome shall be capable of any such purchase of christians…”
Christians meant Whites
Statutes of the Virginia Assembly, Vol. 2, pp. 280-81)
Runaway Irish Slave:
Oscar Handlin says that
“Through the first three-quarters of the 17th century, the Negroes, even in the South, were not numerous…They came into a society in which a large part of the White population was to some degree unfree…The Negroes lack of freedom was not unusual. These Black newcomers, like so many others, were accepted, bought and held, as kinds of servants.”
He goes on to say that the desire for cheap labor caused the elite merchants and land owners to enslave not only the negroes but their own White kindred as well
Blacks were much more expensive than Whites, Therefore, Whites were mistreated more often than blacks
During the Colonial period, Whites did the harder work, such as digging ditches, clearing land, and felling trees.
The frontier demands for this kind of heavy manual labor was satisfied primarily by White slaves
As late as 1669 those who had large scale plantations were manning them with White slaves, not negroes.
That’s the way it was done in the mother country, Great Britain!
In 1670 the Governor of Virginia said that he had 2000 Negro and 6000 White slaves.
Hundreds of thousands of Whites in colonial America were owned outright by their masters and died in slavery.
Even the blacks knew this. If they were made to work too hard they accused their masters of “treating them like the Irish”
i / l a? ' b ??r i ? / , officially the Republic of Liberia, is a country in West Africa bordered by Sierra Leone to its west, Guineato its north and Côte d'Ivoire to its east. It covers an area of 111,369 km 2 (43,000 sq mi) and is home to about 3.7 million people.English is the official language and over thirty indigenous languages are also spoken within the country. Its coastline is composed mostly of mangroves, while its more sparsely populated inland consists of forests opening onto a plateau of drier grasslands. The climate is hot and equatorial, with significant rainfall during the May–October rainy season and harsh harmattan winds the remainder of the year. The country possesses about forty percent of the remaining Upper Guinean rainforest. Liberia is the only country inAfrica rooted in U.S. colonization. Beginning in 1820, the region was colonized by blacks from the United States, most of whom were freed slaves. These immigrants established a new country with the help of the American Colonization Society, a private organization which believed that former slaves would have greater freedom and equality in Africa. African captives freed from slave ships were also sent there instead of being repatriated to their countries of origin. In 1847, this new country became the Republic of Liberia, establishing a government modeled on that of the United States and naming its capital city Monrovia after James Monroe, the fifth president of the United States and a prominent supporter of the colonization. The colonists, known as Americo-Liberians, led the political and economic sectors of the country.
