The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America

It is significant that two journalists wrote this extremely important book. Many professional historians don't want much attention paid to white slavery for fear that it will take something away from black slavery or make whites feel less compassion for black slaves. That is foolish. People must realize that anyone could (and still can) fall into bondage under whatever name if the circumstances are right. Other books that covered similar subject matter (but received little attention) are:

1) The Forgotten Cause of the Civil War: A New Look at the Slavery Issue by Lawrence R. Tenzer. Shows that white slavery was present in the antebellum American South and played an important role in increasing the tensions between North and South that led to the American Civil War.

2) Legal History of the Color Line: The Rise And Triumph of the One-drop Rule by Frank W. Sweet. Shows that American slave status was not truly based on "race" but on maternal descent from a female slave, regardless of race or color.

3) Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race by Matthew Frye Jacobson. Shows how ruling planters created anti-black racism and white supremacy in order to divide the labor force and secure the help of lower class whites in putting down slave rebellions and fighting Indians.

A very comprehensive book about a segment of Amican history that has been greatly ignored. You won't learn this in any history class. I thought myself to have been well read in both American and European history but found myself learning something new with the turn of almost every page. A+

This is a fascinating book. It explains so much more and sheds a bright light on slavery in America. The level that this was practiced in America was a total surprise to me. Glad I read it. Will pass it on to all my children and family and friends.

Herein lies a feast for hungry historian eyes in search of the truth about America's founding myths. Using a bevy of primary sources, released in the 1990s by both British and Spanish archives, and augmenting them with pirate ship manifests and logs, and court records; plus a wealth of correspondences and anecdotal evidence, Don Jordan and Michael Walsh have now joined a rising chorus of historians who have taken the deep-dive into these new materials, and here, without ever fully acknowledging that they have done so, have come up with a new revised, more complete, and arguably a more honest picture of America's creation story.

The leitmotif of this story is that Britain, though always recognized as a skillful plunderer of the global sea routes, only after the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, was finally accepted not just as bands of state-sanctioned pirates, but as a bona fide global sea power and rival to Spain's predominance. England had gotten into the empire-building game late and was playing "catch-up" to the other European powers already occupying most of North America, especially Spain, Portugal and France. Since Spain had ruled the seas for nearly 150 years, it was the Spanish model of conquest that the English adopted as its template.

The reader will surely recall that in the Spanish model, Queen Isabella of Castile had commissioned and financed able seamen from Genoa of the Italian variety, like Christopher Columbus, who then used the funds his long time friend the queen had provided him, all in a quest for glory and gold, and in the process, the hope to expand her empire by christianizing the savages thought to populate the "New World." In the British adaptation of the Spanish model, a single new twist to the colonization and conquest formula was added: Since ongoing skirmishes in Europe and within England in particular, had virtually stripped the British Exchequer, Queen Elizabeth I, commissioned, but refused to finance, missions to America. British entrepreneurs were thus forced to raise their own funds. The best they could hope for was to use the Queen's commissions as a hook to lure investors.

The first such commission went into two failed missions of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, the half brother of Sir Walter Raleigh. Gilbert found no gold and managed to die in a capsized ship on returning from his second voyage. The second commission was that given to Sir John Popham, Gilbert's successor, and a man curiously written completely out of the American historical narrative, but who, arguably, nevertheless appears to have played a more important role than many of our founding fathers.

In addition to being a rogue, highwayman (i.e., a stage coach robber, today's equivalent of a drive-by shooter or carjacker) and a privateer (i.e., a robber of seagoing vessels), he also proved to be a convincing and a conniving entrepreneur. Because Elizabeth's very corrupt kingdom had taken a liking to men with unsavory reputations such as his, Popham, like Gilbert, too had risen to become a respected, if not one of the most corrupt, British office holders. In lieu of not being financed by the Crown, Popham made a virtue out of necessity and chose to establish two joint stock companies by selling shares exclusively to the gentry as his way of financing his voyages. He thus established both the "London" and the "Virginia" companies. And in the grand style of political corruption of his day, Popham of course promptly made himself the principle investor in the Virginia Company.

Gilbert's earlier failed forays had disabused Popham's of all the "pie-in-the-sky" or "pots of gold" at the end of the American rainbow, ideas. Being a hard-nosed realist, in addition to being a professional criminal, and thus ipso facto, a savvy entrepreneur, he believed that economics (and crime as well as corruption too, apparently) dictated that when there is a demand for something, a market will soon develop.

In short, Popham was convinced that the British colony could be turned into a viable investment project only in the old fashion way: through brute amoral entrepreneurial force: If the vast territories that made up North America were ever to be developed into a viable investment proposition, he advised the queen that the land would have to be worked into farms, and crops yielding goods that could be traded globally. Tobacco and cotton would later prove him right in this regard.

But producing farm goods, required vast amounts of non-existent cheap labor. Whereupon, over the next few decades there followed a two-pronged strategy to both raise finances and bring free labor to Britain's American colonies. There were a series of failed fund-raising attempts, as well as a few failed attempts at settlement, before any of Popham's ideas actually took off.

One idea that achieved modest success was establishing lotteries to buy a chance at winning tracts of land in America. However, the most unsavory of ideas was also the most successful. It was called the "head-right" system. The head-right system was a scheme in which agents would "trick" poor and wayward Europeans into making the voyage in search of freedom, prosperity and land -- never knowing before hand that upon arrival they would immediately be enslaved for between 3-15 years. The agents, who were engaged in this 17th Century con game, were paid handsomely, as well as rewarded with 20-100 acres of land per head. In fact, it is fair to say that most of the gentry of the American colonies, including most of our founding fathers, became wealthy through the acquisition of land through some variation of the head-right system.

As for how agents were able to fool enough free souls to give up everything and sail to the British colonies? Well, all that can be said is that they had considerable assistance in this project from the kingdom. Given the social turmoil going on in the British Isles at the time, both Popham and his predecessor, Gilbert, were of one mind about how this could best be done: Colonize America with the dregs of England: Empty the jails, prisons, flophouses, streets, insane asylums, hospitals, prostitution houses, etc until there are enough slaves transported across the seas to turn a profit.

Thus, began a long amoral descent into "entrepreneurial hell" for those who were told they would find freedom, justice and equality in the new land, when in fact, just the exact opposite of what we have been taught, ensued. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to suggest that the "populating of America" was a series of well-orchestrated but cheap entrepreneurial investment schemes involving the unwitting enslavement of large numbers of innocent white people, schemes that, after much trial-and-error, eventually were perfected for all of the wrong, and often for, greatly embarrassing reasons.

The fabled quest for freedom, liberty and justice, as we now know from this book and from the other recent authors mentioned above, was "still-born." Freedom, liberty and justice were just "catch words" that served as the rhetorical decorations needed to "reel-in the marks." Then, to add moral insult to injury, even after wholesale enslavement of large numbers of people, the cynical entrepreneurs, still adorned their crimes with the same language of freedom, liberty and justice. .

As is still the case today, Sir John Popham was the first to recognize and then begin a process that would become the real underlying reason for America's founding: finding the quickest route to the bottom of the global labor pool. On this point, the historical evidence deployed in this and several other recent books, is all but incontrovertible. Sadly, the "canonical American story about "liberty, freedom, equality and justice," was just so much cheap PR rhetoric, mere "catch words" used as the ornamental "top-cover" needed to lure unsuspecting victims into the traps of boarding transport ships. Put simply, a lot of trickery that ended many lives prematurely and placed thousands of innocent white people into slavery for a large portion of their lives, was the defining act in the creation of the British colony that would become America.

Thus, in his devious but well-organized entrepreneurial mind, it was clear to Popham just how to make a buck for his investors off the cheapest form of labor, which in every culture then as it is now, was to force people to work for free against their will. In every place but Britain and colonial America, this process was known as slavery. But Britain, still crawling out of the Feudal era, had no need to yet invent a word for slavery. So, the euphemism "servant," was also transported to colonial America. And when most of the white Europeans were transported (tricked actually) to America "under contract," the term expanded to the phrase, "indentured servants."

Sir John Popham, should go down in history as a "one man category F-5 social tornado," one who single-handedly rearranged British laws and society so as to facilitate turning America into a dumping ground for British criminals, convicts, kidnapped kids, prostitutes, malcontents, terrorists and so-called free-willers. Not only did he play the leading role in rewriting new laws, and altering and upgrading old ones -- such as vagrancy, juvenile delinquency, drunkard-ness, parole violations, indebtedness, etc., -- but also, being Chief Justice, gave him controlling influence in all the decisions made in the jails and penitentiaries in Britain. All that remained to be done to finalize his plan, was to establish a PR campaign sufficiently robust to lure as many innocent souls as possible onto ships for the 4000 mile trip.

How this was done, in my view constitutes the real tragedy of the American national experiment, and exposes the utter hollowness and dishonesty of the canonical American founding story. For, just as is the case today, the discovery of America, was not first about liberty, justice and equality, as we have been repeatedly told, but was first about the investor's bottomline -- and to make this point unmistakably clear, the investor's bottomline at the time was about an investment in buying and selling humans as slaves. Indeed, the wholesale enslavement of both blacks and whites was exactly the opposite of freedom, justice and equality.

Any one who doubts this, cannot miss the color-coded parallels strewn across American history of: red, white, and then black slavery, quickly followed by yellow coolies during the mid-19th Century (who were paid but in worthless Chinese scripts), and finally the brown near-slaves called "Braceros" and "Latinos," freshly up from our southern borders today in the twentieth Century. Our "so-called immigration problems" have always been little more than the residue from the corporate class' unceasing search for the cheapest labor on the globe.

But more importantly, the Popham template is still live and well, operative in the form of a new alphabet soup of so-called "free-trade" agreements, one of which is at this very moment being negotiated between our faux progressive mulatto president, Mr. Obama, and the party that literally had for seven years spewed venom at him and acted to stymie his every move. What, one might reasonably ask, would motivate Mr. Obama to get in bed with the very snakes that have already bitten him severely and repeatedly?

The answer of course is that as president, Mr. Obama's job is to maintain a steady flow of low wage workers for this generation's version of the 18th Century American gentry. Not disturbing the founding formula that built this nation is Mr. Obama's unwritten mandate. His agreements, currently being negotiated with like-minded corporate elites in other nations, will continue to make the cheapest global labor force that money can buy, available for maximum exploitation by U.S. corporations. This mindless amoral search across the globe for the cheapest available labor, is a sickness of our contemporary corporate class -- just as it was for the gentry of our founding generation. Mr. Obama's version of NAFTA and CAFTA, etc will undermine the democratic freedoms of Americans in the same way that slavery undermined them during the revolutionary generation.

Finally, I must say that I was disappointed that the authors chose to make this a "white slave" versus "black slave" intra-colonial competition, instead of seizing on the more important fact (as other like Gerald Horne, Roxanne Dubar-Ortez, and Andrea Stuart, for instance, did) that this new material actually rewrites the canonical American founding narrative.

I do agree with the authors though that the facts of white enslavement, prior to, during and especially after the American Revolution, very much needed dramatizing. This is especially true since the enslavement of whites went on for at least forty years after the "so-called "American Revolution? (Go figure?) But, it must be said, if only in passing: Are we supposed to forget the fact that it went on for blacks, not just another forty years, but another full century, before it was then, not eliminated, but converted over into its kinder and gentler forms of Jim Crow, share-cropping and penal work-release farms?

But more to my criticism of the book, I believe it borders on being more than just a bit disingenuous not to emphasize that it was the very whites who were enslaved (and now their direct poor white descendants), who, after the "Bacon Rebellion," threw their lot in with the slaveholding class? How could they so easily drink the Kool-Aid of the slaveholders, all in exchange for the paltry price of sharing a "symbolic only" relationship with their brutal masters?

I say "symbolic only" because in every other respect except the artifice of skin color, white slaves remained exactly like black slaves. It was nearly forty years after the revolution before white supremacy changed all this. And sadly, it was as clear then as it is today, that this concession on the part of the Planters, was a devious Machiavellian gesture designed specifically to drive a wedge between black and white slaves so that the kind of unified revolt against them that Bacon's rebellion represented, could never happen again. And in fact, political coalitions between blacks and whites as a revolt against the corporate classes has never happened again. And quite simply, doing so today, in today's toxic racist dominated culture, would be quite impossible.

Today, due in large part to the skillful invention and refinement by the planters of a very useful political instrumentality called "race," division of whites and blacks by racial ideology still remains, and will remain for the foreseeable future, the most salient element in American politics. Four stars

I was surprised by what the author said about first 150 years of the American Colony under British rule before the Revolutionary War (1776) for independence. I am disappointed in the fact that it has been glossed over by our educators. I found that a search on the internet came up with the same documented facts.

Well written and organized. Did not think it was droll at all like some other reviews suggested. Historical sources are abundant and well cited. Excellent book, however, the ending (i.e. last paragraph) seemed rushed as if they were trying to hurry up and summarize the whole thing in less than a page. Overall though, very good read.

Very interesting read. It's definatly not somthing you learn about in school, maybe if we did we would understand the US history a bit more. Highly recommend, great for kids as young as high school too.

Most people think that the country was built on the labor of Africans. Truly, this country was built in fits and starts and was done through what was called indentured servitude - but in reality was slavery.

This is a very detailed and informational telling of how America was built at the cost of very European "settlers." If you can put aside the time period of African slavery, you'll see that commerce today has changed very little from commerce in the 18th and 19th centuries. Money rules all - as long as the rich profit and the poor pay the price.

In their book White Cargo, authors Jordan and Walsh re-explore a perspective that has enjoyed very little support in American history books. Although repetitive at times, this book is quite interesting and overall, an easy read for history buffs.

The socio-economic stratification of America's first white settlers is clearly outlined and links are made to their origins in Jacobean Britain. The focus of this book is on the business of transporting criminals to the King's American colonies and the manipulation of British colonial laws to allow for their unspeakably cruel handling. The primary motive being colonial land acquisition and profits to be made from it. The masterminds are ex-military leaders whose previous career was with Oliver Cromwell's infamous ethnic cleansing tirades (Irish-Catholic genocide). With backing from London's wealthiest merchants, these retired soldiers created a business that enjoyed enormous profits for centuries.

If in fact, the laws defining the difference between chattels & slaves appear blurred (or unrecognized), it isn't because the authors are a "Marxist throwback to the 60's & 70's" ~ its because the laws WERE unclear at that point in history. And, it is quite obvious that colonial courts clearly favored the gentried elite.

Many shocking facts re: colonial social mores and the holding of slaves (Anglo & African) are described. The sheer number of petty criminals transported to America, particularly Virginia, against their will, is appalling. These numbers, if accurate, would mean that the majority of white Americans with family roots in the mid-Atlantic, are indeed decendents of chattel slaves.
As a history/sociology teacher in Virginia, I enjoyed the proximity of details in this book. Although not written in academic format, White Cargo consolidates many scholarly facts. In doing so (and perhaps unwittingly), it provides a basis for what has become known as the modern prison industrial complex.

This book should be required reading when studying Colonial America. Heck, it should be required for every politician, Black Live Matter activist, grievance-monger, hoity-toity "trace my ancestry back to the founders" elite, poor whites, rich whites, eastern liberals, southern red-necks, "woe is me" special snowflake, social welfare advocates, technocrats, and anyone who thinks history is in any way neat, orderly or sane.

I first read this book on loan from the local library. I liked it enough I bought a copy for my own shelf.

I can't say it's a gripping read - it is largely scholarly in tone. But the material presented gives an entirely different flavor to the colonial period that I've ever seen before, and I say that as a certified history teacher who has taught US history. I knew the early days were rough, but this paints a picture that I've never seen hinted at in any US History textbook or college classes, where the subject of "indentured servants" is hardly more than briefly touched, and always very sanitized. Even Nathaniel Bowditch Carry On, Mr. Bowditch , an early American mathematician, became an indentured servant as a child due to family poverty. It's a subject glossed over because it makes everybody look bad - planters, the convicts transported as an alternative to death, the "free-willers" who were so easily duped, the kidnappers and shippers, the British monarchy and parliament, wealthy merchants. Everyone got their hands dirty. It also gives a much more nuanced view of the development of race and class relations and myths.

This is, I think, I great source to point people too, along with White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and Islam's One Million White Slaves and Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, The Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800 (Early Modern History: Society and Culture) who think whites have done nothing but take from the rest of the world and deserve a comeuppance and must pay for past crimes. Centuries ago, life was cheap, and it was brutally bad for all but the ruling classes EVERYWHERE. Every culture and race of note has buckets of blood in their history that should be acknowledged, though the crimes can never be "made right" as the perpetrators are long dead.

This book has extensive end notes, and cites a great deal of original source material. It should be on every history teacher's desk, every homesechoolers library (or at least checked out from the local library), and read at least twice. History requires context, and this book provides a much needed context to a complex and fascinating, but often overlooked, corner of history very well.

tHIS BOOK CAN CREAT AN AWARENESS THAT SLAVERY TOOK MANY FORMS IN THE uNITED STATES. aLSO THAT SLAVERY OF YOUR ANCESTORS IS NO EXCUSE FOR LACK OF
GROWTH AND SUCESS TODAY. iF YOU RENT SPACE IN YOUR HEAD TO OTHERS WHO WOULD USE YOU FOR THEIR GAIN YOU ARE MAKING A SERIOUS MISTAKE.

"White Cargo" by Don Jordan and Michael Walsh is a look at the beginnings of forced labor in the American colonies from a new perspective. There is some very surprising (and sickening) material in this book, but it is well-written, well-researched, and important to know. Sadly, bringing African slaves to the New World didn't begin forced labor here--the British Crown had begun that years before using their own citizens who were socially undesirable. This is a pattern they would repeat for years to come, and which would have major effects on the histories of Ireland, Australia, and other British possessions. A truly interesting book, and unfortunately, forced labor continues around the world to this day.

White Cargo discusses white slavery of the time period from Britain's first settlement in Jamestown of the early 17th century to America's war with Britain during the late 18th century. The focus is mainly on Virginia and Maryland, where that form of slavery was the most pervasive. The author's intention was not to whitewash black slavery, but to bring to light what was long omitted from the history books.

Euphemistically white slavery was referred to as `indentured servitude'. Indentured servitude however was in fact slavery. Many never lived to see freedom as they died either of disease or exhaustion before their time was up. White slaves, like blacks, were crammed on ships during transports (many died in transit), were sold or auctioned off upon arrival, were subject to constant beatings and whippings while on the plantations, were malnourished, were raped, had few rights, and had their children taken away. Whites made up the vast majority of servant labor during the first century of American colonization.

From pages 15-16: “It has been argued that white servants could not have been truly enslaved because there was generally a time limit to their enforced labour, whereas black slavery was for life. However, slavery is not defined by time but by the experience of its subject. To be the chattel of another, to be required by law to give absolute obedience in everything and to be subject to whippings, brandings and chaining for any show of defiance, to be these things, as were many whites, was to be enslaved. Daniel Defoe, writing in the early 1700s, described indentured servants as more properly called `slaves'. Taking his cue, we should call a slave a slave.”

“The indentured servant system evolved into slavery because of the economic goals of early colonists: it was designed not so much to help would be migrants get to America and the Caribbean as to provide a cheap and compliant workforce for the cash-crop industry. Once this was established, to keep the workforce in check it became necessary to create legal sanctions that included violence and physical restraint- This is what led to slavery: first for whites, then for blacks.”

“A creation myth has flourished in which early American settlers are portrayed as free men and women who created a democratic and egalitarian society more or less from scratch.”

The servants who worked the American plantations were largely criminals (many for petty crime), POWs, non-protestant Christians, the hated Irish, and kidnapped youngsters. Shipping these people to America and the Caribbean were a way to rid English Society of some of these outcasts. Servants were not treated as human, but as commodity:

“The convicts were, in a real sense, perishable goods. If a woman couldn’t stand up to the work or was diseased, the £8 or £10 spent on buying her was wasted. With men costing £13 and upwards, the buyer was even keener on ensuring they were sound. Those undergoing inspections or witnessing others being inspected usually drew the same parallel. Convict servant William Green recalled: ‘They search us there as the dealers in horses do those animals in this country by looking at our teeth, viewing our limbs to see if they are sound and fit for their labour.'” (p252)

Few indentured servants lived to find freedom and fewer ended up owning any sort of property. Owners almost always found ways to add time to the servants' bid such as blaming them for bad behavior, laziness, or for attempting to run away. The courts normally sided with the owners. There is also the myth of persistent racism, at least during the early days of slavery. According to African-American writer Lerone Bennett Jr (p170):

"Not only in Virginia but also in New England and New York, the first Blacks were integrated into a forced labor system that had little or nothing to do with skin color. That came later. But in the interim, a fateful 40-year period of primary importance in the history of America, black men and women worked side by side with the first generation of whites, cultivating tobacco, clearing the land, and building roads and houses."

And according to the African American historian Audrey Smedley (p 170): "Early references to blacks reveal little clear evidence of general or widespread social antipathy on account of their colour ... Records show a fairly high incidence of co-operation among black and white servants and unified resistance to harsh masters."

In the beginning, blacks were indentured just like the whites. Some blacks who survived at the end of their contracts even became plantation owners themselves and owned slaves. Racism did eventually come into play when colonies began passing laws such as the legalization of lifetime enslavement for blacks, the barring of blacks from owning white slaves, and reduction of property rights for blacks.

When Andrew Thomas cries on youtube about Irish Slaves not being slaves. That convicts forced into servitude on sugar plantations, and literally worked to death... that is Death with a "D" Andrew, make sure you got that, that is slavery. Not to mention the forced deportations of a Nation into forced labor camps. Ya I suppose that the Jews for the Nazi's where "just convicts of the State also" by Andrew's logic. His google search was limited and failed to check sources. Celtics and the Irish have always been a source for white slaves, just look at the Romans or even the Vikings. Although we are talking about the context in The New World. Well once again, not only where convicts taken, but so where homeless and anybody else that the Crown felt it could profit form the free labor of the Irish Slaves. This book comes in to disprove him 110%. He wants academic sources... well cupcake, this is the book for you. Anyways, you are wrong. XO

Celeste write a review calling the book fiction. Futhering ignorance by pointing out that the SLAVES signed a contract when the choice between leaving or death kind of forces the decision. The second coming of Irish to the new world came after the ":so called " famine. You can't have a famine when enough produce, meat and dairy was shipped out of the country to feed the population twice over.
I am a first generation American from Irish parents.
The irish population was reduced to less than 400,000 under Cromwell and the intention was to wipe them out entirely. There were bounties on them at one point and killing an Irishman was not illegal.
The book is only the tip of the iceburg. It kills me when I hear "Famine" and te early IRA called terrorists. My Grandmother is buried in a mountain grave site and the head stone reads, "Buried with Honor by the Old IRA"
These people gave all to free their country from 800 years of English occupation and untold horrific abuse.

Thought so. You never tell the honest truth about your past, euro-Americans. Ever.. Now it's out. Smile, you did it to your selves, to each other, as you say to the minorities. Deal with it status quo, as it eats at america

The plight of millions of American slaves has been overlooked by historians for far too long. Slavery in the Americas was not limited to black Africans nor were the depredations inflicted on non-African slaves.

This well-documented, scholarly expose of white slavery is a must-read for historians and civil-rights advocates, many of whom will be surprised by how widespread this practice was. The practice of indenture was well-known, but the fact that bondage often lasted until the end of life is not. I found this work to be simultaneously heartbreaking, infuriating, and riveting in content.

My husband's sixth-great-grandmother and her son were sold on the block in Charleston, but whenever we tell this story, other people actually try to "correct" us with, "No, she was an indentured servant, not a slave." (Not true). This long-overdue work is a memorial to the nameless individuals who died in bondage as well as an expose of a practice too long forgotten and ignored by American history textbooks. Five stars.

This is not just focused on the data regarding the Irish, Scottish, and even British slum children and what happened to them but includes a wraparound narrative that puts these numbers into perspective. In that sense the book at times seems to go off the topic but all in all I found it very informative. Of course all of this was much more complex. While reading Capital in the Twenty-First Century you can note that things like this may be on the verge of becoming the norm again, if it isn't already.

Very readable, as an avid history reader I would have enjoyed a little more detail as some of it was not 'new' to me. If you are looking for a good intro or medium level book this is a good one to start with, well researched and meaty; holds interest well.