The Slaves That Time Forgot
By John Martin
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? After all, 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 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.
http://afgen.com/forgotten_slaves.html
The Joke is in your Hand! on Amazon.com
It has both Irish and African American jokes and 41 other chapters.
I’m Irish.
the schools can be forced to teach the contributions of gay, lesbian and transgender citizens, why is it that only the black slave story is told? Something should be done about this and the Full Story told.
You go Connie !
The reason is because there is too much money and power associated with slaves having been only black. If they admit whites were slaves too that would cut into the white guilt trip they have white Americans on. It would be difficult to justify the billions we spend to counter and give reparations to the black people. while ignoring the white people who were slaves also. All the black organizations and caucus and racist black leaders would lose their special money train and considerable political power based on their skin color.
The same thing happened with the Japanese who were put in camps during WWII. They all got reparations while the Germans and Italians, who were also put in the camps, were ignored.
Basically, they can’t allow it to look like anything but that the whites are racist oppressors.
Sorry, I’m late to this post, but I just had to say this.
When we were ruled by a black roman emperor’s Did they free the ten’s of thousands of white and black Slaves throughout the roman empire no.
People can be shockingly bad to humanity in the past, now, and in the future.
The article fails to mention that the only reason the African was more expensive was because he was all ready a marked man, easy to identify. He could not easily escape like an Irish and blend into society. This assurance to the master came at an expensive price.
Wow, I always knew the Irish were slaves, but I thought they were slaves in Ireland and Britain. I never knew they were slaves in America. I think one reason this may not be mentioned now a days is to divide the races sadly. I think is was blocked out by Irish Americans so they could be part of the white cultures. The “everybody always liked us, we’re just as white as everybody else” type of stuff. Same thing you see with Italians.
The irish 1st came to the west indies as slaves. All the words people try to use to make their role seem less harsh, they were slaves plain and simple. They weren’t treated worse than the African/indian slaves in th caribbean, but they were actually treated marginally better but we all know how the afro/indi slaves were treated so marginally better than that was still a horrible and terrible faite. Later the scottish and the irish became slave masters in the caribbean, this is true. In Montseratt for EG the irish were the masters alone under English instructions at a certain time. The irish have a part in Jamaican history which I’m proud of and others that I’m upset about but THEY WERE SLAVES and that fact and the fact that most black people across the caribbean carry Irish ancenstry should not be forgotten either. Check the accents for starters
HEY WALLACE…TOTALLY AGREE WITH YOU….I ALWAYS USE TO LISTEN TO IRISH PERSONS SPEAK AND SAY TO MYSELF…YOU SOUND JUST LIKE A JAMAICAN DOES WITH THE WAY THEY PRONOUNCE CERTAIN WORDS!…NOW I KNOW WHY., LOL! AT THE END OF THE DAY..IT REALLY DOES’NT MATTER WHICH GROUP OF SLAVES WERE TREATED BADLY,,,JUST TO BE MADE A SLAVE, AND HAVE YOUR LIBERTY TAKEN AWAY, WAS BAD ENOUGH!….AND HOW TERRIBLE TO BE A YOUNG CHILD AND RIPPED AWAY FROM YOU FAMILY TO A PLACED IN A PLACE FAR FAR AWAY IS ATROCIOUS!…WE’RE ALL HUMANS BLACK OR WHITE. I AM JAMAICAN BY THE WAY AND PART OF MY SURNAME IS ENNIS