“All the slaves in U.S. history were black! They built this entire country, while suffering under the burden of slavery! All you White people had it easy compared to these poor, put-upon African-Americans! And it was all your fault!”
And there you have the version of our national history as taught to all of us in school, from American history books. But — guess what? Historians sometimes distort, or even lie, about elements of our past about which they have strong political views, or about which they can’t stand to write — the way things ACTUALLY were.
KNOW WHAT? From 1607, when the first English colonists landed at Jamestown, until we declared our independence in 1776, hundreds of thousands of White Europeans — mostly Irish — were shipped across the Atlantic Ocean, often against their own will, to serve as “indentured servants,” mostly for he cotton planters in Virginia and Maryland who were already needing cheap labor to start planting and picking that cotton — as well as doing all the other physical labor that had to be done on the plantations.
“Indentured servant” meant a White person who, willingly or otherwise, agreed to work for an “owner” in the colonies, for seven years, after which he or she would supposedly be freed, be given a few acres of land, etc. At least, that’s the way the deal was outlined to the poverty-stricken Irish — and some Welsh and English — before they had agreed to it.
But often it didn’t work out that way. Many of the “owners” didn’t want to give up their cheaply-purchased servants, and would find ways to fake some kind of misbehavior on the servant’s part that would lead a local judge to perpetuate their obligation to serve, for another seven years — or more. And because of the extremely hard work they were forced to do, and the carelessness and don’t-give-a-damn of their “owners” about the way they were fed and treated, many of the White servants didn’t even live their full seven years.
AND OFTEN, those poverty-stricken White people were the “scum of the streets,” as many in that day and in modern times alike refer to them, who were rounded up by police and other officials in London and other cities, then loaded onto ships to make the trip to America. Another source of White servants was the prisons in Britain, when the government needed to get a bunch of prisoners out of there so they could put in some new ones.
Now, obviously I’m not denying that there were hundreds of thousands of black slaves shipped over to the colonies from Africa, too, and their enslavement was, legally in those days, for life. And many of those black slaves were mistreated by their owners, too. But often, the black slaves were treated better than the White ones. Why? Because the planters usually had to pay what we nowadays would call a “pretty penny” for the Africans, while the European “servants” came pretty cheap.
By the early 1800s, the White slave traffic had pretty much ended, following the Continental Congress’s banning it in 1776, when they declared our independence. Yes, the black slave traffic continued until 1808, when Congress banned it, too. But of course, black slavery wasn’t eliminated until the Civil War ended.
BUT WHAT was often true about how the White slaves and the black slaves were treated differently, still applied when large numbers of immigrants, the Irish the first, began swarming into the U.S. in the late 1840s.
Many of those Irish, poor as church mice as most of them were, wound up doing manual labor jobs, often alongside black slaves, in the South. Once a writer of novels during the 1850s was watching a mixed-race construction gang building a new canal in New Orleans, Louisiana. He noticed that if there was a particular job to be done that appeared more dangerous than most, the foreman always always put a White man to work on it.
The writer asked the foreman why this was. The foreman replied, “If we put a nigger on that job, and he gets killed, or hurt really bad, we have to pay his master for him. If a Mick gets killed or crippled, we just hire another one.”
NOW, THOSE of you who have read other race-related columns I’ve written in the past, are probably saying, “Oh, don’t believe any of that! Engle’s just a horrible racist and fascist! He just made all that up about there being White slaves!”
No, I didn’t “make it all up.” Go on amazon.com, and look for a book entitled, “White Cargo — The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America.” The authors are Don Jordan and Michael Walsh, and the book is well written and very meticulously researched. Another book of the same genre is “They Were White and They Were Slaves — The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America.” It was written by Michael A. Hoffman II, and it too is expertly written and well researched from documents from the 17th and 18th centuries when the White slavery was in vogue. And there are a number of other, similar books available on there about the same subject.
You want to know more about American history, that they didn’t teach you in school? Looks for books like this, and those on other aspects of our history.
That’s what I did. Don’t just accept everything the Establishment tells you is true — because sometimes, it’s not.
