White Slavery In The States United

The First Slaves Were American Negro Indians And Whites

WHITE SLAVERY???

White people were slaves too, and not in some far off land, right here in America. We have to shatter that myth. Yes, white people, you were chattel too. I would like to start with the following quotes for context before we continue. There was a connection between Black and White people far more complex than modern history books espouse:

“It sometimes happens that the infant boy entertains a stronger affection for his Black nurse than for his white mother.”

Kemble. F. Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation, p. 194. 1864.

“Every Southern man in his memory runs back to the negro woman who nursed him; to the boy who hunted and fished with him; to the man who first taught him how to swim, and as he grew to manhood the cordial welcome given him by his nurse, with tenderness scarcely inferior to his mother.”

Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, Sex and Race, J.A. Rodgers, Vol. II p. 199, 1942.

“Rev J. H. Aughey said he was struck by the whiteness of some of the “Negros”...There is a girl who does not look very white in the face due to exposure but when I strip her to whip her, I find she has skin as fair as my wife.” J.A. Rodgers, id p. 205

American Slavery As It Is, p.25 1839

“The Niles Register, June 9, 1821, “the people were out of their minds after seeing a woman and her children, “who were as white as any of our citizens, indeed, we scarcely ever saw a child with a fairer of clearer complexion than the younger one”... for sale at public auction amongst the Blacks.”

J.A. Rodgers, id

“In August 1774, William Cunningham brought a number of Whites kidnapped in Ireland to America and sold them. He confessed on his death bed in 1791.”

“Race! Do not speak to us of race- we care nothing for breed or color. What we contend for is, that slavery whether black or white, is a normal, a proper institution in society. The blood of orators, generals, statesmen, even the President of the Republic runs in the veins of men who are bought and sold like horses and mules. Slavery, white or black, is right and necessary.”

George Fitzhugh. Sociology for the South or The Failure of Free Society p. 225 1854

“But the imagery of white slavery was dangerously unstable in an economy that was changing as fast as that of the urban South in the 1850s. It was in 1857, after all, that George Fitzhugh finalized his own famous solution to the anomalous presence of a white working class in a society based upon black slavery: Enslave them all. And, indeed, even as prosperous slaveholders were spending thousands of dollars at a time to buy near-white slaves to work in their households, they were employing increasing numbers of whites (and those, like the Irish, who were in the process of becoming white) as wage laborers, tenant farmers, and domestic servants. New Orleans in the 1850s, as the Louisiana physician and racial theorist Samuel Cartwright described it, daily offered more concrete examples of "white slavery" than did distant strikes or living conditions. "Here in New Orleans," Cartwright wrote in DeBow's Review, "the larger part of the drudgery-work requiring exposure to the sun, as railroad making, street-paving, dray-driving, ditching, building, etc. is performed by white people . . . a class of persons who make Negroes of themselves in this hot climate." As Barbara Jeanne Fields has put it, class relations between white people in such southern cities as New Orleans were being "drawn into [racial] terms of reference, as a ray of light is deflected when it passes through a gravitational field." According to Cart- wright, the Irish were not becoming white, they were, like the white workingmen with whom they shared their days, turning black.”

Published on Historical Society of Pennsylvania,'White Slavery' in the ante-Bellum South and Civil War Era: A Little Known Phenomenon'

White people for some reason have been erased from the slave narrative. Whites, and not just from Ireland were routinely kidnapped and sold into slavery everywhere. There are stories of white people being kidnapped, including children and dipped in black dye to make their skin dark, it was called “bootlegging.” Try to wrap your head around that. Preferably a young girl, 13 and under, kidnapped from her family, molested, passed around like trash, dipped in some sort of dye, having beeswax put in her hair to make it curly, taken to a slave market, threatened to be silent, or drugged and sold like a animal. A white person in America, land of the free.

Richard Hildreth, a 1850 historian noted how easy whites could be kidnapped and made into negro slaves, “Just catch a stray Irish or German girl and sell her... and she turns a 'nigger' at once and makes just as good a slave...”

J.A. Rodgers, id. pp.210

“The Abbeville Banner of Alabama tells of James C. Wilson, white, who married a white woman, and later sold her and her children to a preacher named, Guilford, as slaves. Later he sold his wife's 15 year old brother too.”

Anglo African Magazine, Vol 1 p. 336 1859.

“The Philadelphia (PA) Public Ledger, for December 27, 1860, reprinted an article from a Natchez, Mississippi newspaper, entitled, "Painting a White Girl to Make Her a Slave." It was stated how a man from Natchez was on a steamboat on its way to Greenville, Mississippi, when he noticed a young girl, "aged about nine or ten years," with black hair and "yellowish brown skin." He was told she belonged to a gentleman on board who was taking her to New Orleans to be sold for $160.00. Talking to the young girl alone, the inquisitive passenger was informed by the girl, how " she was an orphan, and had been taken from an asylum in New York," and that her hair had been light originally, but her 'master' had a barber dye her hair black, and also put "some yellow dye on her skin." Soon after the above confession, the young girl was taken by the ship captain, who after using potash, soap and water, removed "the dyes...and the light hair and light complexion were brought to light." The pretended "master was seized by the excited passengers," who caused him to be locked up in a state room until the boat should land. The young girl was eventually placed in an orphan asylum in New Orleans.”

“Cincinnati (Ohio) Gazette(reprinted in the Philadelphia

Daily Evening Bulletin), related that within the 78th Ohio Infantry Regiment, was a man who was taken, "as a runaway slave," into the Union lines in Tennessee. His features and skin color denoted "Anglo-Saxon" ancestry, while his eyes were also "blue, his lips thin, and his hair light." His former Tennessee master had admitted to Colonel Mortimer D. Leggett, "that there was not a drop of African blood in the veins of his slave," and that he had purchased the man in Richmond, Kentucky years before, and that he'd been "sold into slavery, out of some charitable institution to which he had been committed as a vagrant."

The Lebanon (PA) Courier, for April 9, 1863, contains a remarkable tale of a white man held as a slave. The account states how a planter's daughter in Mississippi was seduced, and to "hide her shame" after she became pregnant, her female child was given to a slave woman, along with a certain amount of money, in order to "bring her up as her own." The child eventually became the "mistress of the planter's son, who succeeded to the estate. She had by him five children, and among them the man...Charles Grayson. This was in Calhoun County, Mississippi, three miles from Paris." Eventually Charles was sold to William Steen, and soon after he learned of his true parentage. Running away, he was "captured and treated with harshness. He was made to do more work than any slave.--The object was to break him down. He proved to be strong and able to bear all the burdens put upon him."On December 17, 1862, the Third Michigan Cavalry came into the area, and Grayson procured a horse and rode into their encampment. There he was employed as a cook for one of the non-commissioned officers, Theodore Reese, of Company 'F.' He wished to move North, and was thus aided by Lt. Col. G. Rogers as well as citizens of Jackson, Tennessee, who assisted Grayson in carrying out his plan. Not long after he took up residence in Cass County, Michigan, where by 1870 he was working as a farm laborer for a Peter Scofield and his family of Cass County. Charles Grayson was a 'slave' for seventeen of his twenty-three years, but his "straight, light hair, fair blue eyes, a sandy beard," revealed that he was indeed a Caucasian and not of Black ancestry.”

Published on Historical Society of Pennsylvania,'White Slavery' in the ante-Bellum South and Civil War Era: A Little Known Phenomenon'

“In January of 1857 Jane Morrison was sold in the slave market in New Orleans. The man who bought her was James White, a longtime New Orleans slave trader, who had recently sold his slave pen and bought land just up the river from New Orleans, in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana. ' Morrison, apparently, was to be one of his last speculations as a trader or one of his first investments as a planter. Sometime shortly after her sale, however, Morrison ran away. By the time White saw her again, in October 1857, they were in a courtroom in Jefferson Parish where Morrison had filed suit against him. Before it was settled, that suit would be considered by three different juries, be put before the Louisiana Supreme Court twice, and leave a lasting record of the complicated politics of race and slavery in the South of the 1850s. The reason for the stir would have been obvious to anyone who saw Morrison sitting in court that day: the fifteen-year-old girl whom White claimed as his slave had blond hair and blue eyes. In her petition, Morrison asked that she be declared legally free and white and added a request that the court award her ten thousand dollars damages for the wrong that White had done her by holding her as a slave. She based her case on the claim that her real name was Alexina, not Jane, that she was from Arkansas, and that she had "been born free and of white parentage," or, as she put it in a later affidavit, "that she is of white blood and free and entitled to her freedom and that on view this is manifest."Essentially, Alexina Morrison claimed that she was white because she looked that way. By the time Morrison v. White went to trial, Alexina Morrison would claim that her whiteness made her free, but when Morrison and White first met, in the slave market, it might simply have made her more valuable. It is well known that slaveholders favored light-skinned women such as Morrison to serve in their houses and that those light-skinned women sold at a price premium. What is less often realized is that in the slave market apparent differences in skin tone were daily formalized into racial categories-the traders were not only marketing race but also making it. In the slave market, the whiteness that Alexina Morrison would eventually try to turn against her slavery was daily measured, packaged, and sold at a very high price. The alchemy by which skin tone and slavery were synthesized into race and profit happened so quickly that it has often gone unnoticed. When people such as Morrison were sold, they were generally advertised by the slave traders with a racial category. Ninety percent of the slaves sold in the New Orleans market were described on the Acts of Sale that transferred their ownership with a word describing their lineage in terms of an imagined blood quantum-such as "Negro," "Griffe," "Mulatto," or "Quadroon." Those words described pasts that were not visible in the slave pens by referring to parents and grandparents who had been left behind with old owners. In using them, however, the traders depended upon something that was visible in the pens, skin color. When buyers described their slave market choices they often made the same move from the visible to the biological. When, for example, they described slaves as "a griff colored boy," or "not black, nor Mulatto, but what I believe is usually called a griff color, that is a Brownish Black, or a bright Mulatto," buyers were seeing color, but they were looking for lineage. The words the buyers used-griffe, mulatto, quadroon-preserved a constantly shifting tension between the "blackness" favored by those who bought slaves to till their fields, harvest their crops, and renew their labor forces and the "whiteness" desired by those who went to the slave market in search of people to serve their meals, mend their clothes, and embody their fantasies. They sectioned the restless hybridity, the infinite variety of skin tone that was visible all over the South, into imagined degrees of black and white that, once measured, could be priced and sold. As Monique Guillory has suggested in her work on the New Orleans quadroon balls, the gaze of the consumer projected a fantasy of white masculinity onto the bodies of light-skinned women: the fantasy that other people existed to satisfy white men's desires. Though that fantasy was particularly associated with the notorious "fancy trade" to New Orleans, the sale of light-skinned women for sex or companionship occurred all over the South. The word "fancy" has come down to us an adjective modifying the word "girl," a word that refers to appearances perhaps or manners or dress. But the word has another meaning; it designates a desire: he fancies...The slave market usage embarked from this second meaning: "fancy" was a transitive verb made noun, a slaveholder's desire made material in the shape of a woman like the one slave dealer Philip Thomas described seeing in Richmond: "13 years old, Bright Color, nearly a fancy for $1135." An age, a sex, a complexion, and a slaveholder's fantasy. A longer description of Mildred Ann Jackson traced the same lines: "She was about thirty years old. Her color was that of a quadroon; very good figure, she was rather tall and slim. Her general appearance was very good. She wore false teeth and had a mole on her upper lip. Her hair was straight." Jackson's body was admired for its form, for its delicacy, and for its fetishized details. The slave dealer James Blakenly made the density of the traffic between phenotype and fantasy explicit when he described Mary Ellen Brooks: "A very pretty girl, a bright mulatto with long curly hair and fine features . . . Ellen Brooks was a fancy girl: whiteness means by that a young handsome girl of fourteen or fifteen with long curly hair." Solomon Northup (12 Years a Slave), a free black who had himself been kidnapped and sold in the New Orleans market, remembered slave dealer Theophilus Freeman's account of the price that light-skinned Emily would bring in New Orleans: "There were heaps and piles of money to be made for such an extra fancy piece as Emily would be. She was a beauty a picture a doll one of your regular bloods-none of your thick-lipped, bullet-headed, cotton pickers." Freeman made explicit what lay behind the descriptions; according to the ideology of slaveholders' racial economy, which associated blackness and physical bulk with vitality, such bodies were useless for production. Light-skinned and slender, these women were the embodied opposites of those sought as field hands; their whiteness unfitted them for labor. For slave buyers, near-white enslaved women symbolized the luxury of being able to pay for service, often sexual, that had no material utility they were "fancies," projections of the slaveholders' own imagined identities as white men and slave masters. And so, at a very high price, whiteness was doubly sold in the slave market. In the first instance the enslaved women's whiteness was packaged by the traders and imagined into meaning by the buyers into delicacy and modesty, inferiority and intelligence, beauty, bearing, and vulnerability. These descriptions of enslaved light skinned women, however, were projections of slaveholders' dreamy interpretations of the meaning of their own skin color. Indeed, in the second instance it was the buyers' own whiteness that was being bought. The fantasies they projected onto their slaves' bodies served them as public reflections of their own discernment: they were the arbiters of bearing and beauty; their slaves were the showpieces of their pretensions; their own whiteness was made apparent in the bodies of the people they bought. By buying ever-whiter slaves, the prosperous slaveholders of the antebellum South bought themselves access to ever more luminous fantasies of their own distinction. And so slaveholders were willing to pay a lot of money for the right kind of performance. The better the slaves' performance, the greater the value produced out of the synergetic whiteness of slave and slaveholder. Ironically, these slave market syntheses of whiteness and slavery, these costly flirtations with hybridity, were underwritten by slaveholders' ideology of absolute racial difference. The saving abstraction "black blood" held the power to distinguish nearly white women from really white ones, to distinguish what was essentially performance from what was the performance of essence-slaveholders generally believed that "black blood," if present, would be apparent in the countenance, conversation, or carriage of the one who bore its taint.' When a performance of enslaved whiteness was too good, however, the combination of "white" appearance and behavior could overwhelm the intended distinction; a slave could become "too white to keep," likely to slip aboard a ship or hop onto a train and escape to freedom. A virtuoso performance of whiteness could breach the categories designed to contain and commodity hybridity; a slave could step over the color line and onto the other side. Perhaps the slave trader who sold Morrison to White was thinking of that type of performance when he remembered that she was "too white." And perhaps that is why James White had apparently curled the young woman's hair and dyed it black after he brought her home from the slave market. According to most versions of the southern social order, Alexina Morrison-whether as enslaved white or passing slave-was not supposed to exist at all. But the color coding, black slaves and white supremacy, that characterized most of the political debate over slavery was unreliable as a description of the institution's everyday life. First, there was racial mixture and sexual predation: throughout the history of American slavery it was not always easy to tell who was "black." 'I Second, there was manumission: just as racial mixture made it harder to tell who was "black," manumission made it harder to tell who was a slave. The ultimate expression of slaveholders' property right-the right to alienate their property however they pleased increasingly undermined the ability of slaveholders as a class to keep race and slavery coextensive.' Finally, there were the slave trade and interregional migration: the antebellum South was a rootless society. The broad transition from an upper South tobacco economy to a lower South cotton economy and the domestic slave trade, through which as many as two-thirds of a million people may have passed in the antebellum period, had removed hundreds of thousands of people such as Alexina Morrison from the communities in which their identities were rooted. Through acts as small as lying about their past in the slave market or as audacious as running away and claiming to be white, many of the enslaved people forcibly transported by the trade worked their deracination against their slavery. By 1857, when Alexina Morrison ran away and sued the slave trader, southern lawmakers already had at least two centuries' experience with the ambiguities of a social order in which not all slaves were black and not all nonwhite people were slaves. Throughout the nineteenth century, southern states passed ever more detailed laws defining the acceptable limits of drinking, gambling, and lovemaking along the lines of race and slavery. Those laws attempted to control sites where black and white, slave and free, bargained and socialized freely with one another, places where the white supremacist ideology upon which the defense of slavery increasingly relied was daily undermined in practice. The capstone of the effort to make the categories of race and slavery once again coextensive was the self enslavement laws passed by many states in the 1850s. Based on the racist premise that enslaved people were better off than free people of color because they had white people (read owners) to take care of them, and flirting with the point at which the edifice of pro slavery ideology would collapse beneath the weight of its own absurdity, the laws offered free blacks a chance to choose a master and enslave themselves.' Like many of the other people who came before the courts in cases of disputed racial identity, Alexina Morrison emerged from a shadowy world in which legal and historical categories may have had only episodic relevance to everyday experience. It was not unheard of in the antebellum South for people who were legally enslaved to live as free for many years before being dragged into court as slaves. Nor was it impossible for someone to appear as "black" or, more likely, "mulatto" on one tabulation of the United States census and "white" on another. It sometimes took a long-dormant claim of ownership or an intruding census taker to make people make sense of themselves in the categories that supposedly ordered southern society-black and white, slave and free. When Alexina Morrison escaped from James White, her jailer/protector remembered, the first thing she said was that she was white. And when she brought suit against White, she did so by building this assertion into a story: that she was born of white parents and taken away from her home in Arkansas by "gross fraud," that she had been held by force and falsely claimed as a slave. By the time the case came to trial, however, the pieces of that story had been folded back into the initial assertion of whiteness. Morrison's letters to those whom her lawyers termed "her friends and supposed family" in Arkansas and Texas had gone unanswered (intercepted, the lawyers suggested). As fifteen-year-old Alexina Morrison sat in court while her case was tried, she embodied her lawyer's entire case: her whiteness was "on view ... manifest."Morrison's claim of whiteness drew its power from three sources: her appearance, her behavior, and the idea that "black blood," if present at all, would necessarily be visible. Most simply, her case took the form of outright description. "From his opinion," one witness testified, "the girl is white. Says he judges she is white from her complexion." Or: "Has seen plaintiff and been intimately acquainted with her. From witness' judgment of plaintiff arising from his intimacy she has not the features of the African Race." Other witnesses placed a greater emphasis on behavior when they described what it meant to be white: "Had witness been introduced to the girl without knowing her, he would have taken her for a white girl . . . Has had opportunity of Judging her, and she conducted herself as a white girl. She is so in her conduct and actions. She has none of the features of an African." If there had been any of "the African race" in Alexina Morrison, they argued, it would have been outwardly and objectively visible in the way she looked and acted, but from the moment she had made her initial claim of whiteness, there had been no outward sign that she was anything but white all the way through. As one witness put it, on the night when Morrison escaped from the trader,"she seemed to be in trouble...from her air and her manners." In other words, she seemed like a white woman in distress. Alexina Morrison, in her effort to get free, had been forced to accept attention from white men, many of them non slaveholders, that went well beyond their identification with her plight. "Saw her naked to the waist"-spoken by Morrison's supporters, those words circulate through the trial record like a leitmotiv. Indeed, in the weeks after the mistrial, Morrison's half-naked body seems to have been the center of a festival of whiteness in Jefferson Parish. P. C. Perret remembered seeing her "frequently" exhibited at the hotel in Carrollton after the first trial. And listen to L. Castera, testifying on her behalf and under direct examination in the retrial: "Witness saw the girl at the Hotel and someone asked him if he thought the girl has African blood, at first witness answered no, and then made an examination of her nose, eyes, under her arms, between her shoulders, examined her hair and the conformation of her face, her fingers, nails." Or Seaman Hopkins: "examined plaintiff's back in fact he saw her naked to her waist. Examined her closely and found no traces of the African." These witnesses, part of an apparently leering and possibly threatening group of white men, did things to Alexina Morrison that they would never have done to a white woman in public, not to a maid, not to a dancing girl, not to a prostitute. Publicly exhibited, stripped to the waist, and examined: Alexina Morrison was paying for her freedom with a performance straight out of the slave market. For the men at the hotel in Carrollton, Morrison's liminal body, now protected, now violated; now free, now enslaved; now white, now black; now Mexican, now Indian, now Caribbean, was a symbol of everything whiteness promised them: that they would never themselves be slaves, but that they were entitled to benefit from race as slaveholders did from slavery-through control and sexual access. Alexina Morrison had passed from the property regime of slavery into that of whiteness, from being subject to the prerogatives that defined mastery in the antebellum South to being subjected to those that defined white patriarchy. The case was heard in the lower courts for the third time in New Orleans, where, on January 30, 1862, Alexina Morrison was herself "exhibited to the Jury in evidence." Following the instructions of the Supreme Court, the judge admitted the depositions from Arkansas and gave oral instructions to the jury, which were not included in the trial record. After retiring for "some time," the jury sent word that its members were unable to agree upon a verdict and requested that they be allowed to decide by majority. Present in the courtroom, Morrison consented, and the jury returned to announce that it had voted 10 to 2 in her favor. White's lawyers again appealed to the Supreme Court, where the case was delayed during the Civil War occupation of New Orleans, redocketed five days after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and continued a few times until 1870, when it was placed on the delay docket where it sits today, apparently awaiting action on Morrison's request for damages. It is tougher to track Alexina Morrison. On the Jefferson Parish census of 1860 she is listed as a free white woman, living with her little girl in a house next door to that of William Dennison, the man whom she had first met as her jailer. Morrison's daughter, like the little girl who lived in Dennison's house, was called Mary. Perhaps one-year-old Mary represented Morrison's shadowed claim to a place within Dennison's household, perhaps, more simply, her daughter was Morrison's best hope for a legacy of freedom. For, by the third hearing of the case (in 1862), Alexina Morrison was apparently back in jail, coughing blood, and fearful for her life. And there the trail ends: Neither Alexina nor Mary Morrison appears in the 1870 census of Jefferson or Orleans parishes. Judged by the history recorded in law books and legislative records and according to the Louisiana Supreme Court that had ultimate jurisdiction over her fate, Morrison was swimming against the current of history, finally unable, in spite of her extraordinary effort, to escape the inexorable consolidation of slave holding power in the years before the Civil War. But if we pay attention to the local as well as the legal importance of the case and the everyday as well as the systemic impact of individual acts of resistance, if we think about what it must have been like to wake up in Jefferson Parish on the morning after the district court had decided Morrison's case and moved on to other business, historical time has a different scale and Alexina Morrison's story offers a different moral. The covering rhetoric of white supremacy may have remained unquestioned and the power of the Supreme Court to dampen subversive appropriations of that rhetoric by refusing the verdicts coming from the lower courts intact. But Alexina Morrison had raised troubling possibilities in a society based on racial slavery: that a slave might perform whiteness so effectively as to become white; that behavior thought to indicate natural difference might, instead, be revealed as the product of education, construction, and, even, commodification; that one could seem white without really being that way; that the whiteness by which the slave holding social order was justified might one day be turned against it. The problems Morrison posed were particularly acute when addressed to the white workingmen who increasingly inhabited the antebellum South: How could they continue to claim to be their own masters if they or their wives and daughters worked for someone else? Did race really give them a stake in slavery? Would their whiteness really protect them from enslavement? No longer could a Jefferson Parish jury be trusted to try the case of the slave trader and the white slave; no longer could slaveholders be sure that the property claims of slavery would be supported by the logic of whiteness. Indeed, the notions of a supposedly commonsense differentiation between black and white that were broach- ed in the Third District Court were so various and so contradictory that by the end of 1857 it would have been hard for anyone in Jefferson Parish to say for sure what people there meant when they talked about "race." Whether they realized it or not, as they tugged Alexina Morrison back and forth across a color line that they all thought they could plainly see, the white participants in Morrison v. White revealed that line as an effect of social convention and power, not nature.”

The Slave Trader, the White Slave, and the Politics of Racial

Determination in the 1850s Author(s): Walter Johnson Source: The Journal of American History, Vol. 87, No. 1 (Jun., 2000), pp. 13-38

Or what about the case of Salome Mueller, born in Alsace, Germany in 1813 and brought to America in 1817 by her father? Salome was separated from her father and was snatched up by Fritz J. Miller, who had the reputation of “specializing” in kidnapping white people and selling them as Negros. For 24 years she was held, until someone dug up her birth certificate in Germany.

Another interesting fact, Black people in America owned so many white people that they had to pass laws forbidding it, “No Negro or Indian though baptized and enjoying their own freedom shall be capable of any such purchase of (white) Christians, but not yet disbarred from buying any of their own kind.” Act V. Laws of Virginia, Oct 1670.

“No Negro, Mulatto, Indian, although a Christian or any Jew, Mohammedan....shall purchase any Christian White servants.”

Act IX. Laws of Virginia Oct 1748

On March 20, 1818, the Louisiana legislature passed similar measures due to the amount of whites being purchased by blacks. In September 1664 Maryland passed a law that if any white woman married a negro, then she would serve the master as well for life. This created a surge in white slave owners encouraging the marrying of white women to blacks so that the white people could be sold legally. It became so prolific that in 1681 they had to pass a law outlawing this practice. The penalty was freedom for the woman and a 10,000 pound tobacco forfeiture.

“And be it further enacted, That no minister of the church of England, or other minister, or person whatsoever, within this colony and dominion, shall hereafter wittingly presume to marry a white man with a negro or mulatto woman; or to marry a white woman with a negro or mulatto man, upon pain of forfeiting and paying, for every such marriage the sum of ten thousand pounds of tobacco; one half to our sovereign lady the Queen, her heirs and successors, for and towards the support of the government, and the contingent charges thereof; and the other half to the informer; To be recovered, with costs, by action of debt, bill, plaint, or information, in any court of record within this her majesty’s colony and dominion, wherein no essoin, protection, or wager of law, shall be allowed.”

“In the 1640s—before slavery had emerged as an institution in Virginia the colonial legislature, the House of Burgesses, tackled complex questions of servitude and status. The House of Burgesses was elected by the landowners and dominated by the emerging planter class. Their legislation reflected their class interest in controlling the colony’s laborers, white and black. From the 1640s through the 1680s, the Burgesses struggled to secure their growing investment in Africans, but at no time was the legislature able to create a certain and clear definition of slaves.”

“A 1657 statute regulating runaways also illustrates the lack of any formal recognition of slavery before the 1660s. This law punished runaway servants, who were overwhelmingly European at this time, by extending their service and branding them thus, in 1661, the Burgesses passed its first police regulation of slaves, dealing with the problems of European indentured servants escaping with slaves. To discourage such interracial challenges to the regime, the law provided that Europeans would have to serve extra time for any slaves who ran away with them. The new law declared: in case any English servant shall run away in company of any negroes who are incapable of making satisfaction by addition of a time, it is enacted that the English so running away in the company with them shall at the time of service to their owne masters expired, serve the masters of the said negroes for their absence soe long as they should have done by this act if they had not beene slaves, every christian in company serving his proportion; and if the negroes be lost or dye in such time of their being run away, the christian servants in company with them shall by proportion among them, either pay [four] thousand five hundred pounds of tobacco and caske or [four] yeares service for every negroe soe lost or dead.”

“This law not only provided compensation for masters whose slaves ran away with whites, but also drove a wedge between African [Aboriginal Negro “Indians” mostly] slaves and European servants. The colonial legislators hoped this law would discourage interracial cooperation and lead it fewer escapes.” italics mines.

Slavery in the United States, Persons or Property? Paul Finkelman p. 108-115.

If you read my previous book, I believe the term “African” and “Slave” is utilized a bit too loosely, and if you didn't read it, the here is my position, for the most part: “Native Americans, including noncombatants, who surrendered during King Philip’s War to avoid enslavement were enslaved at nearly the same rate as captured combatants, research shows.” “Native American slavery “is a piece of the history of slavery that has been glossed over,” says Linford D. Fisher, associate professor of history at Brown University. “Between 1492 and 1880, between 2 and 5.5 million Native Americans were enslaved in the Americas...” “While natives had been forced into slavery and servitude as early as 1636, it was not until King Philip’s War that natives were enslaved in large numbers, Fisher writes in the study. The 1675 to 1676 war pitted Native American leader King Philip, also known as Metacom, and his allies against the English colonial settlers. During the war, New England colonies routinely shipped Native Americans as slaves to Barbados, Bermuda, Jamaica, the Azores, Spain, and Tangier in North Africa, Fisher says. While Africans who were enslaved did not know where they would be taken, Native Americans understood that they could be sent to Caribbean plantations and face extremely harsh treatment far from their homes and communities, according to the study. Fear of this fate spurred some Native Americans to pledge to fight to the death, while others surrendered hoping to avoid being sent overseas, the study found. Fisher’s study appears in the journal Ethnohistory. Documentation of Native American enslavement shows up in colonial correspondence, shipping records, court cases, town records, colonial government orders, and petitions from colonists to the British government.”

“Even contemporary official histories of the war all point to the same thing: Indians were enslaved en masse and either distributed locally or sent overseas to a variety of destinations,” Fisher writes in the study. Studies in native slavery have opened up in recent years, Fisher says, with award-winning books published in 2002 and 2003 highlighting the systematic nature of indigenous enslavement, even within English colonies. Fisher’s study on those who surrendered in King Philip’s War looks at what factors contributed to native slavery and the impact enslavement had on Native Americans for generations.”

“Fisher examines the short and long term effects of native slavery in his study, noting that during the war, the widespread fear of being sold overseas as slaves was used by Philip-allied Native Americans as a tool to recruit natives to their side.”

“Other Native Americans surrendered, Fisher writes, either in response to explicit inducements by the English offering mercy, or because they hoped that doing so would be understood as a statement of neutrality. These surrenders could be individuals, families, larger bands, or entire communities, Fisher says. Some Native Americans offered their services to the English in the war, like Awashonks, the female chief of a confederation of Sakonnet Indians, who pledged support on the condition that Sakonnet men, women and children would not be killed or sent out of the country as slaves, according to the study. Especially near the war’s end, Fisher writes, natives surrendered in larger numbers in direct response to promises of leniency, but “leniency” had no consistent, practical meaning. English authorities focused first on disarming natives, either by selling guns turned in by surrenderers or prohibiting them from bearing arms, Fisher writes. English communities objected to letting natives who surrendered simply go free, and housing and feeding them was complicated, so often captured and surrendered Native Americans were simply sold into slavery, both overseas and within New England, or forced into servitude for limited terms within English households. In addition, native communities were asked to pay an annual tribute of five shillings per male “as an acknowledgment of their subjection” to the government of Connecticut, according to the study. New Englanders’ motivations for enslaving Native Americans included making money and clearing land for colonists to claim, Fisher writes. It was also easier to remove Native Americans from the region than to sell them locally and risk having the Native Americans run away to find refuge. Fisher also argues that there was an ideological component to enslaving Native Americans. Among colonists, “there was a presumption involving the innate inferiority of natives,” he says. “There were practical notions of European superiority, plus an appetite for land,” he says. “If you look at the history of the colonies, slavery happens almost right away.” Fisher says he is increasingly convinced that, for colonists, “slavery was a normal part of their mental framework.” Some free Native Americans working with the English tried to influence where Native American surrenderers would be settled and how they would be treated, Fisher writes, like Uncas, the sachem of the Mohegans in Connecticut. Uncas, who fought on the side of the English, “seemed determined postwar to keep Indians out of English households and—even more important—off of English merchant ships that threatened to take them to the Caribbean,” Fisher writes. Uncas and other Native Americans also encouraged captives to run away and sheltered them when they did, or helped them resettle elsewhere, according to the study. In other cases, Fisher writes, Native Americans requested captives as servants for themselves, sometimes to keep them out of English households, or served as slave-trading middlemen. In one case, Fisher notes, a Native American slave owned by a Pequot leader was sold by him to an enslaved African woman.”

“The shadow of native enslavement in New England extends into the 18th century and beyond,” Fisher says. “There are records of people petitioning for freedom in the 1740s who were the descendants of Native Americans first enslaved during King Philip’s War.” In the study, he writes, “Small legal loopholes and dishonest practices on the ground ensured that, in many cases, limited-term service turned into lifelong and even heritable slavery.” In 1676, Connecticut officials decreed that a native slave’s term of service could be lengthened but not shortened. A law passed the same year by the Rhode Island General Assembly seemed on the surface to outlaw Indian slavery, but, Fisher notes, in practice that and other laws ensured that Native surrenderers were “disposed of” for the benefit of the colony, with various terms of servitude. For Native Americans five years of age or younger, their servitude lasted until they were 30 years old. These enslavement practices permanently disrupted the “lives, livelihoods, and kinship networks of thousands of Indians,” Fisher writes, and sometimes slavery was simply given another name.”

“In 1721, 45 years after the end of King Philip’s War, the Connecticut General Assembly took up the question of second-generation Native American child slaves. The Native American children who had been placed as servants in English households after the war had grown up and had children of their own. What should be done with them? Fisher writes that while leaders did not approve of enslaving them, they also did not want to set them free, so that generation of children also became indentured servants. Native Americans sold overseas occasionally made it back to the United States, Fisher writes. Others died or disappeared into a wider slave market and labor force, or became established in the locations where they were sent, like the modern-day community of individuals in Bermuda who claim New England Indian descent.”

[Brown University] —A study by Linford D. Fisher, associate professor of history at Brown University, finds that Native Americans, including noncombatants, who surrendered during King Philip’s War to avoid enslavement were enslaved at nearly the same rate as captured combatants.

Not just during King Phillip's War, this was part and parcel with every expansion of colonial territory, the aboriginals would be kidnapped and sold as slaves. The “African slave trade” is the cover story. Yes, some slaves did come from Africa, but the majority were already here. White people, “Indians,” Mexicans, Blacks or anyone who was out and about could be kidnapped and sold into slavery. Again, they were killing parents and stealing their children to sell, they were kidnapping white people, dying them brown, they were capturing people like animals and selling them as such. It was business. White people, especially females, today have forgotten, they feel safe now, but there was a time when they were scurrying around, like everyone else, dodging the “slavers” right here in America and Europe. Labor, sexual exploitation and all manner of indignities was the penalty for being in the wrong place, at the right time, whatever your hue.

“From the start of the 17^th century to the early 19^th century, between one half and two thirds of all the White colonists who came to the New World came as slaves. They were owned as property, were accorded no rights and had no recourse to the law. Laws relating to fugitive black slaves also applied to them.”

Black Lies Matter, White Lies Too

Jean Baptiste Guillory (2019)

Lord have Mercy