Timeline PhotosEleven-year-old Philip Welch was kidnapped from his own bed in 1654, by order of Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England. He and another Irish lad, William Downing, were loaded onto the ship Goodfellow, which by then was already bursting at the seams with Irish women and children destined for slavery in New England. ~ White slavery in colonial New England
King James II and Charles I also 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.
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His Proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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In this decade, 52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to Barbados and Virginia.
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Another 30,000 Irish men and women were also transported and sold to the highest bidder.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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England continued to ship tens of thousands of Irish slaves for more than a century.
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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.
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One British ship even dumped 1,302 slaves into the Atlantic Ocean so that the crew would have plenty of food to eat.
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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.
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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.
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In 1839, Britain finally decided on its own to end its 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????
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Where are the history books?
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Why is it so seldom discussed?
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Do the memories of hundreds of thousands of Irish victims merit more than a mention from an unknown writer?
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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.
Between the years of 1652 to 1659 it is estimated that well over 50,000 men, women, and children of Irish descent were forcibly transported to British imperial colonies in Barbados and Virginia to serve as slave labor on plantations.
Other prisoners of war, as well as political dissenters, taken from conquered regions of England, Wales, and Scotland were also sent into permanent exile as slaves to Barbados. This essentially enabled Cromwell to purge the subject population of any perceived opposing elements, as well as to provide a lucrative source of profit through their sale to plantation owners.
The extent to which White prisoners were transported to Barbados was so great, that by 1701, out of the roughly 25,000 slaves present on the island’s plantations, about 21,700 of them were of European descent. Later, as the African slave trade began to expand and flourish, the Irish slave population of Barbados began to drastically recede over time, due in part to the fact that many were worked to death early on in their arrival and also as a result of racial intermixing with Black slaves.
In stark contrast to the small number of White indentured servants present on Barbados, who could at least theoretically look forward to eventual freedom no matter how bad their temporary bondage may have been, White slaves possessed no such hope.
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"Mr. G O'Rilla, The Young Ireland Party, Exulting over the Insult to the British Flag. Shouldn't he be Extinguished at once?"
Indeed, they were treated the same as slaves of African descent in every manner imaginable.
Irish slaves in Barbados were regarded as property to be bought, sold, treated and mistreated in any way the slave-owner saw fit. Their children were born into hereditary slavery for life as well.
Punitive violence, such as whippings, was liberally employed against Irish slaves, and was often used on them immediately upon their arrival in the colonies to brutally reinforce their enchained status, and as a warning against future disobedience.
The dehumanizing and degrading cattle-like physical inspections used to assess and showcase the "qualities" of each captive for prospective buyers, which reached infamy with the Black slave markets, was also practiced upon both White slaves and indentured servants in the colonies of the West Indies and North America.
Irish slaves were marked off from their free White kinsmen through a branding of the owner’s initials applied to the forearm for women and on the buttocks for men by a red-hot iron. Irish women, in particular were seen as a desirable commodity by White slave owners who purchased them as sexual concubines. Others found themselves sold off to local brothels.
This degrading practice of sex slavery made Irish men, women and children potential victims to perverse whims of many unsavory buyers.
In reality, White slaves fared no better a fate as unwilling human property than did contemporary captive Africans. At times they were even treated worse than their Black counterparts due to economic considerations. This was especially true throughout most of the 17th century, as White captives were far more inexpensive on the slave market than their African counterparts, and hence were mistreated to a greater extent as they were seen as a conveniently disposable labor force.
It was not until later that Black slaves became a cheaper commodity. An account dating back to 1667 grimly described the Irish of Barbados as
“poor men, that are just permitted to live,… derided by the Negroes, and branded with the Epithite of white slaves.”
A 1695 account written by the island’s governor frankly stated that they labored
“in the parching sun without shirt, shoe, or stocking”, and were “domineered over and used like dogs.”
It was common knowledge among the Irish of this era that to be deported, or “barbadosed”, to the West Indies meant a life of slavery. In many cases, it was actually common for White slaves in Barbados to be supervised by mulatto or Black overseers, who often treated captive Irish laborers with exceptional cruelty. Indeed:
The mulatto drivers enjoyed using the whip on whites. It gave them a sense of power and was also a protest against their white sires.
White women in particular were singled out for punishment in the fields. Sometimes, to satisfy a perverted craving, the mulatto drivers forced the women to strip naked before commencing the flogging and then forced them to continue working all day under the blistering sun.
While the women were weeding in the fields in that condition, the drivers often satisfied their lust by taking them from the rear.
Such instances of horrific rape and unwilling sexual union between Irish female slaves and Black slave-drivers, was actually implicitly encouraged by many of their White masters.
The above ran in the conservative British publication Judy. It portrays Gladstone's reforms as appeasing violence, and the simian-Fenian beast is intended to blame Irish Americans for fostering resistance to slavery amongst both themselves and the blacks.
Mulatto children, who resulted from such unions, both willing and unwilling, were seen by the plantation masters as a potentially unlimited breeding stock of future native-born slave labor, acquired free of charge and without the costs of transportation.
Existing public records on Barbados reveal that some planters went as far as to systematize this process of miscegenation through the establishment of special “stud farms” for the specific purpose of breeding mixed-race slave children. White female slaves, often as young as 12, were used as “breeders” to be forcibly mated with Black men.
The enchained Irish of Barbados played a pivotal role as the instigators and leaders of various slave revolts on the island, which was an ever-present threat faced by the planter aristocracy.
Such an uprising occurred in November 1655, when a group of Irish slaves and servants escaped along with several Blacks, and proceeded to attempt to spark a general rebellion among the enchained community against their masters.
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This was a serious enough threat to justify the deployment of militia, which eventually overcame them in a pitched battle. Before their demise they had wreaked considerable havoc upon the ruling planter class, having hacked several to pieces in brutal retribution for their bondage. They had not succeeded in their broader strategy of completely laying waste by fire, the sugar fields in which they had been forced to labor for the enrichment of their masters.
Those taken prisoner were made examples of, as a grim warning to the rest of their kindred Irish, when they were burned alive and their heads were thereafter displayed on pikes throughout the market place.
As a result of a steep increase in Black slave labor migration to Barbados, compounded with high rates of Irish mortality and racial intermixing, White slaves, which had once constituted the majority of the population in 1629, were reduced to an increasingly dwindling minority by 1786.
In the present era, there remains only a minuscule, yet significant community within the native Barbadian population comprised of the descendants of Scots-Irish slaves, who continue to bear testimony to the tragic legacy of their enchained Celtic forebears. This small minority within the predominantly Black island of Barbados is known locally as the “Red Legs”, which was originally a derogatory name, understood in similar context to the slur “redneck”, and was derived from the sun-burnt skin experienced by early White slaves who had been previously unadjusted to the tropical Caribbean climate.
To this day, a community numbering approximately 400 still resides in the northeastern part of the island in the parish of St. John, and has vigorously resisted racially mixing with the larger Black population, despite living in abject poverty. Most make their living from subsistence farming and fishing, and indeed they are one of the most impoverished groups living in modern Barbados.
An interesting film on the Red legs can be watched
http://www.moondance.tv/broadcast-barbados.htm
IRISH TIMES: MOST BARBADOS RED LEGS HAVE BAD OR NO TEETH. MANY BLIND, WITHOUT LIMBS.
Sean O'Callaghan, To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland
Kelly D. Whittaker, White Slavery, What the Scots Already Know
Michael A. Hoffman II, They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America
Robert E. West, England’s Irish Slaves
