Slave ships–explanations about black slave trade from the white slave trade
Recently, I read a good book about the forced deportation of British citizens to the Americas to be sold into bondage–both limited and lifetime. The most valuable part of the book were the first-person accounts and documents–and also because the author really has NO interest whatsoever in the black slave trade (this was a book written for a genealogical society, so the preoccupation was really in exploring the variable experiences of enslaved white immigrants, and blacks of any type were mentioned only in passing). The horribleness and brutality of the indentured servant/white slave trade REALLY came as a shock to me–and it explained many of the things that I had a hard time understanding about the black slave trade.
First, some figures. It’s estimated that some 50,000 British citizens were exported to be sold into bondage in the Americas. About ten times that many Africans were sold into bondage in North America alone, and North America was actually a very small market for black slaves compared to Brazil and the Caribbean. (There are wildly differing statistics on this, as it is a hotter political topic and documentation is nowhere near as thorough, but 500,000 is a solid and safe number.) This is out of a possible maximum of around 10 million slaves sent to the New World, total–the more tropical colonies, English or otherwise, had a much higher demand for slaves than the industrial North or mixed-cotton/tobacco/etc. agricultural South, where sugar cane farming made even tobacco farming seem light and pleasant by comparison.
White and black slavery in the English colonies appeared at the same time–the early 1600s–and mostly for the same reasons–the desperate need for labor in the New World and the really unpleasant living conditions that made voluntary emigration insufficient to meet the demand. The justification of both kinds of slavery was extremely similar. The “criminal classes” of Britain (I’ll explain the quotes later…) and the normal culture of the Africans were seen as uncouth, uncivilized, unChristian (this is really meant in a cultural rather than actually *religious* sense), and almost inhuman–and were a convenient justification for slavery. Both would be somehow morally improved through the good, hard, honest labor of slavery and would emerge purified.
The best reason I can come up with from the evidence as to why the descendants of black slaves and not white slaves were themselves enslaved was because, frankly, the owners could get away with it. The white child of an indentured servant was a British citizen, and so taking away his freedom without a legal grounds wouldn’t fly. Essentially, whites were innocent until “proven” (more about that later!) guilty, and blacks were guilty unless “granted” innocence/manumission. It wasn’t until 1654 that there was any formal legal distinction of any sort made between white or black slavery, with blacks being denied the protections of citizenship that white slaves still theoretically had. (We’ll see that that meant in real terms later…)
The abolition of white slavery in the United States came in the 1780s, when the last states passed laws against the import of British indentured servants. Because white slavery, even when it was for life, could NOT be passed down to one’s children, that was a natural end to the institution as a whole. Support for the total abolition of black slavery did not gather much ground until the abolition of the slave trade and wealthy northern businessmen were no longer financially invested in it. Black slavery in the United States came to an end, then, at the conclusion of the Civil War, in 1865, with a few exceptions (it took another year to free slaves held by Indians in Indian territories and another years after that to get rid of a rather sneaky involuntary apprenticeship system Maryland tried).
Now, most of my readers are probably wondering why I am calling indentured servitude “slavery.” Every single textbook and most general histories are VERY adamant that indentured servitude and slavery were completely separate institutions. Which is all well and good….but the problem is that the people of the time didn’t see it that way! Indentured servants were referred to interchangeably as “slaves” by pretty much everyone during this time period in primary sources. It was not a loaded term used to get an emotional reaction of one sort or other–it was simply what they were called. And there was now blushing about or shying away from the fact that these people were being sold into slavery, often enough to work side-by-side with black slaves. It seems to me that the most honest way of labeling these people is calling them what they were called by themselves and their contemporaries. Making up an anachronistic distinction of terminology is a mistake. So I will use the most common term of their day. Note that “white slave” is rather anachronistic itself, though–they weren’t referred to specifically as “white,” they were merely not called “black” or “negro” as “white” was the assumed default.
There were some differences between white and black slavery. The parallels and differences do need to be addressed before talking about what white slavery was like. But first, why on earth would white slavery tell me anything about black slavery at all? And what unique insights would it give?
Five points:
1) The work for many slaves was exactly the same, regardless of origins or skin color. On many farms, they were given the same work, the same food, the same clothes, and the same treatment with few differences. So the testimony of either a white or a black slave could shed equal light on those conditions.
2) Just about all the British slaves would be native English speakers, and a substantial minority were literate enough to record their experiences. Records of black slaves *from Africa* itself are exceedingly sparse, and the testimony of various white slaves gives us an insight into the slave trade that is just lacking if you try to look for specifically black sources.
3) The same ships and often the same captains were involved in the black and white slave trades because a slave ship was a slave ship, whatever its path. There is less reason to believe that their actions were extremely different with one “cargo” than the other than to believe that the experiences of either would have broad similarities.
4) The experiences of white slaves at auction are perfect parallels to descriptions by American-born black slaves of being sold themselves, indicating even more similarity.
5) Unlike with the African slave trade, there is copious information about what happened when ships for indentured servants were at their ports of departure. This gives us even more information that we wouldn’t have otherwise. The white slave trade was entangled heavily with the British government, leaving a broad swathe of documentation that just doesn’t exist for the African end of the black slave trade.
Next time, I’ll deal with how the black experience of slavery in the Americas and the white experience were, for certain, either the same or different. With that foundation, I can go on to make speculative conclusions about the black slave trade based on drawing likely parallels–things that we don’t know 100% for sure–with the white slave trade. It’s the last that, I think, are the most fruitful, as it gives illumination to subjects that we just don’t know about from direct information about the African Atlantic slave trade.
