British Slavery

Michael A. Hoffman

As a revisionist historian, I wrote They Were White and They Were Slaves for the astonishing reason (to some observers) that it was a chronicle that had not been adequately addressed and thus was pure gold from the standpoint of historical rediscovery. My “sin” is to have detailed the history without regard to the idol of political correctness. The truth was in the writings of the white slaves themselves who referred to themselves as such, and eyewitnesses to their plight who wrote accounts of what they saw.

In the following I have relied mainly on testimony of the white slaves themselves, their own writings and pleadings and those persons high and low who encountered them and wrote of them. In my book I give examples of white British aristocrats speeding in their carriages to abolitionist meetings where the plight of blacks in America was decried, heedless of white children by the side of the road who had finished toiling 16 hours, half-naked in a mine; or having their arms and legs mutilated in the factory machinery of the early Industrial Revolution whose owners, such as Josiah Wedgewood, and the famous poet and mine owner Lord Byron, considered poor British whites entirely expendable.

Charles Dickens, who had been a child laborer in a chemical factory, termed this callous hypocrisy “telescopic philanthropy.” The white elite of Britain had the apparition of black enslavement constantly before their eyes, even though it was thousands of miles away, while they were oblivious to the English boys who were sold to chimney sweeps and who sometimes burned and suffocated to death in the chimneys of the magnificent mansions of the abolitionists. Almost no one was paying attention to their agony. It’s supposed to be naughty of me to refer to child labor in the factories, mines, and chimneys of Britain as white slavery. I do not know what else to term girls and boys stripped virtually naked toiling side-by-side in a mine for 16 hours stunted and blackened, or a factory, where they often were seriously injured or killed, because if they didn’t undertake this labor they would starve to death. They went to their labor before dawn and ceased their labors after dark.

A Hereditary Taint

White enslavement has a long history in Britain and Scandinavia. The study of white enslavement has been impeded over the centuries by two facts missing from many studies and critiques. First, white enslavement carried with it a hereditary taint. As I demonstrate in my book, this extends back to the Vikings who looked on Scandinavian “thralls” and those born into “thralldom” as carrying a hereditary defect in part because their enslavement was hereditary. Something akin to this was operating in Anglo-Saxon England under the category of villeinage. The daughter of a villein could not be married without buying her way out of villeinage. The test of a young English woman’s status in early medieval England – whether she was slave or free – was decided by whether or not the local lord had control over her body, as all masters have over their slaves. Under English law, a villein woman was one who could not be married until she first offered the custom of the country as it was known, the “ransom of blood for merchet” (i.e., until she first submitted to sexual intercourse with the lord, prior to her marriage).

Both in early Britain and Scandinavia and much later in the sugar plantations of the West Indies and the tobacco plantations of America (before cotton became king), British-American whites whose parents or relatives had been enslaved, or who themselves had escaped it, or bought their way out (as did some black people), were exceedingly reticent to identify as former white slaves or as their progeny. “Servant” was a far more attractive category, and we see identifications with this status and less so with outright enslavement due to the stigma.

We know from primary source materials that white slaves worked alongside blacks in the West Indies and that the word “redleg” was applied to them by their darker co-workers because of the tendency of the white slaves to sunburn.

Surfeit of Poor White Youth

White bondage was mostly carried out within a framework of law. The white ruling class permitted the mass kidnapping of white children off the streets of port cities such as London and Glasgow for shipment to America under no indentures whatsoever, or under forged indentures, or as criminalized paupers and “rogues.” On arrival these youth were often put to work clearing forests and draining swamps. They were regularly assaulted, ill-fed, and worked to death. Britain had a surfeit of poor white youth who represented a potential for a French-Revolutionary type of insurrection in the cities. The aristocracy was only too glad to be rid of them, and I draw my evidence for this from state papers, contemporary letters and eyewitness accounts.

There was mass “kid-nabbing” (as it was first termed). To facilitate white bondage under penal enslavement, the British ruling class contrived laws such as the Waltham Black Act, which made simple misdemeanors (stealing lace, raiding an aristocrat’s fish pond, poaching deer) into felonies punishable by “transportation for life into the colonies.” In the 17th century the tens of thousands of prisoners these laws netted were not sent to slavery in British America and the West Indies on indentures. They were sold at the ports on arrival. As prisoners they had no rights. These wretches were slaves, clearly handled like chattel (cattle). Diaries, letters, and eyewitness accounts give testimony to their horrible mistreatment and slave labor.

Press Gangs of the Royal Navy

The kidnapping of poor whites has precedence in Britain. It does not have a legal basis per se, but it has color of law and we find it in the systematic mass kidnapping of British men for maritime slavery aboard ship for the Royal Navy. I can anticipate the objection: The bondage was for a determinate period of time. Officially, yes. Englishmen were kidnapped off the streets and country lanes of Britain with the connivance of the judiciary and conscripted for a period of years, but in actuality these determinate number of years was not worth the ink that had been used to write the paper. When it so happened that the victim of abduction was returning home from a five or seven-year compulsory voyage, he saw the blessed shore of England at long last, prayed that his wife had not run off and that his children and parents still lived, and then a few miles from shore, another man-of-war sailed up to his vessel, boarded it at sea with a press gang, and kidnapped him again for another multi-year abduction. This could happen two or three times. The kidnapped sailor could be gone from Britain ten, fifteen, or twenty years and killed or severely injured during that time.

There were tens of thousands of Royal Navy slaves. Impressment was one of the rotten roots, along with villeinage, that created a precedent for an institutional framework for white slavery concealed under cover of “indenture” or some other deceptive and cosmetic rubric. The reality is that a vicious white ruling class in London has seldom had any compunctions against betraying and enslaving their own white English peasantry.

Who’s for Reparations?

It seems that a powerful lobby has decided that black folk have a proprietary relationship with the word “slave.” If this designation is false, however, then it constitutes an act of psychological crippling. The history of the white race is in many respects synonymous with the long history of enslavement, and if blacks have a copyright on the word “slave,” someone should tell that to the Slavic people, who for generations were targets of Viking slave raids and from whom the word “slave” is derived.

Do the English pay reparations to the Irish for what Oliver Cromwell did in transporting Irish slaves to the West Indies? Do the Catholics pay reparations for the pro-Catholic Stuart King Charles II for having shipped criminalized and enslaved English Protestants to the West Indies? A world full of victims demanding payment is a definition of a madhouse, not a civilization. Reparations claims are a political gambit, with war victors or the plutocracy assigning perpetrator and victim status, and apportioning false guilt.