For centuries also and well into the last century, the Arabs, a Negroid people, had been raiding what is now Russia for white slaves, mostly women,—the Circassians. One Arab writer declared that Arabia is such a hard country to live in that but for the importation of African and Circassian slaves its population would soon be extinct.
White slave in Egypt. (Drawing by Sichel).
SLAVERY OF WHITES IN AMERICA
It happens, too, that the first slaves in what is now the United States, were white Englishmen. The earliest warrants banishing convicts to a life of servitude in Virginia were signed by James I in 1617 and the first hundred arrived in 1619 (that is, the same year the Negroes did), and were sold.
The Greek Slave by Hiram Powers.
Scene on a slave-ship bound for America from a French lithograph of 1802. Similar scenes existed on ships bringing white slaves from Europe a little earlier.
Charles V of Germany freeing white slaves held in Africa after his victory there in 1535. (From painting by Nicoles de Keyser).
Freed whites returning to France from slavery in Africa.
One gets an idea of how the sale of white people was regarded in colonial America by what Cotton Mather, famous New England divine, said should be done with William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania, a Quaker. Mather called that faith, “very horrible idolatry.” (Diary, Vol. 1, p. 572). Hearing that Penn, whom he called “the chief scamp,” was on the high seas with his settlers, he urged the authorities to send a ship to capture him. “Make captive Penn and his ungodly crew,” he urged, “so that the Lord may be glorified. Much spoil can be had by selling the whole lot to Barbados, where slaves fetch high prices in rum and sugar.”
Act V, 1680, of the Laws of Virginia, reads, “For the encouragement of trade and manufacture, it is provided that all goods, wares, English servants, Negroes and other slaves imported after September 29, 1681, shall be landed and laid on shore, bought and sold at appointed places and at no other places under penalty.”
They were advertised for sale along with Negroes. The Boston News Letter, September 13, 1714, offers “several Irish maid-servants; one Irishman, good barber and wigmaker; and five likely Negro boys.” The New York Gazette, September 4 and 11, 1732, offers “Welshmen, Englishmen, Negroes, a Negro girl, and Cheshire cheese.” Wall Street was then a slave market. A Philadelphia advertisement of 1728 reads, “Lately imported and to be sold cheap, a parcel of likely men and women servants.” They were mostly German.
European girl captured by Moorish sea-captain. From Voltaire’s Candide. Daughter of the Princess of Palestrina. (Illustration by Bruneschelli).
Johann Buettner, one of those who came under these conditions tells how men and women were stripped naked on board on arrival and examined like cattle by prospective buyers. He says that on the voyage the women slept indiscriminately among the men. So much the better if they became pregnant. They would fetch more.
G. Mittelberger, who came to America in 1750, wrote, “Many parents must sell and trade away their children like so many head of cattle.” He estimated that during the four years he was in Philadelphia, 25,000 of his compatriots were sold there. Children from nine to twelve went for from $30 to $40; and over eighteen from $60 to $69.
William Eddis in “Letters From America, 1769-1777” tells how badly these white slaves were treated by their masters. In that of September 20, 1770, he compares their treatment with that of the Negro slaves: “Negroes being a property for life the death of slaves in the prime of youth and strength is a material loss to the proprietor … they are therefore under more comfortable circumstances than the miserable Europeans over whom the rigid planter exercises an inflexible severity. They are strained to the utmost to perform their allotted labor … generally speaking they groan beneath a worse than Egyptian bondage.”
“White servants,” says Bancroft, “came to be a usual article of traffic. They were sold in England to be transported and in Virginia resold to the highest bidder; like the Negroes they were to be purchased on shipboard as men buy horses at a fair.”
J. B. McMaster says, “They became in the eyes of the law a slave and in both the civil and the criminal code were classed with the Negro and the Indian. They were worked hard, were dressed in the cast-off clothes of their owners and might be flogged as often as the master and mistress thought necessary. … Father, mother, and children could be sold to different buyers. Such remnants of cargoes as could not find purchasers within the time specified were bought in lots of fifty or more by speculators, known as ‘soul-drivers,’ who drove them through the country like so many cattle and sold them for what they would fetch.” (Acquisition of Political, Social, and Industrial Rights in America, pp. 32-35). Some whites served under Negro slave overseers.
White slaves who ran away were advertised for in the newspapers. If caught, they were branded with the letter “R” (runaway). Those who “stole flour and meal given out for baking” had their ears clipped. George Washington advertised for two white runaways.
No wonder Moreau de St. Mery, who spent five years in America (1793-98) wrote as regards the sale of white people, “It is, therefore, not the goodness of the soil, nor the excellence of the laws which are responsible for the growth of the population of the United States, but the traffic in men from Europe.” He estimated that in one year alone, 13,000 of these whites were sold at ten pounds sterling each, or a total of some $650,000. (Voyage, etc. pp. 321-22). There is a translation of this work by Kenneth Roberts.
One reads of the horrors that Negroes suffered on slave ships from Africa but eyewitness accounts of what white slaves suffered on their passage sound as awful. Mittelberger wrote in 1750, “During the voyage there is on board these ships terrible misery, stench, fumes, horror, vomiting, many kinds of sea-sickness, fever, dysentery, headache, heat, constipation, boils, scurvy, cancer, mouth-rot and the like all of which comes from old and sharply salted food and meat, also from the bad and foul water … lice abound so frightfully, especially on sick people, that they can be scraped off. … During a storm that closely packed people tumble over each other both the sick and the well. …” (Journey to Pennsylvania, p. 20). Geiser’s “Redemptioners,” Chapter “The Voyage” gives equally harrowing tales of those sufferers.
Detail from “The Slave Market” by J. L. Gerome (1824-1904). Negroes and Whites being sold together.
Like the black slaves, they were packed like sardines. “Packed like herrings and sold as slaves,” says Pastor Kunze. Christopher Sauer in his petition to the Pennsylvania legislature in 1775 asserted that at times “there was not more than twelve inches room for each person at night.”
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