[MR] Fwd: (OOP) Irish Slaves
David Chessler
chessler at usa.net
Thu Oct 28 14:53:29 PDT 2010
------ Original Message ------
Received: Thu, 28 Oct 2010 03:38:22 PM EDT
From: johnmac the bard
Subject: [johnmacsgroup] Irish Slaves
Receive from Marine Colonel Tom "Tank" Meehan
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Sunday, August 15th, 2010 | Posted by
Seamus Boyle
Irish Slaves
Brothers, by the time you read this
edition of the Digest, the convention in Cincinnati will be another piece of
history. As I write this column today I think of history and our ancestors and
what they went through for centuries. We know about the forced famine of the
mid 1800’s and about Cromwell and his murderous deeds and more recently
about the troubles of the past 40 years. How many of you know about the
slavery of the Irish?
Last month I attended a meeting of
the AOH Division 1, Cape May County New Jersey and found out more than I
really would have liked to know about the slavery of the Irish people. It is
one of the least known atrocities against the Irish nation and one that we all
should be aware of.
Although I knew about slavery and
the Irish, I could not believe the vastness of this issue over so many years
and yet we see very little or none of this in our history books in Ireland or
here in America .
I am not going to give you a
history lesson (that is Mike McCormack’s job and he is excellent at it) but
I do want to make you aware of this part of our past and I thank the members
in North Wildwood NJ for opening my mind to this part of our history. The
following factual events are just the tip of the iceberg and by reading this
small part of a book by author John Martin, I hope it makes you feel the need
to look further into the subject and pass this information on to your family,
children, grandchildren and your friends.
We do take a lot of flack about our
nationality and the stereotyping so it is incumbent upon all of us to counter
this and this is one way to educate them and possibly shock them by telling
the story of the Irish slaves.
They came as slaves; vast human
cargo transported on tall British ships bound for the Americas . They were
shipped by the hundreds of thousands and included men, women, and even the
youngest of children.
Whenever they rebelled or even
disobeyed an order, they were punished in the harshest ways. Slave owners
would hang their human property by their hands and set their hands or feet on
fire as one form of punishment. They were burned alive and had their heads
placed on pikes in the marketplace as a warning to other captives.
We don’t really need to go
through all of the gory details, do we? After all, we know all too well the
atrocities of the African slave trade. But, are we talking about African
slavery?
King James II and Charles I 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 . His
Proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and
sold to English settlers in the West Indies . 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 was Irish slaves.
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. 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 . In this decade,
52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to Barbados and Virginia .
Another 30,000 Irish men and women were also transported and sold to the
highest bidder. 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. 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 were 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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
England continued to ship tens of
thousands of Irish slaves for more than a century. 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. One British ship even dumped 1,302 slaves into the
Atlantic Ocean so that the crew would have plenty of food to eat.
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. 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.
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. 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.
"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his
own facts." --
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
"When you come to the fork in the road, take it" --
L.P. Berra
"Always make new mistakes" - Esther Dyson
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable
from magic"
-- Sir Arthur C. Clarke
"You Gotta Believe" - Frank "Tug" McGraw (1944 - 2004
RIP)
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