White Privilege
What was the reality of life in the American colonies for the European laborers that made up the great majority of the population?
"Thus the workforce flooding into the Chesapeake colonies after the boom of the tobacco industry was an amalgam of people, largely English, many from the slums of the two main Atlantic ports. [...] This immigrant population consisted mostly of indentured servants.
[They were] convicts, vagrants, war prisoners, orphans and women; increasingly, there were Irish among them, despite the fact that in the West Indies, where Irish laborers had been recruited in large numbers, they had proved to be difficult, unreliable and often rebellious, largely as a consequence of the vicious treatment they received from the English planters, who despised them. Once debarked at the small Chesapeake ports and riverside inlets on the mainland, the incoming servants found themselves transformed into commodities--commoditized units of labor. If their service was not already committed, they--their services--were sold to the highest bidder. Most of the uncommitted were disposed of in shipboard and dockside transactions, the length of their labor determined by the terms of sale. Those who were not sold on shipboard were peddled through the countryside for sale in small numbers or individually to inland farmers, many of whom had themselves only recently been freed and were struggling to produce enough tobacco to buy a sufficient stake in the land. Though conditions had improved since the earliest, most barbarous years, mere physical survival for the newly recruited laborers was still the most immediate problem. The sudden encounter with the hot, malarial climate, especially in tidal and low-lying areas, was shocking and debilitating, and when the effect of the environment was compounded by a severe work regime, the result was devastating. Between 15 and 30% of male immigrants to Maryland at mid (17th) century died within the first "seasoning" year of their residence, and those who were alive at age 22 could expect to live only another 23 years. In one county, 17% of the immigrant males who were alive at age 22 died before 30, 41% by age 40, 70% by age 50. In Middlesex County, Virginia, "only a minority lived to the end of their service and joined the ranks of the free". "Within the great flow of immigrant workers there continued to be utterly destitute vagrants picked up by recruiting agents at "beggars' fairs", where one could find "more rogues than ever... whipped at a cart's arse through London... or dropping out of Ireland". There were young orphans routinely disposed of to brokers by parish overseers to reduce welfare expenses. There were those "lewd and dangerous persons, rogues, vagrants, and other idle persons"--those "sturdy beggars as gypsyes and other incorrigible rogues and wanderers"--who were ordered by the Commonwealth government to be seized by the local constables, imprisoned, and unless acquitted of vagrancy, sent to the plantations "for five years under the condition of servants". And there continued to be clandestine seizures of men and boys--occasionally women as well--for forced shipment to the colonies, where their services were offered for sale. It was a brutal traffic, described in vivid accounts by victims and in court records. What had been occasional in the Virginia Company's earliest years had developed into an organized system with safe houses for confining victims until shipping could be arranged and with standardized transaction costs and procedures. Week after week, month after month, children, male and female, were snatched from the streets of London for shipment and sale "for a slave" in Virginia. One was "an infant about 4 years of age", the Middlesex County Court in London recorded, "to the endangering of his life"; another, a servant deluded and enticed by false promises; still another, an apprentice sold by his master and held on shipboard for a week before being rescued. As early as 1645, kidnapping for the servant trade in Virginia had become so notorious that the government ordered all public officers to apprehend anyone caught "stealing, selling, buying, inveigling, purloining, conveying or receiving children stolen". But what the Privy Council denounced as a "barbarous and inhumane" traffic continued. In 1664 Bristol sought to control the traffic by creating a registry office to record all legitimate outbound passengers and exclude all others. London later did the same. But "spiriting" could not be stopped by legislation or bureaucratic procedures. Vicious too, though legal, was the forced transportation to the colony of convicts. Less vicious, but greater in volume, was the traffic in prisoners of war, which flourished in the years of the Commonwealth's military campaigns. How many captured troops of the royalist armies actually reached the Chesapeake and were forced to work in the fields for years, cannot be known. It is known, however, that after each of Cromwell's major victories, hundreds of captured troops, most of them Scots, were rounded up and disposed of. Some were allowed to return to their homes, but some were handed over to local merchants in need of cheap labor, some were sent to serve as mercenaries in foreign armies, and many were bound to service in the plantations. At least a thousand prisoners were authorized to be shipped to Virginia and New England after Dunbar, and after Worcester 1'610 were granted to people desiring them in Virginia, on assurance that the prisoners would be accorded "Christian usage". In all, close to 3'000 war prisoners were authorized in a short period of time for shipment to the Chesapeake. And while their arrival and precise location in the colonies cannot be traced, by the late 1650s Scottish names suddenly became prominent in the land patent books. In 1665 a Scottish minister in Virginia reported that his countrymen in the colony were "living better than ever their forefathers, and that from so mean a beginning as being sold as slaves here, after... Worster fight are now herein masters of so many servants themselves". |
There is nothing exceptional in these vicissitudes. This is what life has been like for our wretched primate species during most of history. Modern Western societies, so rich, so (until recently) safe, and so stupid, are historical anomalies--precious and fragile. Their material advancement, far from being loot from African peasants or Asiatic coolies, was a consequence of the scientific and industrial revolutions, of their superior social organization, and of their Faustian spirit, the thirst for physical and intellectual expansion, for rising above the squalid confines of mere life. Europeans created the modern world while the rest of humanity was sleepwalking in superstition, ignorance, indolence, tyranny and fanaticism. This the latter will never forgive to the former. The guilt-mongering today against Europeans is nothing more than psychological warfare . It is masochism brought to you by sadists. Their aim is to paralyze and disarm the peoples of the West while their culture is systematically destroyed and they themselves are dispossessed of their homelands. Amathia, lies, bullying, parochialism and resentment masquerading as "morality" are their means. |