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Interesting note in the show on PBS about the building of the Panama Canal.
The primary source of labor came from Barbados. The 20 cents and hour they got paid was more than they got at home and thousands came to work there, despite the danger and hard work. But descendends and survivors were interviewed. Interestingly all of them had Irish surnames. They were the descendents of the thousands of Irish transported as slaves there who mixed with the black africans brought in both later and concurently.
Why is this important piece of America's history not so well known? I never learned of it in school; it was in fact only recently that I was made aware of this.
While doing genealogy and studying old documents/papers, I've run into a lot of cases of native americans with mexican slaves, mexicans with native amercian slaves, and native americans with native american slaves. It's pre statehood in the current western states, so I wouldn't expect it to be taught. But interesting none the less. Back on topic, I can't believe they aren't teaching about indentured servants anymore. That's a huge part of our history.
Slavery still exists today in the United States although a much more efficient form of slavery than existing in the 17 and 1800s where a slave owner had to provide housing, clothing and food for the slaves that were owned.
Today, take anyone making minimum wage that also has large amounts of debt that can never be paid off (with interest building up on that debt often in amounts annually that can never be paid off either.) and combine that with the fact that the current plantation owners (the ruling class, politicians, etc) have to subsidize the existence of those slaves with section 8 housing, food stamps, earned income tax credits and other free stuff while knowing full well that those people will never be able to rise up from the level they are at. And it is essentially slavery, just a different shade of it.
And even it you take someone that is not in the bottom 25%, but has a mortgage they will never be able to pay off, student loan payments spanning two decades, credit cards with high interest rates and a job that they will never advance at while real wage rates continue to remain stagnant. Still a slave although without whips and chains.
And those at the top of the ruling elite never have to worry about being killed during a slave insurrection because they keep those in the wage and debt slave classes passified with cable television, Xbox 360s, alcohol and the delusional promise of a better life known as the American dream (which would require one be sleeping since after all, it is just a dream).
Hardly compares with Slavery? Although most people have to work all their lives.
Most average people in any developed 1st world country have cars, take holidays, can buy smartphones, eat takeaways etc, have leisure time. And any 2nd world countries, like china, perhaps some eastern Europe countries the standard of living is increasing all the time. Will we see African countries having the same standard of living as 1st world countries in 50 years perhaps. Look at how China is now the 2nd biggest economy in the world in perhaps only 30 years.
And don't forget many rich people, who could retire whenever they want and have millions in the bank choose to work very hard.
Beyond say a 100k a year - there is no great in advantage these days in being very rich, mass production and consumerism, competition between corporations have democratized wealth and reduced costs of things so that we can all have what we want. If you look beyond money in the bank - we are all getting richer all the time.
A person on the minimum wage now is richer than a millionaire 50 years ago in terms of technology, food, standard of living, knowledge available at their fingertips.
A Billionaire can only buy the same products as everyone else, they only eat the same food as you, they can only take so many holidays, they can buy lots of sports cars and big houses - but there just more of the same stuff - they don't have any real advantage with having lots of money in the bank.
The standard of living will eventually get so high that being a billionaire in the future will become a pointless and irrelevant goal. Your intelligence level and talents, work ethic, spirit is really what matters - not just piling up cash in a bank account, how boring and dull.
Last edited by mikeyking; 04-13-2012 at 12:29 PM..
Call me crazy, but I didn't know this was an America-themed thing - my country of origin had slavery hundreds of years ago (part of the Ottoman Empire) - and slaves came in all colors there: white, black, and everything in between.
Call me crazy, but I didn't know this was an America-themed thing - my country of origin had slavery hundreds of years ago (part of the Ottoman Empire) - and slaves came in all colors there: white, black, and everything in between.
Of course ( according to the locals) it's "America-themed thing," because if it were not, they'd have already mentioned that the ultimate equivalent of White slavery was serfdom, not indentured servitude in the US.
Call me crazy, but I didn't know this was an America-themed thing - my country of origin had slavery hundreds of years ago (part of the Ottoman Empire) - and slaves came in all colors there: white, black, and everything in between.
What's different here is that what started as white bondage became mixed and then black as the races were deliberatly divided by the details of their captivity. The Civil War was fought for many reasons, but slavery was one of the central ones. The echos of the practice and the restrictive system which followed still effects our perceptitons of our society. It was never practiced by more than one in ten as owners, but in the social stratification of the poor which continued long after either practice (slavery or indenture) have continued to effect our perception of our fellow citizens.
Until we as a society can stop playing the guilt game, we never will.
What this does, in terms of discussion of indenture and convict labor (which built colonial america, and was as much white as black) is make it hard to deal with it as a history and look at its overall place, since some must insist it was certainly not the same and some must insist it was identical and the reason and analysis tends to get lost in the muddle.
What remains is that for the poor on the streets swept up in convict raids as ships has space, processed through the courts or just straight to the ship, or the Irish swept off to fill orders, or the poor lied to about an indenture or the blacks sold by their own in africa it was forced labor without much concern that they'd survive the trip and especially for those with indentures, little concern about their survival during the time of the sentence. They were all simply fodder for the fields of those with the money to buy them.
It's interesting that in Australia, up until recently, convict shipping lists and records were routinely destroyed (now stopped) and families often chose not to know of their origions.
In the US before the revolution, two thirds of immigrants came as convicts or indentured, so there are many many white americans with roots back to it as well.
I would recommend looking into the stories of Thomas Pellow & James Riley. Riley in particular, since many former Barbary slaves such as Riley, went on to become some of the most vocal abolitionists.
I've read that there were indeed white slaves, not just 'indentured servants' in the early days of the colonies when there weren't as many slaves from Africa. They were pretty rare but there was no law forbidding the enslavement of white people. This was before the 'immortal declaration' that 'all men are created equal.'
Australia was built upon white slavery - the convicts.
The Duke of Cumberland had the families of Jacobites (and of Highland Scots who were merely accused of Jacobitism) sold into slavery in the Americas where they were treated just like black slaves, housed no differently, and subject to the same atrocities. (Men accused of Jacobite sympathies were hung, not enslaved - it was their wives and children who were made into slaves).
Many of the slaves who were considered "black" were for all practical purposes white. There were isolated accounts of slavemasters kidnapping white children, especially girls, to sell on the slave market, but there is little documentation of the extent of which Southern "white slavery' went on.
a great deal of rewriting of history since 1964. i only wish the indians were given a fair shot at their version.
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