White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America (31 page)

northern Europe in the period shortly before the American War of Independence.

In 1750, Mittelberger embarked on a ship named the
Osgood
, along with 500 fellow Germans. Accompanying him was a brand-new church organ destined for Pennsylvania. His detailed descriptions of their experiences should be compared with those of conditions endured by other Europeans and Africans on the Atlantic slave run:

Both in Rotterdam and in Amsterdam the people are packed densely, like herrings so to say, in the large sea-vessels. One person receives a place of scarcely 2 feet width and 6 feet in length in the bedstead, while many a ship carries four to six hundred souls; not to mention the innumerable implements, tools, provisions, water-barrels and other things which likewise occupy such space.6

The passengers were so tightly packed that during stormy weather they tumbled over one another. ‘Children cried out against their parents, husbands against their wives and wives against their husbands,’ reported Mittelberger. Most of all, the passengers railed against ‘the soul-traffickers’ who had persuaded them to emigrate.

Slave ships on the run from Africa carried a cargo of up to 600

souls or so. In a later report to the British Parliament, the slave ship
Brooks
was depicted with a sleeping space for each adult male of only one foot, four inches across, and only one foot, two inches for a female. British convicts’ berths were eighteen inches wide. So, with their ‘scarcely 2 feet’, the Europeans of Mittelberger’s time were faring abominably but better than African or English slaves.

In one of the most powerful travel journals ever written, Mittelberger described the Atlantic journey in unflinching terms: 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 come from old and sharply salted food and meat, also from very bad and 222

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foul water, so that many die miserably . . . Children from 1

to 7 years rarely survive the voyage.

During Mittelberger’s own voyage, thirty-two children died and their bodies were buried at sea. As there was no ordained minister on board, Mittelberger conducted the burial services.

Having survived the voyage, Mittelberger recorded what happened once they arrived in Pennsylvania. It is doubtful that many of the redemptioners would have read Penn’s intoxicatingly optimistic charter for his province, written in 1683 – ‘no People can be truly happy, though under the greatest Enjoyment of Civil Liberties’ – but they would have been hoping for some relief from the trials of the voyage. For many there was no release.

Those who were unable to pay for their passage or provide security for payment from a friend or relative were kept on the ship, still stinking from the ordeals of the crossing. As the vessel rode at anchor, the familiar parade of agents and planters came on board over a period of days and bargained over the length of time the passengers should serve to pay their passage. The sick had the worst of it, remaining on the ship for weeks. According to Mittelberger, they frequently died without setting foot ashore.

Other cruel abuses awaited the redemptioners. If a husband or wife had died at sea when the ship had made more than half the journey, the surviving spouse had to sign themselves up not only for their own passage but also for that of the deceased. When both parents died more than halfway into the voyage, their orphaned children had to stand for their parents’ passages as well as their own. Theoretically, an orphan could thus be enslaved for eighteen years or so.

Mittelberger reported: ‘It often happens that whole families, husband, wife and children, are separated by being sold to different purchasers, especially when they have not paid any part of their passage-money.’ Some parents felt compelled to sell their children into bondage so that they might remain free, no doubt hoping that they would in time raise enough money to redeem their children and be reunited with them. As the parents often had no idea where their children were going, they ran the risk of not seeing each other 223

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again for many years or, as Mittelberger put it, ‘perhaps no more in all their lives’.

Germans poured in, not just to Pennsylvania but also to New York, Maryland, New England and Carolina. Mittelberger calculated that during his four years in Philadelphia as many as 25,000 Germans arrived in the city. As he listened to their stories, he realised that merchants, or Newlanders, as they were known, were preying on German immigrants. They encouraged people of every rank and trade to emigrate, hoping they would fall into debt on the journey and then have to sell themselves as servants.

The new arrivals made a startling allegation. They claimed that European princes and rulers received a kickback from merchants for every subject they allowed to leave. For each person of ten years of age or more, their lord received a payment of three florins or a ducat. In Philadelphia, the merchants could make sixty, seventy or eighty florins for each person, in proportion to the passenger’s debts incurred during the voyage.

For the prosperous, Pennsylvania was a land of bounty. Its inhabitants were almost free from taxation. The annual tax on a hundred acres of land was only a shilling. Trades and professions were not bound by guilds, so anyone could carry on whatever business they wished. If a lad learnt his art or trade in six months, he could become a master and marry whenever he chose.

Free men and women could marry redemptioners but would have to pay £5 to £6 for each year their bride or groom still had to serve. Mittelberger wryly noted that ‘many a one who has thus purchased and paid for his bride, has subsequently repented his bargain, so that he would gladly have returned his exorbitantly dear ware, and lost the money besides’.

The inner man was equally well cared for. Mittelberger described how all types of religious sects were tolerated. Among those he listed were Lutherans, Catholics, Quakers, Anabaptists, Moravian Brethren, Pietists, Seventh Day Baptists, Dunkers, Presbyterians, Freemasons, Freethinkers, Jews, Mohammedans, Pagans, Negroes and Indians. Somehow, as one reads Mittelberger, images of ancient Greece float unbidden to the mind, with worthies discoursing upon democracy in the senate while their slaves labour in their estates.

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By late 1755, Mittelberger was back home in Wittgenstein, where he received a package of letters from Philadelphia. He read that during the previous autumn more than 22,000 people had arrived in Philadelphia, mostly Württembergers, Palatines, Durlachers and Swiss. The sick were dying in great numbers. The rest were so poor that most had sold their children to pay their debts.

It is perhaps little wonder that Mittelberger found that in Pennsylvania, the land of religious tolerance, there were many who thought little of religion. ‘Many do not even believe that there is a true God and devil, a heaven and a hell,’ he said. The paradise that was being sought in the New World had more to do with what was in the minds of men who created its plantation than in providential promises arising from any golden book. As the German experience demonstrated, men could become free in America, but only if they could avoid the many snares and nets held out to trap the unlucky or unwary.

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

DISUNITY IN THE UNION

While Governor Hunter was grappling with the Palatines in New York, the authorities in England were drawing up plans to dump another batch of troublesome people on America. These were the Jacobites from what became known as ‘the Fifteen’

– the unsuccessful attempt in 1715 to dislodge the Hanoverian George I from the throne in favour of the Stuart claimant Prince James Edward Stuart, who would become known as the Old Pretender.

The rebellion was launched just a year after George had ascended to the throne. Large forces of Jacobite clansmen gathered in Scotland while in England an Anglo-Scottish army of Jacobites advanced into Lancashire. But the rebellion turned into a shambles. The push into England ended at the battle of Preston, where 1,500 Jacobite prisoners were taken. In Scotland, delay and indecision saw the Jacobites waste opportunity after opportunity and their forces disintegrate. In Christmas week 1715, the Old Pretender left France and landed in Scotland, for the first and only time in his life, in an attempt to rally his armies. But he was no military commander. While many among the Highland clans were for fighting on, James Edward prevaricated. By the end of the first week in February he had gone, never to return.

In the meantime, many ringleaders in both England and Scotland were rounded up and executed for treason. After the surrender in 227

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Preston, the authorities had to decide what to do with the 1,468

prisoners, of whom 1,003 were Scots. Ultimately, the ordinary fighting men were given the choice of being tried for treason or accepting transportation.

The rank-and-file rebels were farmed out between the prisons of Lancaster, Liverpool and Chester. The aristocratic leaders were imprisoned in the Tower of London. Two famous escapes took place. The Earl of Winton, perhaps uniquely for a member of the nobility, had been apprenticed in his youth to a locksmith. He picked a lock and made off. Just as amusingly, the Earl of Nithsdale waddled out disguised as a pregnant woman.

The farce was short-lived. Thirty-three men were tried for treason, sentenced to death and hanged. The government felt sure this would encourage the remainder to accept the King’s magnanimous gesture of an offer of their lives in return for transportation. The prisoners remained reluctant. There was probably a mixture of reasons why they did not immediately act to save their skins. Some no doubt thought it best to sit it out in the hope that any settlement made with their leaders would include clemency for the foot soldiers; others wanted to use what influence they had to gain a pardon; some were anxious to remain in the hope – no matter how slender – that they might see their families once more; and yet others had a legal gripe about being forced into indentures or transportation at all, for, as we have seen in Chapter Ten, transportation to the colonies was more of English making than Scottish.1

With so many prisoners awaiting their fate in several prisons, it was hardly surprising that an enterprising merchant should propose that he could ease the burden of the state. The British authorities had to deport the rebels whether they signed indentures or not. Sir Thomas Johnson, a merchant of Liverpool, wrote to the treasury offering to transport the rebels for forty shillings a head in return for being allowed to dispose of them for seven years’ servitude apiece.

By April 1716, the governors of the American colonies had been given instructions to receive the rebels. Any who had not signed seven-year indentures before they landed should be forced to do so. Many were reluctant not only to be transported but enslaved as 228

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well, as attested to in a letter from an officer imprisoned in Chester Prison on 28 April 1716.

[We] were all offered indentures to sign for seven years in the plantations, as the said Sir Thomas should please to dispose of us. They have prevailed with a great many of the common sort to sign them, the last of whom were carried off to Liverpool this morning. But the gentlemen unanimously refuse to do the same, alleging they were no ways bound thereto by the nature of our petition presented to his Majesty, but only to simple transportation, which we were will[ing] to undergo at his Majesty’s desire, whereupon we were severely threatened, and, without getting liberty to return to our rooms for our bed clothes and linen, and we were all turned into a dungeon or little better, and fed only with bread and water.2

Whatever the prisoners might expect, they were bound for servitude; after all, the officer in charge of the castle was none other than the son-in-law of Sir Thomas Johnson, whose government contract stipulated that he could sell them in the first place.

During the summer of 1716, Johnson and his associates transported some 600 prisoners to both the American mainland and the West Indies, to be indentured for seven years. During five months, twelve ships carried a total of 619 Jacobite rebels at a total cost to the Crown of £1,238, with the majority of them destined for South Carolina, Virginia, Jamaica, Maryland and Antigua.

Thirty went to St Christopher and just one to Barbados.

As told by Margaret Sankey in wonderful detail in
Jacobite
Prisoners of the 1715 Rebellion
, this was not the end of the troubles faced by the authorities. Many prisoners managed to escape before even crossing the Atlantic. Some bribed ships’ crew members, others used subterfuge, while in one famous case, thirty prisoners, helped by at least one member of the crew, rebelled on board the
Hockenhill
, bound for St Christopher, and sailed from the Caribbean back to Europe, landing in Bordeaux, where they sold the cargo before making off. Other prisoners managed to escape 229

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indenture completely by bribing their way to freedom once they had arrived in the colonies. The
Elizabeth and Anne
set sail with 127 rebels but when it arrived in Virginia its complement was only 112. Investigations revealed the captain had been bribed to set the missing rebels ashore in England.

It appears that the deported rebels of 1715 may have done better in America than many of those transported to the West Indian colonies. By the early eighteenth century, conditions were easier in Virginia and a Scottish network had grown up among the colonists. Scottish settlers had been coming of their own volition for many years. The earliest had settled among the Dutch in New Netherlands and along the shores of the Delaware. Apart from the Covenanters and the Quakers from the lowlands, Highlanders also settled, predominantly along the Canadian borders. For those sent to South Carolina, things were not so good at first, as sporadic wars with the local Native Americans still persisted, but many thrived.