White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America (35 page)

‘heir to all the felons who should die under his care’. He got off the charge.6

After greeting the incoming ship in Annapolis or Boston, the merchant’s priority was advertising his cargo. Notices of arrival of the convict servants were placed in the
Boston Gazette
or the
Virginia Gazette
. Posters, known as tear sheets, were pinned to the walls of the local coffee houses.

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Last week arrived here from Bristol the
Snow Eugene
, Captain Jonathan Tallimay, with 69 of His Majesty’s seven-year passengers, 51 men and 18 women.

Just imported from Bristol in the ship
Randolph
, captain John Weber Price, 115 convicts, men, women and lads: among whom are several tradesmen who are to be sold on board the said ship, now in Annapolis Dock, this day, tomorrow and Saturday next.

One advertisement notifying a sale of newly arrived servants gave pride of place to other, presumably more desirable goods. It appeared in the
Boston Gazette
in the late 1720s, headed ‘Plaids from Glasgow’. The text read ‘Plaids of sundry sorts, both fine and ordinary, choice linens of several sorts, bed tickens, handkerchiefs and muslins, with some young men and women’s time of service

. . .’ Would-be buyers examined the human merchandise, paying minute attention to every limb and tooth. The convicts were, in a real sense, perishable goods. If a woman couldn’t stand up to the work or was diseased, the £8 or £10 spent on buying her was wasted. With men costing £13 and upwards, the buyer was even keener on ensuring they were sound. Those undergoing inspections or witnessing others being inspected usually drew the same parallel.

Convict servant William Green recalled: ‘They search us there as the dealers in horses do those animals in this country by looking at our teeth, viewing our limbs to see if they are sound and fit for their labour.’7

Another ex-convict, James Revel, put the scene in verse: Examined like horses, if we’re sound

What trade are you my lad says one to me

A tin man Sir, that will not do says he.

Some felt our hands and viewed our legs and feet And made us walk to see if we were complete

Some viewed our teeth to see if we were good

Or fit to chew our hard and homely food.8

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In 1758, a London weaver observed a sale of convict servants in Williamsburg:

They all was set in row, near 100 men and women and the planter come down the country to buy . . . I never see such parcels of poor wretches in my life some almost naked and what had clothes was as black as chimney sweeps, and almost starved by the ill-usage of their passage by the captain, for they are used no better than many negro slaves and sold in the same manner as horses or cows in our market or fair.9

The true parallel was with other humans. What happened to white convicts on their entry to the New World was the same as what happened to Africans. Both were advertised for sale, both were inspected and probed and both were taken off in chains by new masters or by an agent who would find them new masters.

Apart from the chains, non-criminal servants were often sold in much the same way. John Harrower, a forty-year-old indentured servant from Scotland, kept a diary of his arrival in Fredericksburg, Virginia, in 1774. On 16 May, he wrote:

This day severals came on board to purchase servants’

indentures and among them there was two soul drivers. They are men who make it their business to go on board all ships who have in either servants or convicts and buy sometimes the whole and sometimes a parcel of them as they can agree, and then they drive them through the country like a parcel of sheep until they can sell them to advantage, but all went away without buying any.10

The mainland colonies tried to block the resumption of convict sales. They couldn’t overturn a British law but they could sabotage it. Maryland took the lead and in 1719 it enacted a law requiring everyone buying convicts to lodge a good-behaviour bond of £100

per convict. The Privy Council squashed this wrecking move inside two months.

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Virginia’s burgesses attempted similar tactics. They ordered ships’ captains to give a security of £100 for each convict sold and buyers to lodge a £10 bond for their purchase’s good behaviour.

This, too, was vetoed by the Privy Council, so Virginia’s leaders temporised, arguing that if convicts must come they should be settled on the western frontier. The merchant Joshua Gee proposed giving them frontier land and using them as a bulwark against Native Americans. The influential Reverend Hugh Jones suggested workhouses for them on the frontier where they could work and become self-sufficient.11

None of it came to anything, and convicts poured in. The vast majority went to the Chesapeake provinces, followed a long way behind by Pennsylvania. Many of these unwilling immigrants were immediately thrust into heavy labour – on the plantations, in mining, forestry and industry. Others, the skilled amongst the convicts, were bought to be assistants in shops, printing works and a hundred different small enterprises. According to a convict agent from Baltimore, Maryland alone absorbed some 600 convicts a year for decade after decade. The province’s Governor Horatio Sharpe commented: ‘I could heartily wish that they [convicts] were sent to any other part of His Majesty’s plantations but while we purchase them they will send them.’

Quite simply, thanks to the subsidy, convicts were cheap labour and too good a bargain to miss. They were a third of the price of black slaves and, while more expensive than regular indentured servants, the free-willers, they invariably had far longer to serve.

Baltimore records show that convicts were twenty-five to twenty-nine per cent more expensive than other indentured servants but their length of servitude was more than twice that of the average indentured period.12

Neverthless, the market for free-willers was buoyant. Fewer were arriving from England, where the economy was picking up, but many more were coming from Ireland and Scotland, where poverty and want were widespread. The nature of the exodus from Ireland in the eighteenth century differed significantly from what had preceded it. In the 1600s, people were forcibly transported mainly to clear the land of its Catholic population to make way for 254

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Protestant English and Scots. Now, in the 1700s, punishment and poverty were the two driving forces.

Ireland contributed convicts and free-willers. As was happening to people up and down the Rhine, the Irish were the target of the hard sell on the wonders of life in the New World. Merchants published advertisements, bogus letters were planted in the press and tracts extolling America were passed hand to hand. The
Dublin
Weekly Journal
, for instance, carried an advert in January 1735

offering Irish Protestant emigrants to New York a special deal. Land purchased from the Mohawk Indians could be rented by them for one shilling and nine pence farthing per hundred acres. Then there was a widely circulated letter that was purportedly written to a County Tyrone clergyman extolling the money-making merits of New York. It was written phonetically in a Scots dialect: ‘. . . if your son Samuel and John Boyd wad but come here they wad get mair money in ane year for teaching in a Latin School, nor your sell wad get for three years preaching whar ye are . . .’

The letter described the ‘bonny country’ then gave the very high wage rates for various trades and the very low price of land, and urged: ‘I beg of ye all to come here.’ The letter was signed ‘James Murray’ but was most probably a fake, a piece of propaganda got up by planters or shipping agents. But the propaganda worked.

In 1728, the head of the Anglican church in Ireland, Archbishop Boulter, complained that canvassing by American agents had persuaded large numbers to emigrate from Ulster, ‘deluded with stories of great plenty and estates to be had for going for in these parts of the world’. He continued: ‘there are now seven ships at Belfast that are carrying off 1,000 passengers hither’. However, the Archbishop then put his finger on what was really sending so many across the ocean – dire poverty. Referring to the Belfast migrants, he added: ‘if we knew how to stop them, as most of them can neither get victuals nor work at home, it would be cruel to do it’.

There are few reliable figures for those shipped from Ireland.

However, it is estimated that 15,000 convicts were deported between 1718 and 1775. In the 1740s, the Irish Parliament commissioned a report into the deportations of felons and vagabonds. The suspicion was that merchants engaged to transport the convicts were taking 255

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their subsidy and dumping their cargoes in England, Wales or even somewhere else in Ireland. This investigation got nowhere and the records that exist provide only snapshots of the Irish convict trade.

What there is, however, tends to confirm that it was considerable.

For example, over just two days in September 1766, seventeen women and ninety-two men, all evidently felons, were indentured before the Lord Mayor of Dublin prior to transportation. (The practice of taking emigrants, free-willers or criminals before the mayor had been established in an attempt to stamp out kidnapping and false indenturing.) They were then taken in fifteen carts from prison to Sir John Rogerson’s Quay, where they were put on board the
Hicks
, from Whitehaven, ‘bound for His Majesty’s plantations in America’.

There were brief moments of comedy in the convict deportations from Ireland. The
Dublin Mercury
for 9–13 June 1767 ran this story about a transported felon:

Among the unfortunate transports shipped out last Monday was one poor fellow, who being skilled in modern fashions of hair dressing, had unluckily made too free with some of his employer’s trinket: one thing he proposed to himself, might be a useful introduction to his being employed by the ladies in America, who will, like the ladies of their sister Kingdoms, not be outdone in mode of fashion.

By now, large-scale users of labour, ranging from Virginia’s great planters to the first generations of industrialists, were all turning to Africa as a major source of slaves. But they remained in the market for convicts and free-willers. In what was still a transitional period in racial segregation, they had no qualms about using mixed-race labour gangs. The picture of black slaves existing alone at the bottom of the heap does not hold. For a long time, white servants were with them at the bottom and treated with equal inhumanity. Indeed, there are indications from various sources that whites were in some cases treated worse than blacks. It was William Eddis, England’s Customs Surveyor in Annapolis, who reckoned that African slaves were better treated than Europeans on the 256

‘HIS MAJESTY’S SEVEN-YEAR PASSENGERS’

plantations because they were more valuable, a lifelong property, whereas European servants mostly had a term to their service.

Planters exercised ‘an inflexible severity’ over white servants, he said. ‘Generally speaking, they groan beneath a worse than Egyptian bondage.’ In fact, nothing suffered by whites equated with the most unspeakable cases of cruelty to blacks: whites were never ‘limbed’ nor castrated. Nevertheless, the death rate suggests that Eddis was broadly right about their treatment. Fifty per cent of convict servants were dead inside seven years.13

Tidewater aristocrats, who came to be so completely identified as African-American slave owners, were among those who bought convicts. Eighteen-year-old petty thief John Lauson was acquired by one of them. According to his own account, he was bought on the quayside by a planter from Rappahannock and slaved for fourteen years. Lauson was in a plantation labour gang of twenty-four, eighteen of them Africans and six Europeans. According to Lauson, his treatment was indistinguishable from that meted out to the Africans. They were chained together, they lived together, slept together, worked together and were whipped together.14

White slavery wasn’t confined to rural America. The archive of the Hampton-Northampton ironworks near Baltimore provides day-to-day evidence of an inter-race slave workforce in operation over decades. The ironworks were owned by the Ridgely family.

Between 1750 and 1800, the Ridgelys bought 300 or so white servants, most apparently convicts, and put them to work alongside black slaves. Professor R. Kent Lancaster researched the archive and emerged with a picture of endless sweat and harsh discipline.

Everywhere there was hard physical labour – feeding the furnaces, working the forge, mining the ore, felling trees for fuel, hauling the ore and ‘in slack times’ being put on farm work. Time books catalogued near perpetual toil. Colliers worked a twenty-six-day month, with only Sundays free, year after year. The only time off at Christmas was on 28 December, which the clerk described as

‘Chillimas Day’. ‘Indentured servants were exploitable for a limited time only and that time could not be wasted on the niceties of holidays,’ Professor Lancaster explains.15

The Ridgelys made money not just by working servants but also 257

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from buying and selling them. Professor Lancaster uncovered a profitable little deal done by Captain Charles Ridgely in 1769.

He bought eleven men for £12 each and nine women at £9 each.

Within two months he had sold seven of the women for between

£10 and £15 a head and eight or nine men for between £17 and

£30 a head.

Men and women continually tried to escape. A document dated 1772 and headed ‘Description of White Workers’ contained profiles of eighty-eight men and women labourers and had been compiled for use if, or rather when, they escaped. When a man called Francis Barrett vanished in the summer of 1775, Captain Ridgely used his profile in the ‘description’ file for a runaway notice in the
Maryland
Gazette
. This described Barrett and noted that he ‘had also an iron collar on’. The collar was apparently fitted after a previous escape attempt and ‘left on to facilitate his return to the furnace site’.