White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America (39 page)

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WHITE CARGO

It took five years before the importation of convicts was banned by law across the USA and in that period seven convict ships secretly brought their cargoes to America and at least two successfully landed them. However, the
Mercury
debacle sounded the death knell for the convict trade. It forced the British Parliament to accept that America would never again be the dumping ground for Britain’s convicted criminals. In 1785, a Parliamentary committee concluded ‘with regret . . . that the ports of the United States have been closed against the importation of convicts’. Australia had by then been selected as the alternative. Two years later, a fleet set out for Botany Bay in New South Wales, carrying a cargo of 750 convicts. Among them were some of those that Britain had desperately tried to offload in America in a last hurrah for the American white slave trade.

Although the convict trade was over, white slavery was not. As with convicts, shipments of free-willers were barred during the war. With the advent of peace, servant ships were back in New York and Boston before the ink was dry on the peace treaty, carrying men and women for sale. The reappearance of the trade scandalised some Americans. In January 1784, while Messrs Pamp and Salmon were in Baltimore trying to pass off the convicts from the
Swift
as free-willers, a group of men liberated a consignment of the genuine articles from a ship just docked in New York. The
Independent Gazette
reported that these New Yorkers considered the indentured system to be ‘contrary to . . . the idea of liberty this country has so happily established’ and, having freed the servants, they were raising a public subscription to pay for their passage.

Hopes of universal liberty were misplaced, however. The prime enslavers, the planter elite from Virginia, were senior partners in the coalition of interests that won the war and would now mould America. The richest planter of them all – slave holder and servant holder – was to be the first president of the new United States, George Washington.

Washington’s attitude was put to the test at the beginning of the war, when the British Governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, promised freedom to servants and slaves who joined his side and fought for King George. The prospect of losing their prime assets 280

THE LAST HURRAH

enraged the planters, not least Washington. He described Lord Dunmore as an ‘arch traitor to the rights of humanity’.15

It would take thirty years before the indentured-servant trade disappeared. It did so as unobtrusively as it came in, dying out slowly and without fuss. No principled campaign was fought to end it, as happened with black slavery. Economics killed it. The trade in white servants simply lost its profitability. Advances in ship design made the journey quicker and cheaper and therefore within reach of more of the poor. At the same time, ethnic self-help groups emerged offering loans to would-be migrants from back home.

The result was that fewer people needed to mortgage their best years in pursuit of a new life in a new world. By 1820, the trade was gone and those who connived at it – some of them great names in America and Britain – were remembered for other things.

What of the legacy of their victims? Did those convicts and free-willers and others dealt with so grossly by the indentured-servant system leave some definable trace of themselves in the fabric of the society they helped to build? The answer is undoubtedly yes, for America grew from their experience just as much as it did from that of others whose stories are more readily told. Is it too fanciful to see something of the harsh conditions of those early settlements, of the backbreaking work in farm and factory, within the present-day American psyche, with its proud insistence on the work ethic? And in its rigorous penal codes, with the death penalty still available in so many states, is it too much to see something of those stern early disciplinarians? One tends to think not.

Early America was created out of a series of convulsive efforts that so often depended upon the sacrifice of those who cleared the trees and tilled the soil. These men and women played their peculiar part in the creation of the dual facets of the American dream: the right to individual freedom and the opportunity to make something of oneself. Thousands upon thousands of enslaved workers gave up their freedom, or had it taken from them, in order that others could make money, while hoping upon hope that one day it would be their turn, too.

281

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1 John Van der Zee,
Bound Over: Indentured Servitude and
American Conscience
(1985).

2 A. Roger Ekirch,
Bound for America: The Transportation of
British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718–1775
(1987).

3 Walter Hart Blumenthal,
Brides from Bridewell: Female Felons
Sent to Colonial America
(1962).

4 Peter Wilson Coldham,
Emigrants in Chains: A Social History
of Forced Emigration to the Americas, 1607–1776
(1992).

5 Lerone Bennett Jr,
Before the Mayflower: A History of the Negro
in America 1619–1964
(1964).

6 Gary B. Nash, ‘Poverty and Politics in Early American History’

in Smith, Billy G. (ed.),
Down and Out in Early America
(2004).

7 Thomas Jefferson,
Notes on the State of Virginia
(1785).

8 Sydney George Fisher,
Men, Women and Manners in Colonial
Times
(1898).

CHAPTER ONE

1 Raphael Holinshed,
The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and
Ireland
(1802).

2 E.E. Rich, ‘The Population of Elizabethan England’ in
The
Economic History Review
, New Series, Vol. 2, No. 3 (1950).

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3 L.W. Cowie, ‘Bridewell’,
History Today
, 23 (1973).

4 Nassau W. Senior, and Edwin Chadwick, et al.,
The Poor Law
Commissioners Report of 1834: Copy of the Report Made in 1834

by the Commissioners for Inquiring into the Administration and
Practical Operation of the Poor Laws
(1885).

5 John Ranelagh,
Ireland: An Illustrated History
(1981).

6 Humphrey Gilbert,
A Discourse for the Discovery of a New
Passage to Cathaia
(1972).

7
Canadian Dictionary of National Biography Online
, www.

biographi.ca/EN/ShowBio.asp?BioId=34374&query=humphr ey%20AND%20gilbert

8 Gilbert,
Discourse
.

9 C.W. Eliot,
Voyages and Travels Ancient and Modern
(2006).

10 W.G. Gosling,
The Life of Sir Humphrey Gilbert: England’s
First Empire Builder
(1911).

11 Kevin Major,
As Near to Heaven by Sea: A History of
Newfoundland and Labrador
(2001).

12 Gosling,
Life of Sir Humphrey Gilbert
.

13 David Beers Quinn,
Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies
,
1584–1606
(1985).

14 Annette Kolodny,
The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience
and History in American Life and Letters
(2002).

CHAPTER TWO

1 Alexander Brown,
Genesis of the United States: A Narrative
of the Movement in England, 1605–1616, which Resulted in the
Plantation of North America by Englishmen .
. . (1964).

2 John Brereton,
A Brief and True Relation of the Discovery of the
North Part of Virginia . . . 1602
(1973).

3 Martin Pring, ‘A Voyage Set Out From the City of Bristol’, in Burrage, Henry S. (ed.),
Haklyut 1534–1608
(1906).

4 Lord John Campbell,
The Lives of the Chief Justices of England
(1876).

5 Ibid.

6 T.B. Macaulay,
The History of England
, Vol. 2 (1863).

7 Campbell,
Lives of the Chief Justices
.

8 Thomas Fuller,
Worthies of England
(1840).

284

NOTES

9 James Sullivan,
History of the District of Maine
(1795).

10 Don Pedro de Zuniga, communication to King Philip, 1607, in Brown,
Genesis of the United States
.

11 Peter Wilson Coldham,
Child Apprentices in America from
Christ’s Hospital, London, 1617–1788
(1990).

12 John A. Poor,
The First Colonisation of New England
(1863).

13 W.F. Poole,
The Popham Colony: A Discussion of its Historical
Claims
(1866).

14 John Aubrey,
Brief Lives Chiefly of Contemporaries
(1931).

15 William Stirling,
An Encouragement to Colonies
(1624).

16 Douglas Walthew Rice,
The Life and Achievements of Sir John
Popham, 1531–1607: Leading to the Establishment of the First
English Colony in New England
(2005).

17 Sullivan,
History of the District of Maine
.

18 William Strachey,
History of Travel into Virginia Britannia
(1953).

19 George Chalmers,
Parliamentary Portraits; or, Characters of
the British Senate
(1795).

20 B.F. de Costa,
Relation of a Voyage to Sagadahoc
(1880).

21 Ferdinando Gorges,
A Brief Narration of the Original
Undertakings of the Advancement of Plantations into the Parts of
America
(1658).

22 John Wingate Thorton,
Colonial Schemes of Popham and Gorges
(1863).

CHAPTER THREE

1 John Smith,
The True Travels, Adventures and Observations of
Capt John Smith
(1630).

2 Hugh Brogan,
Penguin History of the United States of America
(1985).

3 Richard Hakluyt,
Richard Hakluyt’s Voyages in Search of the
North West Passage
(1973).

4 Smith,
True Travels
.

5 George Percy,
A Discourse of the Plantation of the Southern
Colony in Virginia by the English, 1606
(1625).

6 Smith,
True Travels
.

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7 David Beers Quinn, ‘Theory and Practice: Roanoke and Jamestown’, the Brewster Lecture in History 1985, Sydney Jones Library, University of Liverpool.

8 Cited in Alexander Brown,
Genesis of the United States: A
Narrative of the Movement in England, 1605–1616, which
Resulted in the Plantation of North America by Englishmen .
. .

(1964).

9 Ibid.

10 Giles Milton,
Nathaniel’s Nutmeg: How One Man’s Courage
Changed the Course of History
(2000).

11 Peter Force,
Tracts Relating to the Origin, Settlement, and
Progress of the Colonies in North America,
Vol. 3 (1836), see Library of Congress.

12 Robert Johnson,
The New Life of Virginia
(1612).

13 Ibid.

14 Terence O’Brien, ‘The London Livery Companies and the Virginia Company’
, Virginia Magazine
, April 1960.

15 William Strachey,
A True Reportory of the Wreck and Redemption
of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight, Upon and From the Islands of the
Bermudas
(1965).

16 George Percy, A
Discourse of the Plantation of the Southern
Colony in Virginia by the English
(1606).

17 Smith,
True Travels
.

18 Alice Morse Earle,
Curious Punishments of Bygone Days
(1896).

19 Cited in Elmer I. Miller,
The Legislature of the Province of
Virginia: Its Internal Development
(1907).

20 Sir Thomas Dale, letter to Lord Salisbury (King James I’s Secretary of State), 27 August 1611, in Brown,
Genesis of the
United States
.

21 A Broadside by the Virginia Council, 1609, in Brown,
Genesis
of the United States
.

22 Richard Hall,
Empires of the Monsoon: A History of the Indian
Ocean and its Invaders
(1996).

23 Frank Welsh,
A History South of Africa
(1998).

24 Mary Johnston,
Pioneers of the Old South: A Chronicle of English
Colonial Beginnings
(1918).

286

NOTES

25 Beamish Murdoch,
A History of Nova Scotia or Arcadie
(1867).

26 Don Diego de Molina, letter of 1613, in Tyler, Lyon Gardiner,
Narratives of Early Virginia, 1606–1625
(1907).

27 Count de Gondomar, communication to King Philip, in Brown,
Genesis of the United States
.

28 Susan Kingsbury,
An Introduction to the Records of the Virginia
Company of London
(1905).

29 Ralph Hamor,
Discourse of the Present State of Virginia and the
Success of the Affairs There till 18 June 1614
(1957).

30 Peter Wilson Coldham,
Emigrants in Chains: A Social History
of Forced Emigration to the Americas, 1607–1776
(1992).

CHAPTER FOUR

1 John Stow,
A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster
(1720).

2
Court Records of Bridewell Royal Hospital 1618–1638
, Bridewell Archives, Kent.

3 Hugh Lee to Wilson/Cecil, 26 March 1609,
Calendar of State
Papers
, Public Records Office, SP/89/3.

4 Hugh Cunningham,
Children and Childhood in Western Society
Since 1500
(1995).

5 Alexander Brown,
Genesis of the United States: A Narrative
of the Movement in England, 1605–1616, which Resulted in the
Plantation of North America by Englishmen . . .
(1964).

6 Susan Kingsbury,
An Introduction to the Records of the Virginia
Company of London
(1905).

7 Elizabeth McLure Thomson,

The Chamberlain Letters

(1966).

8 R.C. Johnson, ‘Transportation of Children from London to Virginia 1618–22’, in Reinmuth, Howard F.,
Early Stuart
Studies
(1970).