LITMIR.BIZ

      European girl captured by Moorish sea-captain. From Voltaire’s Candide. Daughter of the Princess of Palestrina. (Illustration by Bruneschelli).

      Johann Buettner, one of those who came under these conditions tells how men and women were stripped naked on board on arrival and examined like cattle by prospective buyers. He says that on the voyage the women slept indiscriminately among the men. So much the better if they became pregnant. They would fetch more.

      G. Mittelberger, who came to America in 1750, wrote, “Many parents must sell and trade away their children like so many head of cattle.” He estimated that during the four years he was in Philadelphia, 25,000 of his compatriots were sold there. Children from nine to twelve went for from $30 to $40; and over eighteen from $60 to $69.

      William Eddis in “Letters From America, 1769-1777” tells how badly these white slaves were treated by their masters. In that of September 20, 1770, he compares their treatment with that of the Negro slaves: “Negroes being a property for life the death of slaves in the prime of youth and strength is a material loss to the proprietor … they are therefore under more comfortable circumstances than the miserable Europeans over whom the rigid planter exercises an inflexible severity. They are strained to the utmost to perform their allotted labor … generally speaking they groan beneath a worse than Egyptian bondage.”

      “White servants,” says Bancroft, “came to be a usual article of traffic. They were sold in England to be transported and in Virginia resold to the highest bidder; like the Negroes they were to be purchased on shipboard as men buy horses at a fair.”

      J. B. McMaster says, “They became in the eyes of the law a slave and in both the civil and the criminal code were classed with the Negro and the Indian. They were worked hard, were dressed in the cast-off clothes of their owners and might be flogged as often as the master and mistress thought necessary. … Father, mother, and children could be sold to different buyers. Such remnants of cargoes as could not find purchasers within the time specified were bought in lots of fifty or more by speculators, known as ‘soul-drivers,’ who drove them through the country like so many cattle and sold them for what they would fetch.” (Acquisition of Political, Social, and Industrial Rights in America, pp. 32-35). Some whites served under Negro slave overseers.

      White slaves who ran away were advertised for in the newspapers. If caught, they were branded with the letter “R” (runaway). Those who “stole flour and meal given out for baking” had their ears clipped. George Washington advertised for two white runaways.

      No wonder Moreau de St. Mery, who spent five years in America (1793-98) wrote as regards the sale of white people, “It is, therefore, not the goodness of the soil, nor the excellence of the laws which are responsible for the growth of the population of the United States, but the traffic in men from Europe.” He estimated that in one year alone, 13,000 of these whites were sold at ten pounds sterling each, or a total of some $650,000. (Voyage, etc. pp. 321-22). There is a translation of this work by Kenneth Roberts.

      One reads of the horrors that Negroes suffered on slave ships from Africa but eyewitness accounts of what white slaves suffered on their passage sound as awful. Mittelberger wrote in 1750, “During the voyage 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 comes from old and sharply salted food and meat, also from the bad and foul water … lice abound so frightfully, especially on sick people, that they can be scraped off. … During a storm that closely packed people tumble over each other both the sick and the well. …” (Journey to Pennsylvania, p. 20). Geiser’s “Redemptioners,” Chapter “The Voyage” gives equally harrowing tales of those sufferers.