Slavery and Bondage

White Folk in the Colonial Food Chain

27 Jun By Dwight

The English Colonial records of North America and the Caribbean have unfamiliar terms referencing the European population. Confusion arises because we have no context for the lives of the population in the 1600s and 1700s.

This was a world where people were graded economically. Racism was based on social status, not skin color. The economy of colony and wealth building was graded from the few at the top to those in bondage at the bottom. Under this system, slaves (servants, apprentices) could be African, European, Native American or from the Indian Sub-Continent (called East India Indians).

Four Categories of Whites in Colonial North America

There were four main categories for the incoming Europeans, and will be found in court, land, and church registers. However, it is not always clear what is inferred. Just be aware that terminology changes by locality and time period.

White Freeman Who Owned Property: Is defined as a white male over 21 who owned real or personal property of a particular value. He was endorsed by a majority of other Freemen in the community. He had the right to vote and pay taxes.
White Freeman: A free male over 21, not bound, was considered a White Freeman. In the Southern colonies it was freed slaves or anyone who voted or paid taxes.
White Apprentices: A broad term applied to bondage, such as indentured servant, redemptioner, free-willer, and apprentices. Terms such as apprentice and servant, obscured what the terms of bondage may have really meant.
White Slave: This is a person who was bound to a master. Chattel slavery, which was for a lifetime, grew out of the indentured servant system. Slaves could be prisoners, religious or political dissidents, orphans or social outcasts. In the English colonies, African slavery would replace European slavery.

Whites could move up from one grade to the next one. For example, an indentured servant or slave can become a freeman and eventually a landed freeman owning slaves.

This was their world and their values. If you judge them by our standards, you may miss what a particular record is trying to convey.

If you would like help with your genealogy please call 385-214-0925.

Colonial Laws and the Indentured Servant (Part2)

16 Dec By Dwight Leave a Comment

Laws governing human bondage in the English colonies did not happen overnight. As needed, laws were enacted by the colonial assemblies. The Virginia and Maryland colonies were the two most powerful mainland colonies. They lead the way in defining exactly what human bondage really meant. Lawmakers didn’t think in terms of color, but in people as a commodity. For this reason, colonial laws would apply to all races.

Using Virginia colony as an example; in a December 1662 law, women servants who became pregnant by their masters were to finish out their term and then be bound over to the local church to be sold for an extra two years of servitude. An October 1670 law pronounced that all non-Christians brought by shipping (by sea) shall be a slave for life, but if brought by land (from another colony) as children they were to serve until they are 30 years old. If they were adults and brought by land, they were to serve for only 12 years. In April 1691, all whites, bond or free were forbidden from intermarrying with blacks, mulattos or Indians. This law also stated that free white women who had an illegitimate child by a black, mulatto or Indian would be bound out by the local parish church for five years and the child bound until the age of 30.

It was a series of Virginia laws passed in October 1705 which began to define in detail what a slave was. The main points were:

*Slaves brought into the colony by land or sea (except Turks and Moors) remained slaves regardless of converting to Christianity.

*Free people who were Christians in their own country were not to be sold as slaves.

*No black, mulatto, Indian, Jew, Muslim or other infidel could purchase Christian white servants.

*White men or women intermarrying with blacks and mulattoes were to go to prison for 6 months with no bail.

*If any slave resists their master during correction, it was legal to kill them as part of the correction. Escaped slaves could be killed.

*A Christian baptism does not exempt a person from bondage, and the status of all children was according to the condition of the mother.

This was the world of our colonial ancestors regardless of color!

Colonial Laws and the Indentured Servant (Part 1)

15 Dec By Dwight Leave a Comment

Until the laws caught up governing human bondage in the English New World, several systems were in place. One was outright slavery which included political prisoners, criminals, innocent kidnapped individuals, the homeless and orphans sold into bondage. Once shipped to the Caribbean, Virginia or Maryland colonies, many simply disappeared.

Another was the “indentured servant” which was different than outright slavery, however, this is a technicality if the servant didn’t survive. They were basically slaves for a contracted period of time in exchange for either passage over or for promised land. A study of white bondage using England as the focus reveals the following comparison between indentured servants, transported convicts and free immigrants in the colonial period:

Variable Indentured Servants Transported Convicts Free Immigrants

Emigration Reason escape poverty imposed punishment varies

Average age 15-24 years 20-30 years varies

Companions rarely family/friends rarely family/friends family/friends

Social status lower/lower middle lower class middle/upper middle

Select master could not could not not applicable

Marriage none none not applicable

The America before 1776 was a complex time as human slavery fueled the economy. The line between who was a slave and who wasn’t became thin. It took a century for the laws to be put into place that defined who had rights and what those rights were.

Irish Catholics were an important part of this colonial trade. By the 1600s English began to colonize a conquered Ireland. They planted Ireland with Scots and English. Workers left Ireland not only by force as convict slaves, but also were persuaded to leave as indentured servants. Ireland was so bad at the time that many gladly took up the offer to be enslaved for a set number of years. This went on for at least 100 years. The Caribbean islands, Virginia and Maryland were where most of the Irish were transported. Indentured servants would later go in large numbers to the Pennsylvania and New York colonies.

In tomorrow’s blog, I will discuss the laws which governed the practice of bondage and defined human rights, and what constituted slavery. Once the laws were in place, then slavery and servitude became color based.

Bondage Dictionary (Part 1)

20 Sep By Dwight Leave a Comment

The world of slavery is very foreign to us today. For this reason, when we read classic English literature or court records, we need a dictionary to sort through the mind-set of the time. It was a very strange world! This first of three part blogs focuses on words associated with the bondage of Africans, Europeans, East Indians and Native Americans. Only selected words have been chosen for presentation. The focus of this dictionary is terms from the seventeenth century English colonies through the enslavement of African Americans in the United States. There was crossover between many colonial words in regards to both white and black slavery, as the institution was still being defined in the courts during the 1600s.

It’s important to remember how huge the trafficking in human bondage was in the New World, with the Irish being in the middle of it on both sides of the chains. All the European powers with New World colonies were involved. This dictionary will not list some of the more obvious words.

Abandonment: When a slaveholder deserts his or her slaves.

Absentee Owner: A plantation or estate owner who did not live on and manage the property directly.

Absolute Slave: A slave for life; not a term slave.

Adults: African men and women generally older than 13 or 14 years of age or taller than four feet four inches. Specific age ratios differ by time and place.

Agent: In the indentured servant trade, an agent recruited the servants and redemptioners. The agents commonly sold or assigned their rights to these servants to labor starved American colonists.

Agricultural Laborer: After men completed several years as an agricultural servant, married, and established households, they became agricultural laborers.

Agricultural Servant: Young single men who lived in rural areas were commonly contracted to serve farmers for one year periods. This time served as agricultural training and certain aspects of this practice evolved into the indentured servants industry.

Americas: North America, Central America, South America and the Caribbean Islands.

Angola: see West Central Africa

Apprentice: Individuals contracted to serve a master for a specific number of years to learn a trade usually for a low wage. Parts of this practice evolved into the indentured servant practice. Often in an indenture contract, the word apprentice signals that a child is being indentured, not necessarily that the child would be learning a trade.

Apprenticeship: The period an individual was bound under contract as an apprentice, usually until the age of 21.

Barbadosed: A seventeenth century term for white dissidents who were shipped into slavery in the Americas for political resistance. Originally used for dissidents transported to Barbados.

Bight of Benin: Slaving region defined as coving modern day eastern Ghana, Togo, Benin and western Nigeria. Europeans called it the Slave Coast.

Bight of Biafra: Slaving region defined as covering the coastline of modern day western Nigeria, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea and northern Gabon. The region includes Bimbia Island, Cameroon and the Gulf of Guinea islands Principe and Sao Tome.

Bocal Slaves: Newly arrived slaves who spoke languages different from the common language in the place of import. In the African context, bocals (Portuguese) or bozals (Spanish) were slaves imported from the interior to coastal trading sites. In the Americans context, bocals were slaves imported directly from Africa.

Boys: Immature male slaves. Slave traders classified African boys as shorter than four feet four inches or younger than 13-14 years of age.

Carib: The indigenous people who inhabited the Caribbean Islands and parts of the neighboring mainland.

Chattel Slavery: A form of slavery introduced by Europeans in which the slave is treated as property belonging to the owner with no rights. The children of chattel slaves were also slaves.

Children: Immature slaves, defined in the British slave trade as being shorter than four feet four inches or younger than 13-14 years.

Clearance: Primary port where slaving voyages began.

Coffle: A group of slaves chained together in a line commonly used by slavers in the eighteenth century.

Contract: Also called an indenture, the contract was where the emigrant agreed to work as a servant without pay for a fixed number of years in return for passage to the New World.

Convict Servant: Criminals in the British Isles who accepted exile were given mandatory labor from seven to fourteen years as an alternative to execution or prison. They were transported to the American colonies from 1615 to 1776 and to Australia from 1787 through 1868.

Demerara: Coastal region of modern day Guyana.

Departures: Departures refer to ports where voyages originated. Ships would clear customs “for Africa” and depart from Europe or the Americans.

Disembark(ation): To force slaves from vessels in port. Slaves could be disembarked at several ports in the Americas, as captains often traveled to various ports searching for the best price for their cargo.

Domestic Servant: A man or woman who worked for hire in a person’s home for pay. Domestic servants were different than indentured servants.

Domestic Slave: A slave who works in a household rather than in the fields.

Driver: An overseer of slaves. The driver was another slave or a European.

Duty Boy: A seventeenth century term for white child slaves, orphans, and those taken from parents and shipped into slavery in the Americas. Duty Boys were considered the living dead as their enslavement in Virginia and the West Indies was basically a death sentence.

East India Indians: A Colonial American term to mean people from the Indian subcontinent; especially in Maryland and Virginia. They arrived as indentured servants or slaves from England, and intermarried with the Free Blacks or white indentured servants.

Elderly Free Black: A free person of color sixty years of age or over.

Elderly Slaves: A slave sixty years of age and over.

Embark(ation): Loading African captives into a slave ship. Slaves were often be kept below decks for weeks after embarkation, waiting for the slaving master to procure a full cargo.

Estate: A large area of land, used for agriculture with a large main house owned by an individual or family.

Exile: An individual expelled from his or her native country by the government for opposing views.

Factors: Men who traded in their own name, possessed the goods, and usually did not reveal the names of the people for whom they were acting. Factors were the opposite of agents.

Field Slave: A slave who plants, tends and harvests crops on a plantation.

Free Black: Sometimes referred to as “free persons of color” or “free color’ these were either free slaves, African Americans who were born free or mixed-race. Sometimes referred to as Free Color or Free Person of Color.

Girls: Immature female slaves. Slave traders classified African girls as shorter than four feel four inches or younger than 13-14 years of age.

Gold Coast: Slaving region in the modern day country of Ghana.

Guinea Coast: The West African coast.

Guineaman: A common term for a slave ship. Sometimes the term “Guinea Ship” was used.

Headright: A grant of land to individuals responsible for transporting immigrants to Colonial America. The headright was usually 50 acres, and they motivated investors to transport servants to the colonies.

Hired Servant: A servant who received wages for labor and had power to select the master and time to serve. They were not always immigrants although many immigrant servants after their freedom did become hired servants.

Hispaniola: A major Caribbean Island containing both the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

Homeward Passage: The voyage leg returning a vessel to its home port.

Tomorrow in Part 2, I will continue my “Bondage Dictionary” with words I consider to be important for the study of all facets of slavery.

The Important Irish Connection to Barbados

18 Jul By Dwight Leave a Comment

Barbados was settled by the English in 1627, and became a center for the sugar industry. The island had a combination of slaves and indentured servants; both African and European. The Irish were an important piece of this trade in human bondage. Much has been written about the “Barbadosed” Irish, who were sent to the island as slaves under Oliver Cromwell: www.yale.edu/glc/tangledroots/Barbadosed.htm The number sent will never be known, but estimates range from 60,000 to 12,000.

For colonial Catholics, remember, this was a Protestant colony, so your ancestors will be found in the Anglican records. There were also Irish Moravians and Quakers on Barbados. Quakers can be traced to counties Leix (Queens) and Wicklow.

A useful reference work is Geraldine Lane, Tracing Ancestors in Barbados: A Practical Guide (2007) as well as numerous published and online articles. One handy article is Dwight A. Radford and Arden C. White’s article, “The Irish in Barbados,” in The Irish At Home and Abroad 2 (3) )1994/5): 92-97.

Major resources include James C. Brandow’s Genealogies of Barbados Families (1983) and JoAnne McRee’s six volume series Barbados Records(1979-1984). Much has also been preserved in Vere Langford Oliver’s Caribbeana and The Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society. The core records can be found at the Barbados National Archives; the National Archives, Kew: www.nationalarchives.gov.uk with much on microfilm at the Family History Library: www.familysearch.org

For those of us with Irish colonial ancestry in the English colonies, whether white or black, Barbados is such as important link that we dare not ignore it.

India and the Colonial America Connection

15 Jul By Dwight Leave a Comment

Don’t be surprised if your Colonial American ancestors were actually from India. The colonial vocabulary used the term “East Indies” to describe the Indian subcontinent.

So how did these people get to the New World in the 1600s? The records themselves provide answers, and are extracted by Paul Heinegg as “Free African Americans of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland and Delaware”: www.freeafricanamericans.com/East_Indians.htm

Mr. Heinegg, notes that East Indians came in bondage as indentured servants and slaves

from England. He documents East Indians from the court records in Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina. He notes that although they tended to marry into the Free Black community, they also intermixed with the indentured white community, many of whom clearly had Irish surnames. The court records used often use the term “East India Indians.”

One very interesting case from the Spotsylvania County Order Books (1735-38) showed the distinction between the East Indians and African slaves (page 440):

“Zachary Lewis, Churchwarden of St. George Parish, presents Ann Jones, a servant belonging to John West, who declared that Pompey an East Indian (slave) belonging to William Woodford, Gent., was the father of sd child which was adjudged of by the Court that she was not under the law having a Mullato child, that only relates to Negroes and Mullatoes and being Silent as to Indians, carry sd. Ann Jones to the whipping post.”

In this case, Ann Jones, a presumed white indentured servant, had a child by Pompey, an East Indian slave. The laws were already in place restricting white indentured servants having children with African slaves. Yet, it had not caught up with the East Indian issue. In the end, Ann’s sentence was the whipping post!

What a fascinating piece of history with records to back it up.

Irish, African, Slave, Muslim, Christian and Hoodoo Practitioner

29 Jun By Dwight Leave a Comment

The intermixing of Europeans with African slaves produced new religious ideas. This happened openly in the 1600s as Irish indentured servants intermixed with Africans. It also happened through the master-slaver relationship. What it gave birth to was little known piece of American religious history.

Many of the kidnapped Africans were Muslim, and a hybrid form of the faith continued on the plantations, combining Islam, Protestant Christianity, and Hoodoo. Hybrid Islam survived on the isolated Georgia islands into the 1870s. In regard to Hoodoo, it means to “conjure.” It is a folk practice, mixing the Germanic-Swiss hexmeister from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, with indigenous African, Islam, Native American and European folk magic.

If you study the “Slave Narratives” recorded in 1936-38; the former slaves describe the mixed practices. These are on www.ancestry.com under the database: “U.S., Interviews with Former Slaves, 1936-1938,” and elsewhere on the Internet. Georgia Presbyterian minister Rev. Charles Colcock, wrote a guide for missionaries going on the plantation. His The Religious Instruction of Negros in the United States (1842): http://docsouth.unc.edu/church/jones/jones.html provides amazing details as to what he observed. He noted the slaves took the stories of the Quran and transferred them over to the Bible seeing both religions as the same religious idea (see page 125), and this was 1842! It’s an otherworldly and bizarre read by our standards!

Concerning Christianity, Catholic slaves often would mix their faith with Louisiana Voodoo. In the Protestant South, the Baptist and Methodist denominations would dominate African American life. There they mixed Hoodoo into their faith. Voodoo and Hoodoo are very different.

Just be careful not limit what it means to be Irish to white and Christian. Irish identity may have become submerged into the African American experience, but the Irish contributed to the mixture of ideas and faith (Catholic, Protestant and folk religion).

The Irish in Antigua

28 Jun By Dwight Leave a Comment

The English colonized the Caribbean Island of Antigua in 1632. By 1674 the first large sugar plantation was established. The island became important because of its natural harbors. The 1678 Census showed there were 610 Irish out of the population of 4480. This means 13.6% of the population was born in Ireland.

The Irish came to Antigua as indentured servants or as merchants. As more African slaves were imported, there were fewer reasons for the Irish to stay. They would leave for the larger islands or for the mainland American colonies.

There was a direct connection between the merchant families of County Galway and Antigua, and they were often Roman Catholic. When dealing with colonial Catholics, it’s important to keep in mind, Antigua was an English Protestant colony. For this reason, all family baptisms, marriages and burials were recorded in the Anglican Church registers.

Irish Catholics on Antigua also had connections with the Irish Catholic colony on Montserrat.

For the genealogist, Vere Lanford Oliver’s three volume work The History of the Island of Antigua (1894) provides extracts of church records, tombstones, censuses, genealogies and civil records. It is on microfilm at the Family History Library (FHL #1149539): www.familysearch.org Oliver traces many in the planter class of Irish back to Ireland. Primary records at the Antigua & Barbuda National Archives have also been microfilmed at the FHL. The periodical Caribbeana (FHL #38848) is another resource for extracted records. Other records can be found at the National Archives, Kew, England: www.nationalarchives.gov.uk

Antigua is especially important for researching both Catholic and Protestant Irish families in the colonial period. This island may be the link between Ireland and Colonial America.

Black Biographical Dictionaries

12 Jun By Dwight Leave a Comment

The collection “Black Biographical Dictionaries, 1790-1950,” is a major gathering of old biographical dictionaries containing more than 30,000 references. The entries record famous and historic, as well as average people. The 297 volumes, on 1070 microfiche range from listings of national activists, state and local personalities, women, professional directories, fraternal order members, church and missionary listings among others. This collection is widely available. The titles come from more than 100 public and private repositories across the United States and Great Britain. The compilers of this massive African American library include; Randall K. Burkett, Nancy Hall Burkett, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. This source may be your first step in tying into your Irish line.

If a former slave ancestor is mentioned in these works, the chances of the owner or series of owners being mentioned is very good. For example, volumes 181-183 are Abigail Field Mott’s Biographical Sketches and Interesting Anecodotes of Persons of Color published in 1826, 1837 and 1839. These are descriptions of freed slaves or individuals from free families. The sketches frequently mention birthplaces, parents’ names, and former slave owners. This could very well connect you into an Irish slave master, who was also family.

This important collection is available on microfiche at many libraries and archives. There is a three volume index to this collection titled Black Biography, 1790-1950: A Cumulative Index. The first two volumes index biographical sketches alphabetically; volume three is an index by place of birth, occupation, religion and sex.

A second series supplements the dictionaries as new books have been identified. These also are indexed. Both the supplement and the index can be found at any number of university and academic archives.

Remember, what made a person worthy of a biographical sketch historically in the African American community, is different than in the white community.

African American Surnames

29 May By Dwight Leave a Comment

How African American families got their surnames is often misunderstood, affecting your ability to connect into your Irish ancestor. The popular notion is that the slaves took the surname of the last master.

You may find your family did not have a “slave name” at all. Often surnames were used for several generations within a family. It may also be your ancestors were not slaves. You might be descended from those bi-racial and tri-racial families from the 1600s; descendants of African men and Irish woman. This free segment of the population was more common than you might think.

The 1870 Census is the first federal schedule which lists the former slaves by their full names. This is a pivotal record. If you find your ancestors in the census schedules prior to 1870, then start asking some serious questions about what “free color” means.

In some families surnames came into use just like they did with the free population, from the father or mother. In slave families, surnames were often used, but not publically. The slave owner had little reason to know, use or care about slave surnames.

The surnames of slaves might signify a major event or person such as a favorite or first master. Often surnames were chosen for various other reasons; a political figure (Washington, Lincoln), a first name (David, John, George), a principle (Freeman, Love, Pride), an occupation (Carpenter, Mason), or a place. These were sentimental ways of forging an identity as a family unit apart from the brutality of slavery.

Remember, a family could have used an unofficial surname for generations, but the first recorded evidence might have been in the 1870 Census. This is your pivotal record in exploring the origins on your surname.

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