'White Cargo: The Forgotton History of Britain's White Slaves In America' by Don Jordan and Michael Walsh

Don Jordan and Michael Walsh open their text recounting one young man’s story:  an unsung and anonymous lad overworked and ill-used, he was not even granted the decency of a proper burial, but who was instead discarded in a hole under a pile of rubbish in a cellar, to be utterly forgotten over the next 400 years (p. 11). I appreciate that the writers undertook the task of portraying how dire life must have been for the indentured servant, a poor body with no rights, and apparently no recourse during an already tumultuous era in U.S. history known as colony-building.  But it sounds not so dissimilar to colonial life, period.  Survival for any soul, whether landed or not was a challenge in the 1600s; indentured servitude would have been no exception. 

It appears that a critical mission of writing White Cargo was to prove that whites had it just as bad as Blacks; in the minds of Jordan and Walsh, white indentured servitude was tantamount to African slavery.  In fact, the authors include the account of one John Lauson.  Mr. Lauson, a petty thief presumably conscripted into servitude for his criminal misdeeds, is acquired on a Rappahannock, VA plantation.  According to the servant’s story, he slaved for 14 years as a part of a chain gang of 24 (18 Black and six white), and his treatment as a white man was “indistinguishable from that meted out to the Africans.  [We] were chained together, [we] lived together, slept together, worked together and were whipped together.”  (p.257)   At first blush, this argument seems sensible:  all toiling in another’s vineyard without pay, collectively had no rights.  And the authors take pains to prove that irrespective of whichever circumstance responsible for getting an indentured servant to the New World, whether it be a) voluntary enlistment, b) unlawful spiriting, c) misleading enticement, or d) part of criminal sentencing (including prisoners of war), once across the Atlantic, the servants were all gathered together to serve alongside each other.  In fact, Richard Hofstadter, an historian from Columbia University suggested that the organizing principle of the day with respect to any would-be servant stratification was that all were to be “lumped…together as rogues who deserved no better than what was meted out to them (p. 260).”  What was “meted out” presumably included working alongside Blacks, as well as partaking in Blacks’ non-citizenship status and often brutal treatment.

But this is where similarities between white indentured servitude and Black slavery end.  By Jordan and Walsh’s own accounting, servitude and slavery were legally distinct.  The latter was for life.  Valiantly, the author’s confront this point head on:

Of course, one day the indentured period would end and the servant would be free.  That is one of the fundamental differences drawn between white indentured servitude and black slavery.  One was a temporary condition; the other was perpetual.  Except that huge numbers of white servants didn’t live to see the day of freedom.  In the early days, the majority of servants died still in bondage.  Moreover, the bulk of those who did outlive their servitude ended up no better than when they’d arrived.  They would emerge from bondage landless and poor (p. 111).

Indentured servants would also end up free and white.  The bottom line is that they often had either the option to become indentured and/or hope of gaining an elevated position in society.  Yes, many white indentured servants were victims of kidnap, or convicts with no choice in the matter of being transported to the New World, and many of them suffered terrible human rights violations and abuses upon arrival.  But there was still a fair amount of Britons and other Europeans willing to try their luck across the Atlantic. One could surmise that enough Brits were willing to subject themselves to the awful unknown called indentured servitude, leading one to think this option (with many of its hardships no doubt becoming known over the 100+ years it was in play) was still a lesser evil than trying to elevate ones social standing within the shores of the mother country. 

Jordan and Walsh further share the account of one John Punch, a Black indentured servant tied to property in Virginia, who absconds with two white fellow servants.  After all three are apprehended in Maryland, the two white servants have extra time tacked on to their indenture, but John Punch is enslaved for life (pp. 173-4).  The account does not detail any other extenuating circumstance warranting slavery as a life sentence, leaving the reader to surmise that Blackness would have been the only distinguishing feature for why Punch’s punishment was so much more extreme than the other two fugitives of European extraction. 

Whether or not the physical conditions of white indentured servitude and Black slavery were identical, or even as Jordan and Walsh suggest, there were occasions when slaves may have been cared for better than white servants since 1) they tended to be more expensive to acquire, and 2) they were expected to last in service much longer, i.e. a lifetime, to be sure the psycho-social conditions attendant to slavery vs. white indentured servitude would have been wholly distinct (pp. 256-7). It is curious that Jordan and Walsh try to claim some sort of equality betwixt the two conditions.  Though both Black slaves and white indentured servants were thousands of miles from their native environments, African slaves did not speak the language, were unfamiliar with local customs and mores, as well as English traditions, and were, in a word: lost.  It is surprising that this obvious point is never mentioned by the authors.  Investors in human chattel would have to spend considerably less time and other resources training someone who already understood what is expected of her based upon a shared cultural context and a shared language.  This would have been a huge benefit for indentured servants; and a diametrically opposed liability for African slaves.  What is more, as sentient beings—irrespective of overwhelming social opprobrium at the time—each would have had a desire to procreate, nurture and protect offspring.  This basic anthropologic instinct would have been altered in both cases, but would have been crushingly distorted for the African slave who could have neither hope nor option of adequately fulfilling this biological mandate during his own lifetime, or positioning his offspring—also born into a lifetime of slavery-- for anything better in successive generations.  

Using a quote from preeminent Black historian Lerone Bennett, Jr., Don Jordan and Michael Walsh try to assert that slavery was not predicated on racism, as though African slaves and white indentured servants toiled collectively, with little or no dissension based on race (p. 170).  I find this notion hard to swallow.  Clearly, white settlers set foot in the New World with racist notions of their superiority, hence all of the conflict with the Native Americans whose lands whites felt not simply entitled to, but morally impelled to appropriate in the first place.  The Massachusetts Bay Colony was established in 1630 and enacted lifetime slavery for Africans a mere 11 years after in 1641.  The colony of Connecticut was founded in 1636 and inside of 15 years established its own laws instituting slavery in perpetuity for Africans by 1650 (p. 175).   Even if the first few Blacks to arrive from Africa were impressed into service in a fashion based on the template already established by white indentured servitude, it did not take long for the ebon-hued other to be forced to the very bottom of the social hierarchy.   This aspect of the colonial social hierarchy would remain virtually unfazed over the next 400 years.

I think Jordan and Walsh could have been more explicit in highlighting the salience and potency of class violence as a major aspect of how English society was organized prior to England’s laying claim in North America.  This class violence was transplanted to the New World and a critical ingredient to the viability and longevity of white indentured servitude.  Poor people were already abused in England so it stands to reason that the same practices would wend their way to North America and be an integral part of the colony-building process on this side of the Atlantic.

By the authors own admission, there were countless examples of white people who voluntarily impressed themselves into servitude and who were transformed into success stories--landed white folk in the New World (Chapter 15).  I do not believe we have very many examples of Black people who voluntarily impressed themselves into slavery.

I realize the tone of this critique might suggest that I am callous toward the suffering white indentured servants experienced.  I might be a sadistic angry-Negress happy to discover, in explicit detail the torture and trauma poor white people confronted.   This is not the case; unjust suffering by anyone makes me sick to my stomach.  But I do take issue with a common trend found in discussions about race in this country:  knee-jerk ejaculations that white people suffered, too.  Not only are these reflexive responses unproductive and white supremacist, but they hardly address the real issue.  In this day and time, Black people still lack equality and opportunity as a direct result of the suffering their ancestors endured.  In fact, the lack of equality and opportunity Black people in the United States still experience is a continuation and natural by-product of the suffering their Black ancestors survived; suffering 1) for which Black people have never been restituted and 2) which continues to result in increased access and opportunity for whites in this country…why whites are even in this country in the first place.