Competing Narratives: White Slavery, Servitude and the Irish in Late-Eighteenth-Century America

Powell, Martyn

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-25984-6_5

Competing Narratives: White Slavery, Servitude and the Irish in Late-Eighteenth-Century America

Martyn Powell⁵

Chapter
First Online: 06 November 2019

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Part of the book series: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series ((CIPCSS))

Abstract

This chapter seeks to explore Irish migrant experiences in the United States, shortly after the end of the American War of Independence, through the lens of the Irish and American press. Engagement with the trade in runaway indentured servants—by newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic—allows us to reconsider the broader significance of print culture in both facilitating and fabricating this trade. This is of contemporary importance given continued historical (and political) controversy over “white slavery” in America and the Caribbean, most recently put to use by the “Alt-Right,” and this chapter seeks to explore the fictive origins of this narrative, as well as exploring the compromised positions adopted by those in the print trade.

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Notes

1.
John Donoghue , “The Curse of Cromwell: Revisiting the Irish Slavery Debate,” History Ireland 25, no. 4 (July/August, 2017): 24–28.
2.
In the same piece McCormack distanced himself from such approaches, noting: “Hogan chose to declare Irish slavery a myth and selectively cited a few insensitive Irish-Americans who brought up Irish slavery as a counterpoint to Black Lives Matter arguing ‘We got over it why can’t they’?,” History Ireland 25, no. 5 (September/October): 12.
3.
Ted McCormick, “How to Change History: William Petty, Irish slavery, and a fake debate,” available at https://memoriousblog.com/2017/09/13/how-to-change-history-william-petty-irish-slavery-and-a-fake-debate/.
4.
Michael A. Hoffman II, They were White and They were Slaves: The Untold Story of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America (New York: Wiswell Ruffin House, 1991); Don Jordan and Michael Walsh, White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America (New York: New York University Press, 2008). Also see Rhetta Akamatsu’s The Irish Slaves: Slavery, Indenture and Contract Labor Among Irish Immigrants (Independent Publishing Platform, 2010).
5.
John Martin, “The Irish Slave Trade—The Forgotten ‘White Slaves’,” available at https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-irish-slave-trade-the-forgotten-white-slaves/31076.
6.
Donogue, “The Curse of Cromwell,” 28.
7.
Indentured servants in America were bought and sold more frequently than servants and apprentices in England, Aaron S. Fogleman, “From Slaves, Convicts, and Servants to Free Passengers: The Transformation of Immigration in the Era of the American Revolution,” Journal of American History 85, no. 1 (1998): 52.
8.
Jerome S. Handler and Matthew C. Reilly, “Contesting ‘White Slavery’ in the Caribbean: Enslaved Africans and European Indentured Servants in Seventeenth-Century Barbados,” New West Indian Guide 91 (2017): 30–55.
9.
Liam Hogan, “The Ancient Order of Hibernians, History Ireland magazine and the legitimisation of a historical propaganda,” available at https://medium.com/@Limerick1914/the-ancient-order-of-hibernians-history-ireland-magazine-and-the-accommodation-of-ahistorical-ec393928e787.
10.
One of the most cited texts has been Sean O’Callaghan’s controversial To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland (Dublin: Brandon, 2000).
11.
Fogelman estimates that 11,300 Irish indentured servants (including redemptioners) arrived in America between 1776 and 1809, “From Slaves, Convicts, and Servants,” 74.
12.
For the Volunteer Evening Post see Martyn J. Powell, “The Volunteer Evening Post and Patriotic Print Culture in Late Eighteenth-Century Ireland,” in Constructing the Past: Writing Irish History, 1600–1800, eds. Mark Williams and Stephen Paul Forrest (Woodbridge, 2010), 113–35. For the Volunteers Journal, see James Kelly, “Mathew Carey’s Irish Apprenticeship: Editing the Volunteers Journal, 1783–4,” Éire-Ireland 49, nos. 3&4 (Fall/Winter 2014): 201–43.
13.
David Noel Doyle, Ireland, Irishmen and Revolutionary America (Dublin: Mercier Press, 1981); Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); James Kelly, “The Resumption of Emigration from Ireland after the American War of Independence: 1783–1787,” Studia Hibernica 24 (1988): 61–88; Maurice Bric, Ireland, Philadelphia and the Re-invention of America 1760–1800 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2008). Also see Michael Durey, Transatlantic Radicals and the Early American Republic (Lawrence, Kansas: Kansas University Press, 1997); David A. Wilson, United Irishmen, United States: Immigrant Radicals in the Early Republic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Patrick Griffin, The People with No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World 1689–1764 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
14.
Bric, Ireland, Philadelphia, 98–99; Kelly, “Resumption of Emigration,” 80–85.
15.
Volunteers Journal, 5 May, 2 June 1784.
16.
See, for example, Volunteer Evening Post, 27–29, 29–31 July, 28–30 September 1784.
17.
Volunteer Evening Post, 29 April–1 May 1784.
18.
See, for instance, David Meades, Eighteenth-Century White Slaves: Fugitive Notices, Volume 1: Pennsylvania, 1729–1760 (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1993).
19.
For Mathew Carey ’s career see James N. Green, Mathew Carey: Publisher and Patriot (Philadelphia: Library Company of Philadelphia, 1985); Early American Studies, Special Issue: Ireland, America, and Mathew Carey (Fall 2013); Essays by Higgins, Kelly, Wolf in Éire-Ireland 49, nos. 3&4 (Fall/Winter, 2014); Essays by Powell, Magennis, Bankhurst, Wolf in Éire-Ireland 50, nos. 3&4 (Fall/Winter 2015).
20.
For the significance of runaways in American print culture see in particular David Waldstreicher , Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery and the American Revolution (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005). Also on runaway notices see Philip D. Morgan, “Colonial South Carolina’s Runaways: Their Significance for Slave Culture,” Slavery and Abolition 6 (1985): 57–78; Lathan A. Windley, A Profile of Runaway Slaves in Virginia and South Carolina from 1730 through 1787 (New York: Routledge, 1995); Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Low Country (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Woody Holton, Forced Founders, Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), Catharine Adams and Elizabeth H. Pleck, Love of Freedom: Black Women in Colonial and Revolutionary New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Shaun Wallace, “Fugitive Slave Advertisements and the Rebelliousness of Enslaved People in Georgia and Maryland, 1790–1810” (PhD Thesis, University of Stirling, 2017).
21.
See Kevin Kenny, “The Irish in the Empire,” in Ireland and the British Empire, ed. Kevin Kenny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 93.
22.
Waldstreicher, Runaway America, 21–23.
23.
Historical Society of Pennsylvania [afterwards HSP], Lea and Febiger, 227B/1/1/3684, James Adams to Carey, 27 April 1789.
24.
Waldstreicher, Runaway America, 23.
25.
Middlesex Gazette [Connecticut], 1 May 1786; Bric, Ireland, Philadelphia, 99n.
26.
Sharon Salinger , “To Serve Well and Faithfully”: Labor and Indentured Servants in Pennsylvania, 1682–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986).
27.
Salinger, “To Serve Well and Faithfully,” 94.
28.
Volunteer Evening Post, 27–29 July 1784.
29.
Mike McCormack, “It’s still happening,” available at http://www.nyaoh.com/2017/03/30/historical-happenings-for-april-2017/.
30.
Volunteer Evening Post, 3–6 July 1784; Salinger, “ To Serve Well and Faithfully,” 91.
31.
Volunteer Evening Post, 1–4 January 1785.
32.
Bailyn , Voyagers to the West, 174n and 324. Also see Marilyn Baseler, “Asylum for Mankind”: America 1607–1800” (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).
33.
Morning Post, 28 September 1784.
34.
Morning Post, 23 October 1784.
35.
Volunteer Evening Post, 6–8 May 1784.
36.
David Dobson, Ships from Ireland to Early America, (Baltimore, MD, 2001) i, 75.
37.
Volunteer Evening Post, 29–31 July 1784.
38.
Freeman’s Journal [Philadelphia], 14 April 1784.
39.
Pennsylvania Gazette, 3 March 1784.
40.
Pennsylvania Gazette, 30 June 1784.
41.
Salinger, “To Serve Well and Faithfully,” 101–2.
42.
Pennsylvania Packet, 20 August 1784.
43.
Independent Gazeteer, 5 June 1784.
44.
Volunteer Evening Post, 9–11 September 1784.
45.
Volunteer Evening Post, 9–11 September 1784. These notices can be found in Pennsylvania Packet , 8 June 1784, 3, 10 July 1784. In the American and Irish versions the public are warned not to give Cawfield credit on Foulke’s account, as debts will not be paid. The Pennsylvania Packet version notes that Points was a “sadler by trade but has a great turn for engraving.”
46.
Simon P. Newman , Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 83.
47.
Pennsylvania Gazette, 30 June 1784.
48.
There are a number of Irish servants with facial scars, and both groups had missing digits from frost-bite, Pennsylvania Gazette , 14 January 7, 28 July 1784, 13 October 1784, 16 June 1785; Pennsylvania Packet , 8 July 1784; Volunteer Evening Post, 11–14 September 1786.
49.
Pennsylvania Gazette, 10 November 1784.
50.
Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 24 March 1787.
51.
Julie Anne Sweet notes that whippings could be a sanction for indentured servants in Georgia, but that severe punishments were the exception rather than the rule; Julie Anne Sweet, “The Murder of William Wise: An Examination of Indentured Servitude, Anti-Irish Prejudice, and Crime in Early Georgia,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 96, no. 1 (2012): 6.
52.
Pennsylvania Gazette, 25 August, 22 December 1784.
53.
Belfast News-Letter, 2–5 February 1790.
54.
Pennsylvania Packet, 17 November 1784.
55.
Antonio T. Bly, “A Prince among Pretending Free Men: Runaway Slaves in Colonial New England Revisited,” Massachusetts Historical Review 14 (2012): 89 and 99.
56.
Newman, Embodied History, 91.
57.
Pennsylvania Gazette, 10 March 1784.
58.
Pennsylvania Gazette , 31 December 1783; Pennsylvania Evening Herald , 10 January 1787. Behind this terminology, there was a very real threat of rape—and an unwanted child might extend a period of service (Newman , Embodied History, 86).
59.
Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 25 November 1786.
60.
Pennsylvania Gazette, 16 June 1784.
61.
Pennsylvania Gazette, 11 February 1784, supplement no. 2800.
62.
Pennsylvania Gazette, 14 January, 1 December 1784.
63.
Pennsylvania Packet, 17 April 1784; Pennsylvania Gazette, 29 September 1784; Pennsylvania Packet, 4 November 1784.
64.
Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 22 March, 1785, 11 November 1786; Pennsylvania Packet, 10 June 1784; Pennsylvania Gazette, 4 February 1784; 27 November 1784.
65.
Newman, Embodied History, 83.
66.
Volunteers Journal, 14 May, 2 June 1784.
67.
Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 1 March 1785, 28 June 1786.
68.
Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 26 April 1785.
69.
Pennsylvania Gazette, 28 July, 4 August 1784.
70.
Pennsylvania Packet, 30 September 1784.
71.
Pennsylvania Packet, 25 September 1784.
72.
Pennsylvania Packet, 5 October 1784.
73.
See for example a Volunteers Journal article of 26 March 1784 reprinted in Pennsylvania Packet, 20 May 1784.
74.
Pennsylvania Packet, 19 June 1784.
75.
Pennsylvania Packet, 1 July 1784.
76.
Morning Chronicle, 30 August 1783.
77.
South-Carolina Gazette, 18–22 November 1783.
78.
HSP, Lea and Febiger, Letterbooks 1/F278, “Mr P. Carey,” 12 September 1791.
79.
Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 2 July, 3 August 1785.
80.
Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 22 February 1785.
81.
Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 22 March, 2 April, 6 July, 24 September, 30 November, 10 December 1785, 5 July 1786.
82.
Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 15, 19 March 1785.
83.
Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 26 April 1786.
84.
Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 30 April 1785.
85.
Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 14 December 1785.
86.
Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 15 March 1786.
87.
Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 8 April, 13 May 1786.
88.
Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 22 July, 9 September, 27 September 1786.
89.
Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 27 January, 10 February 1787.
90.
Pennsylvania Gazette, 6 October 1784; Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 24 February 1787.
91.
Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 12 April 1785, 25 October 1786.
92.
Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 22 October 1785.
93.
Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 13 August 1785.
94.
Connecticut Journal, 6 October 1784.
95.
Norwich Packet, 7 October 1784; Salem Gazette, 12 October 1784; New-Hampshire Gazette, 14 October 1784.
96.
St. James’s Chronicle, 9–11 December 1784; General Evening Post, 9–11 December 1784.
97.
Waldstreicher, Runaway America, 7–8.
98.
See Joseph M. Adelman, “Trans-Atlantic Migration and the Printing Trade in Revolutionary America,” Early American Studies 11, no. 3 (2013): 526–28.
99.
Waldstreicher, Runaway America, 20.
100.
Ibid., 17.
101.
Ibid., 23.
102.
Ibid.
103.
Newman, Embodied History, 14.
104.
Meades, Eighteenth-Century White Slaves, x.
105.
Waldstreicher, Runaway America, 25.
106.
HSP, Edward Carey Gardiner, 227A 22/8/F2 William Sampson to Carey, 31 May 1830.
107.
Newman, Embodied History, 9.
108.
Newman, Embodied History, 14.
109.
Waldstreicher, Runaway America, 18.
110.
Bric, Ireland, Philadelphia, 159.
111.
Mathew Carey , A Short Account of the Malignant Fever, Lately Prevalent in Philadelphia (1793).
112.
A Pennsylvanian, Considerations on the Impropriety and Inexpediency of Renewing the Missouri Question (Philadelphia, 1820), 3–4.
113.
Simon Newman , historian of runaways, is criticised by Handler and Reilly for lacking precision in his use of the term “white slaves” in the context of indentured servants in seventeenth-century Barbados in his A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Handler and Reilly, “Contesting ‘White Slavery’ in the Caribbean,” 46–47.
114.
Mike McCormack, “It’s still happening,” available at http://www.nyaoh.com/2017/03/30/historical-happenings-for-april-2017/; Farley Grubb, “The Auction of Redemptioner Servants, Philadelphia, 1771–1804: An Economic Analysis,” Journal of Economic History 48, no. 3 (1988): 586.
115.
Adelman, “Trans-Atlantic Migration,” 544.
116.
New-York Packet, 16 September 1784.

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University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
Martyn Powell

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Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK
Daniel Sanjiv Roberts
Maynooth University, Maynooth, Kildare, Ireland
Jonathan Jeffrey Wright

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Powell, M. (2019). Competing Narratives: White Slavery, Servitude and the Irish in Late-Eighteenth-Century America. In: Roberts, D., Wright, J. (eds) Ireland’s Imperial Connections, 1775–1947. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25984-6_5

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25984-6_5
Published: 06 November 2019
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