Irish Slaves Debunking the imagery of the “Irish slaves” meme Those that promote the meme of Irish perpetual hereditary chattel slavery use a variety of images entirely unrelated to indentured servitude to accompany their anti-history. I examined a selection of them.

1. Sale of a Slave Girl in Rome by Jean-Léon Gérôme (1884) The most popular image to accompany the spurious “Irish: the Forgotten White Slaves” articles. It is cropped from a painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme. In this work, Gérôme imagined a scene in a Roman slave market…about two thousand years ago.

The original

2. The “Redlegs” of Barbados The “Irish slaves” meme has been embraced by racists and white nationalists. The meme below was shared by a Tea Party Leader in 2013. It accompanied her advice to African Americans to “move on” from slavery.

But this photograph is not from the U.S., nor does it depict “White Irish slaves.”

Historian Matthew C. Reilly has done extensive research on the “poor white” community of Barbados. This photo was taken in Barbados in 1908, none of those pictured have Irish surnames, and these families appear to have both African and European ancestry. Reilly writes “Photograph locally known as “The ‘Redlegs’ of Barbados”. Pictured are fishermen residents of Bath in the parish of St. John taken in 1908. Photo courtesy of Mr. Richard Goddard.”

“The photograph is widely known amongst island history buffs as well as those interested in family genealogy. On several occasions I encountered individuals who had traced their ancestry to one of the impoverished men pictured in the 1908 portrait of the “Redleg” fishermen. Until my conversation with Fred Watson (Figure 7.2), however, I had never heard it referred to as a “family photograph”. Represented are members of the Watson, Goddard, King, and Haynes families, surnames popular amongst the “Redleg” population for several generations and still present in St. John today. Fred was able to identify several of his father’s and mother’s brothers that were pictured in the photograph including his mother’s brother Simeon Goddard found on the lower left and his father’s brother Joe Watson found in center of the back row. The revelation that the photograph depicts an extended matrilineal kinship network was made more significant by the realization that phenotypes indicate that this network involved Afro-Barbadian as well as “poor white” genealogies.” 3. Photo of survivors of a Japanese POW camp during World War Two

4. Union Army soldier on his release from Andersonville Prison in May, 1865 Probably the most perverse co-option of all. Victims of the horror of the Confederate Andersonville prison appropriated by Neo-Confederates to support their racist myth. N.B. the Ferguson hashtag.

5. Child labourers on a Texan farm, 1913 This is another popular image. It is used here to promote an “Irish Slave Trade” movie idea. This photo of child labourers was taken in 1913 by the great Lewis Hine. The children were working on H.M. Lane’s farm near Bells, Texas. Their father (and uncle for some of the children) was working the plough nearby. This photo is sometimes used on Stormfront when discussing “white slaves.”

6. The East India Company logo The ongoing “we were slaves too!” appropriation of the Atlantic Slave Trade has led to this spectacular misfire. The East India Company logo tattooed as an “Irish slave” branding. I asked this tattooist about the relevance of the tattoo. He referred me to an inactive (and since deleted) Facebook page named “We Were Irish and Slaves”. This Facebook page was the source and inspiration for the tattoo design. The featured branding irons (first and second images) are from the Wilberforce Museum. The third image, the one that the tattoo is based on, is a stamp of the East India Company, not a branding iron. It goes without saying that indentured servants were not branded like slaves on their arrival in the colonies.

7. Former Enslaved Children in New Orleans, 1864 The comfort and ease at which some Irish and Irish-Americans appropriate the history of black chattel slavery is remarkable and disturbing. Guilty of the appropriation below is the “Ireland Long Held in Chains” Facebook page. They shared this photo of former “white” slave children in New Orleans and labelled it “Irish Slavery — Three Slaves”. This piece of anti-slavery propaganda during the American Civil War was aimed at a Northern white audience. These enslaved children were “the offspring of white fathers through two or three generations.” The fact that many slave owners in Louisiana were of Irish

descent only makes this appropriation more reprehensible. In my review of Irish surnames and slaveownership I found that 159 different Irish surnames were represented among slave owners in Louisiana in 1850. These included Brady, Burke, Carroll, Connolly, Collins, Cullen, Crowley, Darcy, Devane, Hickey, Hogan, Keane, Lynch, Mahoney, McCormack, and Murphy. You can read about the history of these photographs in Mary Niall Mitchell’s article in the New York Times.

8. The HMS Owen Glendower, an anti-slave trade frigate Irish Central decided to use a painting of the HMS Glendower to accompany their article about “forgotten white slaves”. It states that this ship was used to bring “human cargo to South American[sic] and the Indies.” This article repeats the absurd claim that an “Irish slave trade” ended in 1839. But the HMS Glendower was not a slave ship. In fact it was used from 1821 to 1824 to suppress the slave trade.

9. The Putumayo Atrocities, 1900s-1910s

The Ancient Order of Hibernians in Florida (State Board) appropriated an image of heavily chained Putumayo Indians, implying that they are “Irish slaves”.

10. Timucua men cultivating a field and Timucua women planting corn or beans (Florida, c. 1560) This image of the Timucua people planting their fields appears on some “Irish slaves” and “white slaves” blogs. The Neo-Confederate Save Your Heritage website frames it as “white slaves” working in South Carolina.

Florida Indians planting seeds of beans or maize, c. 1560 by Theodor de Bry, (1528–1598) Engraver: Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, (1533?-1588)

11. ‘Mulatto’ slave being whipped in an anti-slavery novel This illustration is appropriated from the 19th century anti-slavery novel The White Slave; or, Memoirs of a Fugitive by Richard Hildreth. The protagonist being whipped is a ‘mulatto’ slave. His mother was enslaved and his father the enslaver.

12. Edwardian Servants, Byfield, Northamptonshire (c. 1920)

Some of these websites take the term ‘indentured servants’ literally…They turned this image of two maids photographed in a house in Byfield, Northamptonshire, sometime between 1896 and 1920….

…and made it into a catastrophically awful “white slavery” meme.

from Irish Slave Trade, Ancient Order of Hibernians (Florida)

13. The Damm family, Los Angeles, 1987

The “Irish slaves” myth is also used to deny the existence of white privilege. It is often accompanied by an image of the Damm family taken by the photographer Mary Ellen Mark in Los Angeles in 1987. This myth is flexible.

This is part one of my series debunking the meme. See Part Two, Part Three, Part Four and Part Five MythologySlaveryBlackLivesMatter

The strained juxtaposition of the Irish experience of involuntary indentured servitude in Barbados in the mid-17th century with the entire history of the transatlantic slave trade has led to a festival of disinformation. The most offensive aspect of this trend is the appropriation of African suffering to embellish the narrative. Recent iterations of these spurious “Irish slaves” blogs now claim that 132 Irish

people were purposefully “dumped overboard to drown because ships’ supplies were running low. They were drowned because the insurance would pay for an “accident,” but not if the slaves were allowed to starve.” This unmistakably refers to the murder of between 132 to 142 African people by the crew of the slave ship Zong in late November 1781. The appropriation of this crime serves to bolster the claim made at the end of these “Irish slaves” articles that “slavery is not about race.” It is true, there are many types of slavery…and this is exactly why the co-option fails. The transatlantic slave trade was sustained and justified by anti-black racism. Enter John Lee, the solicitor general who defended the owners of the Zong. He argued that the murdered Africans were not people, but property. “What is this claim that human people have been thrown overboard? This is a case of chattels or goods. Blacks are goods and property; it is madness to accuse these well-serving honourable men of murder. They acted out of necessity and in the most appropriate manner for the cause. The late Captain Collingwood acted in the interest of his ship to protect the safety of his crew. To question the judgement of an experienced well-travelled captain held in the highest regard is one of folly, especially when talking of slaves. The case is the same as if wood had been thrown overboard.”

Was this lie manufactured or is this a case of distortion? How did so many people read this and not recognise it as referring to one of the most famous legal cases involving the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade? To answer the first question, we need to track how this aspect of the myth developed.

This distortion of history is rooted in the political attempt to hyper-inflate Irish victimhood and to obscure Irish participation in the transatlantic slave trade and racial oppression of African Americans. The initial juxtaposition of the Zong Massacre with Irish oppression can be traced back to James Mullin’s polemical article Out of Africa — Out of Ireland. Mullin, who was the Chair of the New Jersey-based Irish Famine Curriculum Committee, published this article about 15 years ago and it was carried on various websites. He did not replace the African victims of the Zong massacre with “Irish slaves”, nor did he intend for this to happen, but his constant interweaving of two different histories sparked this journey to complete co-option. If you read the following trail of sources you will see how confusion was encouraged until finally (and perversely) we find Black History Month Ireland promoting the “Irish slaves” version of the Zong Massacre. 20 August 2002

Out of Africa, Out Of Ireland, by James Mullin

For centuries, England dominated both the African slave trade and Ireland. The parallels are too numerous and haunting to ignore. W.E.B. Du Bois, founder of the NAACP and preeminent historian on slavery in the Americans, wrote: "Any attempt to consider the attitude of the English colonies toward the African slave trade must be prefaced by a word as to the attitude of England herself and the development of the trade in her hands." Amen. Du Bois gives America's "Dialogue on Race" a logical starting place. Racism is the legacy of slavery, and slavery in the Americas began with the "Mother Country's" dominant role in the Atlantic slave trade. Before all white Europeans are lumped together with the British as colonists and slave keepers, let us consider Britain's tyranny in Ireland and the many parallels of subjugation and enslavement to be drawn. Britain first entered the slave trade with the capture of 300 Negroes in 1562, and pursued it with religious zeal for three centuries. She introduced the first African slaves to Virginia on board a Dutch ship in 1619. In 1651, she fought two wars to wrest the slave trade from the Dutch. In her book, Black Chronology from 4,000 B.C. to Abolition of the Slave Trade, Ellen Irene Diggs wrote: "The final terms of peace surrendered New Netherlands to England and opened the way for England to become the world's greatest slave trader." In 1662 the Company of Royal Adventurers was chartered by Charles II. The Royal Family, including Queen Dowager and the Duke of York, contracted to supply the West Indies with 3,000 slaves annually. This company was later sold for 34,000 pounds and replaced by the Royal African Company, also chartered by King Charles II. Diggs says that in 1655, "Oliver Cromwell, in his zeal for God and the slave trade," sent an expedition to seize Jamaica from Spain. It soon became Britain's West Indian base for the slave trade. In 1649 Oliver Cromwell and his 20,000-man army invaded Ireland. They killed the entire garrison of Drogheda and slaughtered all the townspeople. Afterwards, Cromwell said, "I do not think 30 of their whole number escaped with their lives. Those that did are in safe custody in the Barbados. "Under Cromwell's policy, known as "To Hell or Connaught," Irish landowners were driven off millions of acres of fertile land. Those found east of the river Shannon after May 1, 1654, faced the death penalty or slavery in the West Indies. Cromwell rewarded his soldiers and loyal Scottish Presbyterians by "planting" them on large estates. The British set up similar "plantations" in Barbados, St. Kitts and Trinidad. The demand for labor on these distant plantations prompted mass kidnappings in Ireland. A pamphlet published in 1660 accused the British of sending soldiers to grab any Irish people they could in order to sell them to Barbados for profit: "It was the usual practice with Colonel Strubber, Governor of Galway, and other commanders in the said country, to take people out of their beds at night and sell them for slaves to the Indies, and by computations sold out of the said country about a thousand souls. "In Black Folk Then and Now, Du Bois concurs: "Even young Irish peasants were hunted down as men hunt down game, and were forcibly put aboard ship, and sold to plantations in Barbados."

According to Peter Berresford Ellis in To Hell or Connaught, soldiers commanded by Henry Cromwell, Oliver's son, seized a thousand "Irish wenches" to sell to Barbados. Henry justified the action by saying, "Although we must use force in taking them up , it is so much for their own good and likely to be of so great an advantage to the public." He also suggested that 2,000 Irish boys of 12 to 14 years of age could be seized for the same purpose: "Who knows but it might be a means to make them Englishmen." In 1667 Parliament passed the Act to Regulate Negroes on British Plantations. Punishments included a severe whipping for striking a Christian. For the second offense: branding on the face with a hot iron. There was no punishment for "inadvertently" whipping a slave to death. Between 1680 and 1688, the English African Company sent 249 ships to Africa and shipped approximately 60,000 black slaves. They "lost" 14,000 during the middle passage, and only delivered 46,000 to the New World. As Diggs points out, "Planters sometimes married white women servants to Blacks in order to transform these servants and their children into slaves." This was the case with "Irish Nell," a servant woman brought to Maryland and sold to a planter when her former owner returned to England. Whether her children by a black slave husband were to be slave or free occupied the courts of Maryland for a number of years. Petition was finally granted, and the children freed. The "custom" of marrying white servants to black slaves in order to produce slave offspring was legislated against in 1681. How many half-Irish children became slaves through this custom? How many black Americans have Irish ancestors because of it? If a servant is forced to mate with a slave in order to produce slave children for her slave master, is she not a slave? In 1698 Parliament acted under pressure and allowed private English merchants to participate in the slave trade. The statute declared the slave trade "highly Beneficial and Advantageous to this Kingdom, and to the Plantations and Colonies thereunto belonging," according to Du Bois. English merchants immediately sought to exclude all other nations by securing a monopoly on the lucrative Spanish colonial slave trade. This was accomplished by the Assiento treaty of 1713. Spain granted England a monopoly on the Spanish slave trade for 30 years. England engaged to supply the colonies with "at least 144,000 slaves at the rate of 4,800 a year," and they greatly exceeded their quota, according to Du Bois. The kings of Spain and England were to receive one-fourth of the profits, and the Royal African Company was authorized to import as many slaves as they wished. In Slavery: A World History, Milton Meltzer says, "Slave trading was no vulgar or wicked occupation that shut a man out from office or honors. Engaged in the British slave trade were dukes, earls, lords, countesses, knights — and kings. The slaves of the Royal African Company were branded with initials D.Y. for the Duke of York. "In the late 18th century historian Arthur Young traveled widely in Ireland. He wrote, "A landlord in Ireland can scarcely invent an order which a laborer, servant, or cottier dares to refuse. He may punish with his cane or horsewhip with most perfect security. A poor man would have his bones broken if he offered to lift a hand in his own defense. "When the Irish rebelled in 1798, Britain

shipped thousands of chained "traitors" to her penal colonies in Australia. Many Irish prisoners were convinced that the masters of these convict ships were under orders to starve and murder them by neglect on the outward voyage. In The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes writes, "They had reason to think so," and points to the 1802 arrival of the Hercules, with a 37-percent death rate among the political exiles. That same year, the Atlas II sailed from Cork, with 65 out of 181 "convicts" found dead on arrival. Irish sailors who mutinied to help their countrymen were flogged unmercifully, and "ironed" together with handcuffs, thumbscrews and slave leg bolts. In Slavery and the Slave Trade, James Walvin writes: "In 1781 the British slave ship Zong, unexpectedly delayed at sea and in danger of running short of supplies, simply dumped 132 slaves overboard in order to save the healthier slaves and on the understanding that such an action would be covered by the ship's insurance (not the case had the wretched slaves merely died). "The Church of England supported the slave trade as a means of converting "heathens," and the Bishop of Exeter held 655 slaves until he was compensated for them in 1833. Trader John Newton had prayers said twice a day on board his slave ship, saying he never knew "sweeter or more frequent hours of divine communion. " Francis Drake's slave ship was called Grace of God. In The African Slave Trade, Basil Davidson says, "The value of British income derived from the [slave] trade with the West Indies was said to be four times greater than the value of British incomes derived from trade with the rest of the world." Diggs says that the greater profits from the trade "helped make possible the British Industrial Revolution." The tables from the Royal African Company indicate that between 1690 and 1807, they took 2,579,400 slaves out of Africa. By 1839, the year of the Amistad incident, Britain was no longer active in the slave trade, but it was about to engage wholeheartedly in the drug trade! British warships and troops fought the Opium War (1839-42) and forced the Chinese to accept British opium trafficking. "The British opium trade in China amounted to millions of silver dollars and hundreds of tons of opium annually." What a lucrative replacement for the slave trade, and how much more ethical! In 1845-52, over a million Irish people died of starvation and related diseases while enjoying the benefits of direct rule from London. The mortality rate was increased by the forced eviction of 500,000 souls. A million and a half more left Ireland, many on "coffin ships." During "Black '47," the worst year of the so-called famine, almost 4,000 vessels left Ireland carrying food to the ports of Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool and London, according to Dr. Christine Kinealy. During nine months of that year, a total of 1,336,220 gallons of grain-derived alcohol were shipped from Ireland, she says, along with 822,681 gallons of butter! In Forced Famine Genocide? Peter J. Parish, director of the Institute of U.S. Studies at the University of London, recently wrote Slavery: History and Historians. The index contains no entry for England, Britain, Great Britain or United Kingdom. He wrote: "Indeed, in the 16th and 17th centuries, slavery was very much an institution of the tropical and subtropical latitudes, and in the new world was a product of the Spanish and Portuguese empires rather than the British." Indeed?

Walvin says, "The picture described here has been too charitable toward the slavers and does not fully underline the inhumanities endemic in the slave trade ... The slave trade was an exercise in cruelty and inhumanity to a degree scarcely imaginable to modern readers. "Let us use our imaginations to face the horror of history, and overcome the legacy of racism bequeathed to us by "the Mother Country." James Mullin is president of the New Jersey-based Irish Famine Curriculum Committee and Education Fund.