White slave children of colonial Maryland and Virginia : birth and shipping records
(Book)

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

"Everyone I ever heard, and everything I ever read, told me that all the slaves were black, and all the whites subjected to forced labor were indentured servants, or convict laborers, or impressed sailors. Everyone was wrong. Nobody told me about white slavery in colonial America. If I had trusted the experts, the authorities, I would have missed this story altogether"--p. [vi].

"Picking up where he left off in [...] Without indentures : index to white slave children in colonial court records, Dr. Richard Hayes Phillips has now taken the story back even further--back to the scenes of the original crimes--kidnapping of children to be sold into slavery (ca. 1660-1720). In his original book, Dr. Phillips identified 5290 'servants' without indentures, transported without their consent, against their will. He culled that evidence from the Court Order Books of colonial Maryland and Virginia, where the county courts were authorized to examine the children, adjudge their ages, and sentence them to slavery for a number of years. The younger the child, the longer the sentence. In this book, from shipping records found in the Library of Congress, the Bristol Record Office, and elsewhere, the author has identified 170 ships that carried white slave children to the plantations of colonial Maryland and Virginia. The shipping records itemize the unfortunate kids as 'cargo,' and specify the import duties paid to the Royal Naval Officers for each child. The white slave ships sailed from no fewer than seventeen ports of departure in England, Scotland, Ireland, and Massachusetts. Knowing the places from which the children were taken, and their adjudged ages on the dates of their court appearances, has enabled Dr. Phillips to conduct a targeted search of the birth and baptismal records. In all, he has matched more than 1400 children with the parish or town records, their names appearing only once in the right time frame. Most of these birth and baptismal records are online. In search of the rest of the children, Dr. Phillips examined thousands of images of original handwritten parish registers in England and Ireland. Kids who were shanghaied from Massachusetts, if they survived their servitude, could go home. They could walk if they had to, and some of them did. Among their direct descendants are 205 confirmed veterans of the American Revolution, including 72 minutemen, active on 19 April 1775 at Lexington, Concord, Cambridge, or Boston. This book also contains an expose of the colonial shipping industry. Among the child traffickers were the mayors of Bristol and Bideford and the governor of Virginia. This book will help researchers to trace back their white slave heritage even further than before, and it cries out for correctives to be written in American history books regarding our colonial origins and our treatment of one another"--p. [4] of cover.