Isegoria

Working class authors of the pulp era — such as Robert E. Howard, Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour — came from an oral-storytelling tradition and knew the history of their Scotch-Irish ancestors, James LaFond notes, so they wrote about the adventures of poor white heroes — some of them more than simply poor:

Below is an example of one boy’s fate, that may well have been shared by any of the ancestors of men 100 years ago, who still had an oral link to their colonial past.

Although my white slave ancestors were a mixture of Irish POWs sold to English Catholics and English orphans sold to French Canadians, my father-in-law has an ancestor who was a Cornish/Irish slave, sold to a Manhattan-based plantation owner — a Dutchman, I think — and who eventually escaped into the hinterland, settling around Syracuse New York. His history more closely mirrors the norm for white America slaves.

Below is a summary adapted from a tract by Michael A. Hoffman’s, They Were White and They Were Slaves, referencing the book The Life and Curious Adventures of Peter Williamson, Who was Carried off from Aberdeen and Sold for a Slave.

1743, Aberdeen, Scotland

Peter Williamson was kidnapped in Aberdeen and sold to the captain of the White Guineaman [a merchant ship that hauled white slaves and other cargo] the Planter. The Planter hauled 71 kidnapped Scottish children and ‘other freight.’

Eleven weeks out to sea, the Planter ran aground on a sandbar off of Cape May at the mouth of the Delaware River. [Which indicated that these kids were to be sold in the Philadelphia area, to the ever slave hungry Quakers and Amish of William Penn’s slave colony.] The ship began listing and taking on water, so the crew took the ship’s boats to the mainland and waited out the night. The Planter did not sink, however, and the crew returned and took off the children and other cargo in the morning.

Peter was next bought at auction by Hugh Wilson, an escaped slave from a southern colony, who had fled north out of bondage. Hugh bought Peter for the sole purpose of saving him from death at the hands of an owner, as most boys were worked to death before adulthood. His foster father paid for Peter to be educated in a school, and, when he came near to death, willed his horse, saddle and little bit of money that he had accumulated, to Peter.

Peter fought Indians in the interior as part of his effort to literally carve a home out of the wilderness for his wife and friends, away from the slave-based economies of the coastal towns and piedmont farms.

Peter eventually returned to Scotland, published his book in Aberdeen and was arrested. His books were ordered burned. He was then fined, released, and banished from Aberdeen. He did not give up, but went to the Edinburgh Court of Sessions and made such a good case against the slavers of Aberdeen and the corrupt judiciary there, that the slave cartel in Aberdeen was ordered to pay him 100 pounds sterling.

As long as families of literate frontiersmen, farmers and artisans, continued to educate their own children at home, the life of their race remained an open book to their descendents. However, with the mass immigration of Irish — who had been formerly enslaved in their homeland by absentee British masters, and were, during the Civil War, conscripted as slave soldiers — mass public re-education of the kind employed to cleanse aboriginal culture and folk memories from American Indians, was mandated across the United States. Grey and 1990s author John R. Musick, wrote plainly about white-on-white injustice and how the colonial slave masters used Indians as a check on lower class freedom. But, by the time Howard wrote, such subversive ideals that had been preserved by his frontier clan, were best offered as fantasies cloaked in otherworldly horror.

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