I find myself waffling on whether there’s an equivocation going on here between indentured servitude and chattel slavery. Indentured servitude was no picnic, certainly, and on average chattel slavery was less brutal than many seem to imagine, but I’m still not sure I’m comfortable with saying the Irish in colonial North America were “slaves” in the full sense of the term.

But even though it did not seem that things could get worse, with the advent of Oliver Cromwell, they did. In the 1650’s, thousands more Irish were killed, and many more were sold into slavery. Over 100,000 Irish Catholic children were taken from their parents and sold as slaves, many to Virginia and New England. Unbelievably but truly, from 1651 to 1660 there were more Irish slaves in America than the entire non-slave population of the colonies!”

And fun fact: “The cheapest slaves were Irish, as they had no government to protect them and were under foreign rule and English courts did not charge fees to authorize their shipment, such as in Scotland.”

But I’ll ask on the five out of six specifically.

Following the Irish uprising in 1641 and subsequent Cromwellian invasion, the English Parliament passed the Act for the Settlement of Ireland 1652 which classified the Irish population into one of several categories according to their degree of involvement in the uprising and subsequent war. Those who had participated in the uprising or assisted the rebels in any way were sentenced to be hanged and to have their property confiscated. Other categories were sentenced to banishment with whole or partial confiscation of their estates. While the majority of the resettlement took place within Ireland to the province of Connaught, perhaps as many as 50,000 were transported to the colonies in the West Indies and in North America.[21]

During the early colonial period, the Scots and the English, along with other western European nations, dealt with their “Gypsy problem” by transporting them as slaves in large numbers to North America and the Caribbean. Cromwell shipped Romanichal Gypsies as slaves to the southern plantations and there is documentation of Gypsies being owned by former black slaves in Jamaica.[22]

Does that sound remotely plausible to you?

I didn’t even know that “black slaves would be sought directly from Africa, so that their lack of English language ability—and ability to understand one another’s tribal languages—might prevent their conspiring with each other and white slaves to turn on their mutual oppressors” to prevent things like the Powhatan uprising in Virginia where “White runaways banded together with Indians to wipe out the plantations in 1622-23, coming close to success. The war that crowns this period, Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, in which White renegades, White slaves, and black slaves, allied against colonial officials, the plantation owners, Indian tribes and even pirates, in a knock down drag out fight which resulted in the burning of Jamestown, also came close to victory for the rebels.” to quote James LaFond, who explains further “For the first 100 years the plantations were staffed almost exclusively by English children, Scottish kidnapping victims, along with Irish of all ages rounded up in a massive slave-catching initiative that removed five out of every six Irish persons from their homeland.”

And his series of blog posts on this topic can be found here.