Sorry, Barack, but white slavery pre-dates black slavery in America. This fact has been verified by forensic evidence from archaeological digs and historical documents uncovered by contemporary scholars, including Don Jordan and Michael Walsh inWhite Cargo (New York University Press: 2009).

The white slaves not indentured, who began to arrive here in 1618, included hundreds of children – – waifs and strays – – who had been rounded up from streets of London to serve wealthy farmers in Virginia.

Other slaves came from the ranks of the homeless and the poor, whom King James I held responsible for spreading the plague, and from England’s swelling prison population.

The scheme was supported by James I, who believed the homeless and itinerant of London were spreading plague.

Of the first 300 white slaves to land in Virginia, only 12 managed to survive four years. The others died of ill treatment, disease, attack by native Americans or overwork.

Contemporary records show that one child victim, Elizabeth Abbott, was beaten to death when her master ordered her to be given 500 lashes for running away.

At least 70,000 white men, women, and children from England and Ireland were shipped to the colonies to be sold as slaves on the auction block during the 170 years of British rule.

White slaves transported to the colonies suffered a staggering loss of life in the 17th and 18th century. During the voyage to America, the white slaves were kept below deck for the entire nine to twelve week journey. They were chained with 50 other men to a board, with padlocked collars around their necks. The weeks of confinement below deck in the ship’s stifling hold often resulted in outbreaks of contagious disease, including cholera and dysentery.

Ships carrying white slaves to America often lost half their slaves to death. According to historian Sharon V. Salinger of the University of California, Riverside, “Scattered data reveal that the mortality for [white] servants at certain times equaled that for [black] slaves in the ‘middle passage,’ and during other periods actually exceeded the death rate for [Black] slaves.”

Ms. Salinger affirms a death rate of ten to twenty percent over the entire 18th century for black slaves on board ships en route to America compared with a death rate of 25% for white slaves.

Foster R. Dulles in Labor in America writes that white slaves “experienced discomforts and sufferings on their voyage across the Atlantic that paralleled the cruel hardships undergone by negro slaves on the notorious Middle Passage.”

Dulles says the whites were “indiscriminately herded aboard the ‘white guinea men,’ often as many as 300 passengers on little vessels of not more than 200 tons burden–overcrowded, unsanitary…The mortality rate was sometimes as high as 50% and young children seldom survived the horrors of a voyage which might last anywhere from seven to twelve weeks.”

Independent investigator A.B. Ellis in the Argosy writes concerning the transport of white slaves, “The human cargo, many of whom were still tormented by unhealed wounds, could not all lie down at once without lying on each other. They were never suffered to go on deck. The hatchway was constantly watched by sentinels armed with hangers and blunder busses. In the dungeons below all was darkness, stench, lamentation, disease and death.”

In the past, white slavery was acknowledged as having existed in America only as “indentured servitude.”

Such indentured servants were, for the most part, convicts, who served a term of four to seven years laboring on the farms, plantations, and estates in Virginia, Georgia, Maryland, and the Carolinas in exchange for their freedom. But they represented only a small fraction of the hundreds of thousands of whites who remained slaves for life. Such slavery was hereditary: children of the white slaves also became chattel without hope of freedom.

In George Sandy’s laws for Virginia, Whites were enslaved “forever.” The service of Whites bound to Berkeley’s Hundred was deemed “perpetual.”

Throughout the colonial period, white slaves remained the main labour force on the Virginia and Maryland plantations, outnumbering Africans by as many as four to one.

Benjamin Franklin suggested the American authorities should send rattlesnakes back to England in return for such unwelcome imports.

Whites remained slaves until the Emancipation Proclamation. In 1855, Frederic Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who designed New York’s Central Park, was in Alabama on a pleasure trip and saw bales of cotton being thrown from a considerable height into a cargo ship’s hold. The men tossing the bales somewhat recklessly into the hold were Negroes; the men in the hold were Irish.

Olmsted inquired about this to a ship worker. “Oh,” said the worker, “the niggers are worth too much to be risked here; if the Paddies are knocked overboard or get their backs broke, nobody loses anything.”

At present, several African American groups are seeking reparations from the United States government for the time their ancestors spent as slaves. One group, the African World Reparations and Repatriation Truth Commission, is demanding an astronomical $777 trillion. Ocala’s Trinity United Church of Christ has passed a resolution demanding reparations and declaring that:

“WHEREAS: The institution of Slavery is internationally recognized as crime for which there is no statute of limitations, AND

WHEREAS: Uncompensated labor was demanded from enslaved Africans and their descendants for more than two centuries on U.S. soil; AND

WHEREAS: The principle that reparations is the appropriate remedy whenever government unjustly abrogates the rights of a domestic group or foreign people whose rights such government is obligated to protect or uphold has been internationally recognized…”

Michelle Obama, no doubt, expects a sizeable check from Uncle Sam since Jim Robinson, her great-great grandfather worked as a slave on a sprawling rice plantation in Georgetown, South Carolina. I would like a check in a substantially greater amount for my English and Irish ancestors who were subjected to similar indignities.