White Slavery

African Enslavement of White People

Historian Robert Davis, author of Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800 :

"Putting together such sources of attrition as deaths, escapes, ransomings, and conversions, Davis calculated that about one-fourth of slaves had to be replaced each year to keep the slave population stable, as it apparently was between 1580 and 1680. That meant about 8,500 new slaves had to be captured each year. Overall, this suggests nearly a million slaves would have been taken captive during this period. Using the same methodology, Davis has estimated as many as 475,000 additional slaves were taken in the previous and following centuries.

The result is that between 1530 and 1780 there were almost certainly 1 million and quite possibly as many as 1.25 million white, European Christians enslaved by the Muslims of the Barbary Coast.

Davis said his research into the treatment of these slaves suggests that, for most of them, their lives were every bit as difficult as that of slaves in America.

“As far as daily living conditions, the Mediterranean slaves certainly didn’t have it better,” he said.

"While African slaves did grueling labor on sugar and cotton plantations in the Americas, European Christian slaves were often worked just as hard and as lethally – in quarries, in heavy construction, and above all rowing the corsair galleys themselves."

Linda Colley’s book, Captives, estimates from 1650-1830, approximately 1.5 million Europeans and Americans were captured and sold into African Slavery.

Christopher Hitchens describes America’s response.

Notes on white slavery from Jim Goad that challenge social justice orthodoxy on slavery (this original Vice article has since been removed for violating Community Standards):

the root word of "slave" is "Slav," because Slavic peoples… were the primary slave population throughout the Middle Ages…
there have been long stretches of history where Africans have owned white people as slaves! … The empire of Carthage transported white slaves to Africa. The African Moors ruled Spain for 500 years and sent white Christian slaves to Egypt. And poor, defenseless white kids …were kidnapped by Muslims during the Children's Crusade and sold into Egyptian slavery…
Slavery was common throughout Africa, with entire tribes becoming enslaved after losing battles. Tribal chieftains often sold their defeated foes to white slave-traders. In the late 1700s, a freed black American slave named Ottobah Cugoano wrote, "I was first kidnapped and betrayed by my own complexion, who were the first cause of my exile and slavery." …
The word "Abed" means "slave" in Arabic. It also means "black." …the Middle East has hosted far more African slaves than North America ever did…
Jews were involved in all levels of the African slave trade…
white Christians were the first group to make a concerted effort to ABOLISH slavery…
Of the 10 to 15 million Africans who were transplanted to the New World, no more than 6 percent—around 400,000—went to the Northern Hemisphere… Almost all of them went to South America…
At the peak of black slavery in the South, only 6 percent of Southern whites owned slaves. If you include the white people in the North, it means that only 1.4 percent of white Americans owned black slaves at the HEIGHT of slavery…
An estimated 3,000 blacks owned a total of 20,000 black slaves in the year 1860. One study concluded that 28 percent of free blacks owned slaves, which is a far higher percentage than that of free whites who owned slaves…
two-thirds of ALL whites came to the colonies in some form of bondage. Legal papers on both sides of the ocean referred to them as "slaves." White slaves outnumbered black slaves in America throughout the 1600s…
Hundreds of thousands of white slaves were kidnapped and brought to America; their middle-passage death rates were comparable to those of black slaves; they were sold at auction and traded for livestock, they were routinely beaten—sometimes to death—and an estimated one half of them died before gaining freedom.
It's possible that more whites came to America against their will than blacks. Historians from both ends of the political spectrum say that white slaves were treated worse than black slaves…
By 1776, more than 50,000 convict slave laborers had already been sent to America…
American blacks enjoy the highest standard of living of any black population on earth. Their average per capita income is TWENTY to FIFTY times higher than in any of the African countries from where they were displaced. It's true that part of America's wealth was built on black slavery; it is also true that American blacks are enjoying the fruits of that wealth…
When General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, it had been nearly 20 years since Lee owned slaves—he freed his slaves in the late 1840s. In 1856, five years before the Civil War started, he wrote that slavery was "a moral and political evil."
On the other hand, General Grant STILL owned slaves at the end of the Civil War, because Abe Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation cleverly outlawed slavery only in the South. Grant had stated that he would refuse to fight if he thought the war had anything to do with slavery…
there are anywhere from 27 to 200 million humans currently enslaved worldwide. (Compare this to only four and a half million slaves at American slavery's peak.)…
In today's dollars, a black slave in the American South cost approximately $40,000
Britain sent more than 50,000 convicts to America
Nearly all current historians concur that the MAJORITY of whites who came to America in colonial times arrived in a servile condition. Most who specialize in researching indentured servitude agree that at least half, and possibly as many as two-thirds, of ALL white colonial immigrants arrived in chains” - Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America, p. 61.
Oliver Cromwell sold (white) political/religious enemies into slavery in the West Indies
Cromwell was said to have "Barbadosed" at least a hundred thousand of his politico-religious foes... With one decree in 1651, Cromwell enslaved seven to eight thousand Scots and British Royalists he’d conquered at Worcester and sent them all clanging in chains off to the New World... He also sent Irish survivors of his slaughter at Drogheda into slavery. In the 1640s, more than eighty-five percent of the estimated 25,000 slaves in Barbados were white.8 In 1653, an estimated half of all white Barbadians were Cromwell’s political and religious slaves… Cromwell’s son Henry helped run the white-slave racket from London along with daddy, and in 1655 Henry issued an edict which stated that although “we must use force” in seizing young Irish women as colonial laborers, it was “so much for their owne goode” anyway...”
“From nearly all accounts, the hundred thousand or so white slaves in the West Indies rarely survived the term of their indenture… According to accounts from both Virginia and the West Indies during the 1600s, roughly EIGHTY PERCENT of white slaves/servants died within the first twelve months after arrival... Thousands and thousands of white servants, male and female, quietly perished in tropical squalor... Barbadian slave-drivers were said to be particularly cruel. One island commissioner reportedly petitioned Cromwell to switch over to black slavery, reasoning that since black slaves were a costlier, more permanent investment, the vicious overseers might “take more interest in their preservation and so work them with moderation...”
“It would be bad enough if Barbados had been an aberration, but it was only part of a much larger pattern of forced expulsion and enslavement which had arisen in the British Isles and parts of the German Rhineland. Starting in the late 1500s, legal entities in these areas had realized that the most efficient way to quell potential domestic trouble was to deport potential domestic troublemakers… Apparently, force was often necessary. In England, the recruiting agents who were polite enough not to bop you on the head and drag you onto a slaveship were called “drums,” because they restricted their activity to drumming up recruits. Those who slipped a mickey in your beer or overpowered you in a grimy alley were called “crimps” or “spirits.” The spirit, perhaps accompanied by several other burly ghosts, would snatch his prey quietly and suddenly. If a person disappeared suspiciously, they were thought to have been “spirited away.” According to historian Richard Hofstadter, the spirit was someone who “waylaid, kidnapped, or induced adults to get aboard ships for America. Often their victims were taken roughly in hand...”
Gary B. Nash writes that “Kidnapping and shanghaiing of drifters and drunks was endemic. Many unfortunate seaport dwellers awakened one morning with a head-splitting hangover to find themselves in the hold of a ship headed westward across the Atlantic..."
Adults weren’t the only whites being kidnapped and sold into colonial slavery. Forcible seizure of homeless and orphaned children was widespread. It was commonly known as “kid-nabbing,” later mangled by the Cockneys into “kidnapping.” Hundred of thousands of British kids were nabbed into slave work not only for colonial plantations, but also into forced domestic child labor for Britain’s smoke-snorting industrial machine…
Because kidnapped men, women, and children were assigned forged contracts of indenture—or, in several cases, no indentures at all until they arrived in the New World—it’s difficult to gauge what percentage of white indentured servants came here against their will. In The Mind of the South, W.J. Cash guesses that “the greater number” of indentured servants “seem to have been mere children or adolescents, lured from home by professional crimps or outright kidnapped…"
“One could kidnap a man at random in the alleys of London and be sure of a ready sale for him in the South,” writes Thomas J. Wertenbaker in The First Americans...
An ad in a 1784 New York newspaper refers to a still-vibrant “traffick of white people...” and an 1829 judicial decision notes that “It was formerly a considerable business to import Irish and German servants...”
“Amazingly, kidnapping was in many cases a legally sanctioned practice. A 1618 Parliamentary bill allowed for constables to forcefully nab all orphaned children over eight years old and to detain them in prisons awaiting shipment to colonial plantations..."
Other laws allowed for the bodily capture of debtors and criminals. A 1652 Commonwealth law permitted officials to identify “begging or vagrant” subjects and cause them to be “seized on and detained” in order to be schlepped in shackles to the colonies...
Similar initiatives arose throughout the British Isles as local officials realized it was cheaper to sail their lumpen proles westward than to continue doling out poor relief. Hoping to send their underclass en masse to New York, the Scottish Privy Council in 1669 issued orders for local officials to round up “strong and idle beggars, vagabonds, egyptians, common and notorious whoores, theeves, and other dissolute and lousy persons... It was a new, and sparklingly effective, method of taking out the trash.”
An estimate published in 1670 alleged that 10,000 British subjects had been kidnapped that year... A pamphlet issued ten years later reckoned that ten thousand Brits were still being captured per year, every year... If those stats are reliable, this would total 100,000 British kidnapping victims in the 1670s alone. In the history of slavery in America, fewer than 400,000 black slaves were imported...
For all the bad rep Amerikkka gets about black slavery, it probably received no more than six percent of all African slaves shipped to the Western Hemisphere…
Making only mild extrapolations from these British kidnapping estimates, and surmising that roughly ten thousand whites were also abducted yearly for a forty-year run all told, the total of unwilling white immigrants brought to America would equal or surpass the number of Africans forced here against their will. And this estimate is probably low, as indentured servitude flourished for over two hundred years, not forty. And I’m not counting the fifty or sixty thousand convicts dragged over here in the 1700s… So even though the popular belief is that NO whites were shipped to America against their will, it’s highly possible that MORE whites were brought here unwillingly than blacks.”
Then came the Middle Passage, which often proved as traumatic and lethal as it had for African slaves… German “newlanders,” the continental equivalent of the British “drums” and “spirits,” peddled false hopes and empty dreams to German Palatines, many of whom had been rendered vulnerable by political shifts in Der Vaterland… In 1731, the Love and Unity sailed from Rotterdam to Philly with an estimated 150 German Palatines, all but 34 of whom died before reaching the City of Brotherly Love. Food became so scarce that scalpers were SELLING rats and mice to the highest bidder...
Likewise, the British slaveships were often little more than floating coffins. Duncan Campbell, an English merchant who shipped white convicts to America until the Revolution broke out, chalked up a ten percent middle-passage death rate as a “moderate loss...”
One historian calculated that between ten and fifteen percent of all white bondsmen “commonly died during the voyage...”
Others peg the overall death quotient as murderously higher… During a 1638 voyage to America, nearly three quarters of an estimated 350 passengers died before arrival. One of the ship’s survivors had written, “We have thrown overboard two and three for many dayes together...”
In 1720, a third of the passengers croaked aboard the Honour... The next year, roughly forty percent of those the Owners Goodwill died on the way over here... On the 1768 voyage of the Snow Rodney, food became nonexistent—passengers resorted to chewing their own shoe leather... The 1741 passage of Belfast’s Sea Flower took four months and killed nearly half of the 106 humans aboard. During the trip, six human cadavers were gnawed at by famished passengers-cum-cannibals... Water was so scarce on the Justitia’s 1743 London-to-Maryland jaunt that transported felons resorted to drinking their own urine. Almost a third of the ship’s human cargo died at sea...
white indentured servants were sold to the highest bidder, exactly like black slaves. In 1625, a British merchant claimed that in Virginia, “servants were sold here up and down like horses...” In 1755, Maryland’s governor echoed the livestock metaphor: “The planters’ fortunes here consist in the number of their servants (who are purchased at high rates) much as the estates of the English farmer do in the multitude of cattle...”
Transported convict William Green recalled the auction process: “They search us there as the dealers in horses do those animals in this country, by looking at our teeth, viewing our limbs, to see if they are sound and fit for their labour...”
As with Africans, white families were frequently broken apart and sold to different bidders. At auctions, white servants were often purchased in bunches by men known as “soul drivers,” who’d chain groups of newly arrived white slaves together and herd them on foot through rural areas, selling them at a profit. “We were driven through the country like cattle to a Smithfield market and exposed to sale in public fairs like so many brute beasts,” griped one white servant... “They drive them through the Country like a parcell of Sheep untill they can sell them to advantage,” sneered another...
An indentured servant was legally “the property of his Master,” as phrased by West Florida’s Governor Johnstone in 1766... A South Carolina bill introduced in 1717 argued that “the ownership of one white man” should be a prerequisite for State Assembly membership... A 1757 Pennsylvania court ruling declared that a white servant named Thomas Teaffe was indeed his master’s “property...”
White servants were listed as property on tax returns alongside livestock… As property, white servants were bought, sold, traded, and inherited like any other disposable goods. One boy was traded by his master for two deer, much to the amusement of his fellow servants... In 1657, a female servant’s owner swapped the degraded lassie for a pig... Many white servants were bartered for tobacco... John Rolfe, one of Virginia’s early elite luminaries, commented in 1619 that white servants were being exchanged to settle gambling debts in card games... Living servants were often indistinguishable from inanimate commodities, as evidenced in this 1765 comment from a Philadelphia entrepreneur: “[T]he chief articles that answer here from Ireland which can be bought are Linnens...Beef, Butter, Men, Women & Boy Servants...”
[The] majority of indentured servants were used as field hands on southern estates and northern farms...
White temp-slaves had few legal rights. They couldn’t vote or sit on a jury... They couldn’t marry without their master’s permission, which was often denied... Female servants were forbidden from becoming pregnant, even if their masters had raped them... It was his word against hers… By Virginia law, her bambino itself was born into slavery until the age of 31... Back then, 31 years constituted most of a lifetime. In 1765, Virginia curtailed its out-of-wedlock baby-slavery laws to 21 years for white boy trash and 18 years for white girl trash...
So-called “privileged” white skin was brutally ripped open on plantation after plantation. “I have seen an Overseer beat a Servant with a cane about the head till the blood has followed,” remarked an observer, “for a fault that is not worth speaking of, yet he must be patient, or worse will follow...”
In 1624, white servant Elyas Hintone was bludgeoned to death with a field hoe by his master... A Massachusetts servant named Marmaduke Pierce was also pummeled into eternal darkness by his master, who went unpunished.61 A New England couple was acquitted of murder in 1666 after the mistress had chopped off a servant’s white toes, causing a slow death...
Female servants often fared worse than men. The same Virginia slavemaster who whacked out Elyas Hintone’s headlights had regularly whipped his female slave Elizabeth Abbott to the point where “her flesh in some places was raw and very black and blew...” Abbott ran away into the forest, where she died of flesh wounds and weakness. In 1663, murdered white female servant Alice Sanford was so viciously abused, her dead body was described as having been “beaten to a jelly...” Another white girl was whipped to death by her overseer, Mistress Ward, who was found guilty by a jury but only fined three hundred pounds of tobacco.65 White servant Elizabeth Sprigs complained in a 1756 letter that she’d been “tied up and whipped to that degree that you’d not serve an animal. Nay, many negroes are better used....”
Under such conditions, suicides proliferated. A Scottish ex-servant commented that “some of these poor deluded slaves, in order to put an end to their bondage, put a period to their lives.”
Physical torture of white servants was so pervasive that the law began to take notice. A 1642 Virginia statute remarked how “the barbarous usuage of some servants by cruell masters bring soe much scandall and infamy to the country in generall.” The law went on to prohibit the private burial of servants because masters frequently were “guilty of their deaths” and tried to hide the bodies... A 1717 law in South Carolina mentioned “barbarous usage of servants by cruel masters...” Thirty years later, a Maryland coroner who was alarmed at all the bruised corpses whizzing through his office bemoaned the “rigorous Usage and Ill-treatment of Masters to Servants...”
Up to 39 lashes were allowed in Maryland; masters were only forbidden from “excessively” beating their servants... A South Carolina servant who had run away twice was ordered in 1671 to “be stript naked to his waiste, and receive thirty-nine lashes upon his naked back...” As late as 1785, Virginia’s legal code allowed for uppity white servants to be “corrected with stripes.”
Indentured servitude was harsh enough that servants frequently ran away, and colonial newspapers were crammed with classified ads from masters trying to reclaim their white-skinned property. These runaway ads first appeared in the early 1600s and lasted into the late 1820s. Servants are commonly described as bearing whip marks and burned scar tissue, with their attitudes deemed as “saucy,” “proud,” and “impudent.”
Upon capture, white servants were routinely whipped and then penalized with extra time added to their bondage. Statutes and court decisions mandated that runaway servants have their ears cut off, that they be branded with red-hot pokers, or that they wear leg-irons and metal neck collars called ‘pot-hooks.’ Virginia law provided that servants who had run away a second time be “branded in the cheek with the letter R and pass under the statute of incorrigible rogues.”
Captured runaway servants in Virginia were also obligated to serve two extra days for every day they had escaped.76 In Maryland, the ratio was ten days to one...
In South Carolina, it became an extra YEAR for every week a servant absented had himself... There are recorded runaway penalties of five, seven, ten, and even fifteen years... Runaway white servants were such a pervasive problem, the U.S. Constitution proclaimed that those “held to Service or Labor in one State escaping into another shall be delivered up.”
Some have estimated that as many as half of all white bound servants, throughout the two-hundred-plus years the system was legal in America, never survived their term of indenture...
I wonder what a white slave of two or three hundred years ago, after being whipped, shackled, beaten, raped, starved, infected, or impregnated, would have thought of the currently fashionable… doctrine of white skin privilege.
The latter-day guiltmongers just can’t face the reality of WHITE SLAVES. But in colonial times, the words “servant” and “slave” were used interchangeably. For a fuzzy fifty years or so after Jamestown’s settlement, there was hardly any distinction between white and black forced laborers—the system of racially defined, legally endorsed black chattel slavery didn’t blossom in any significant numerical sense until late in the 1600s. According to one historian, “there is no doubt that the earliest Negroes in Virginia occupied a position similar to that of the white servants in the colony.”
A 1641 law provided for all disobedient servants to have their skin branded, regardless of its color... A 1652 law in Providence and Warwicke (later Rhode Island) mentions “blacke mankind or white” servants... A 1683 Pennsylvania law contains the phrase “no Servant White or Black...”
During a 1659 Parliamentary debate on the white-servant trade to the colonies, legislators used the word “slaves” rather than “servants...” A Virginia law of 1705 mentions the “care of all Christian slaves,” Christian being a contemporary euphemism for European... A scribe for London Magazine wrote in 1751 that a British convict shipped overseas became a “slave in America...”
A colonial observer of Virginia convict laborers said, “I never see such pasels of pore Raches in my Life...they are used no Bater than so many negro Slaves...”
A 1777 screed protesting the indenture racket claimed that a white servant’s body was “as absolutely subjected as the body or person of a Negro, man or woman, who is sold as a legal Slave...” In the 1820s, Karl Anton Postl commented that non-slaveowning whites “are not treated better than the slaves themselves...”
White indentured servants frequently referred to themselves as slaves. In 1623, Virginia servant Thomas Best wrote that “Master Atkins hath sold me for a £150 sterling like a damn’d slave...” A white servant named Robert Perkins said that his bondage featured “all the Hardships that the Negro Slaves endured...”
Modern historians would agree. Howard Zinn states that “white indentured servants were often treated as badly as black slaves.”
Eugene Genovese claims that “In the South and in the Caribbean, the treatment meted out to white indentured servants had rivaled and often exceeded in brutality that meted out to black slaves....”
“The Negro,” argues historian James Leyburn, “was a permanent piece of property and must be conserved; the servant was a temporary investment to be exploited to the full...”
In 1770, Annapolis customs surveyor William Eddis reasoned that black slaves, as “property for life,” were “almost in every instance, under more comfortable circumstances than the miserable European, over whom the rigid planter exercises an inflexible severity.” Eddis observed that whites, as temp-slaves, were “strained to the utmost to perform their allotted labour....There are doubtless many exceptions to this observation, yet, generally speaking, they groan beneath a worse than Egyptian bondage...”
In 1855, when travel writer Frederick Law Olmsted asked a steamboat shipmate in Alabama why the Irish were performing more dangerous work than black slaves, he received this verbal shrug: “Oh, the niggers are worth too much to be risked here; if the Paddies are knocked overboard or get their backs broke, nobody loses anything...”
White convict laborers had dribbled into the colonies throughout the 1600s, but they may have comprised as much as a quarter of ALL white colonial immigrants—free or bound—in the 1700s... During the period in which Thomas Goad was transported to Maryland, convicts comprised an estimated forty percent of everyone who entered that state from overseas. One in five of these Maryland convicts bore a sentence of fourteen years to life.107 You heard me—white slaves for LIFE.
British convicts began arriving here in large lumps—an estimated fifty thousand during the 1700s...—after Parliament’s passage of the Transportation Act in 1718. The law provided that convicted felons could be “transported” overseas as slave laborers. Convict-slaves were frequently referred to as “transports.” Transportation was viewed second only to the death penalty in severity. According to one historian, convict-deportation became “Britain’s foremost punishment after 1718....”
It was considered preferable to hanging, but far worse than being whipped or branded. A British judge in 1741 concluded that a thief whom he’d convicted didn’t qualify as “an Object of mercy and therefore I ordered him, instead of being burnt on the hand, to be Transported for Seven Years...”
Convicted felons often begged for whipping or burning instead. A thief named Mary Stanford requested to be hanged rather than be banished overseas... To the average British subject of the day, America represented a savage, frightening wilderness…
Most transported British convicts were not violent criminals. As one writer tells it, “grand larcenists made up the majority of transports....The typical malefactor cast for transportation, then, was a young male labourer driven to crime by economic necessity...”
Grand larceny was defined as theft of anything worth over a shilling. The average unskilled worker’s daily salary at the time was barely more than a shilling… Many, if not most, of the transported convicts may have done mothing more “criminal” than being poor. Convict-transportation flourished during a period when one in ten citizens were starving in the best of times, and nearly half went hungry in the worst of times. British subjects were being hung for stealing bread. One could get the noose merely for plucking fruit from a rich man’s estate... or buying black-market seafood. One man received a seven-year banishment to America for stealing a sheep after being tormented by the “Cryes of his familey for Bread, at a tyme, when he had it not to give them...”
In 1771, a starving pregnant woman was banished to America for stealing a large basin of soup... This case, far from an exception, was described by one researcher as “fairly typical...” There were even rumors of some workers being enslaved merely for asking that they be paid... And there’s evidence that public officials frequently convicted innocent persons in order to get monetary kickbacks from slave traders...
By ridding themselves of the poor, the British saved money on jails and public welfare. As one writer explains, convicts were “pickpockets and thieves who were worth more to the Crown on a New World plantation than dangling from a rope...”
The Crown typically paid merchants five pounds to transport a convict overseas… It was estimated that a convict’s personal upkeep cost between 13 and 15 pounds yearly, ...while his labor during the same stretch could generate from 50 to 150 pounds of income for his owner... Taking the lowest possible estimate—that of a 35-pound-per-year profit for the master—and multiplying it by seven years, one arrives at a MINIMUM profit of 245 pounds for the convict’s owner. Not a bad profit on a convict who may have only stolen a shilling. The slaveowner’s financial return was possibly FIVE THOUSAND times the monetary amount originally stolen by the convict…
Whites comprised the majority of colonial slave laborers through most of the 1600s... Black slaves reached a numerical parity with white servants sometime late in that century or early in the 1700s... The idea of racial supremacy had little to do with the gradual shift from white to black slavery… Throughout the time span of white indentured servitude, African slaves-for-life had always been much pricier than British temp-slaves. In the 1690s, black slaves were still selling for twice or three times the cost of white servants, but the mega-planters began a slow tilt toward black slavery. The reason for the shift was economic rather than racial. “The profit motive alone favored the substitution of black labor for whites,” argues historian Edwin J. Perkins.…To attract new “volunteers,” the colonies had passed laws protecting white servants’ rights. The plan backfired, as it rendered their upkeep more expensive. The supply of white servants diminished as more black markets opened up, cementing the shift toward black slavery… Blacks were visually identifiable by their skin color. They weren’t so much hated for it as they were identified by it. According to a commentator in 1735, the problem in recapturing runaway white servants had been the difficulty in sussing out “whether they were Servants or not”; blacks, however, could “always be known and taken into Custody...”
So it was the rich white man’s money and law—not the poor white man’s unregenerate hatred—which favored black slavery over white indentured servitude. Yes, the intensification of slavery pushed the poor black man down; what’s rarely acknowledged is that it also squeezed the poor white man out… Upon release from bondage, white servants were legally entitled to “freedom dues.” The popular myth is that most servants received a fertile chunk of sod and lived happily ever after. This is an outright falsehood, as most states granted no land whatsoever as part of their freedom dues. Maryland was an exception. But a study of approximately 5,000 white indentured servants in Maryland during the 1670s reveals that only a quarter of them inherited the 50-acre headright; in fact, a higher number of them had died in bondage than had received land...
Instead of land, most white ex-slaves were promised only clothing, tools, and/or a pittance of cash. A 1700 Pennsylvania law provided only for two suits, an axe, and two hoes …In the mid-1700s, Virginia’s freedom dues for newly released servants amounted to a one-shot cash payment of three pounds, ten shillings.... In North Carolina around the same time, freedom dues were a trifling three pounds. …For the freed indentured servant, “[T]he statistical probability for rising to even middle-class position was very slight, ” writes one historian.... The most commonly cited guesstimate, provided by indentured-servitude specialist Abbot Emerson Smith, is that only one in ten white ex-slaves would “wax decently prosperous.” Smith reckoned that maybe another one in ten would achieve some measure of self-sufficiency. Eight of ten servants, however, either “died during their servitude, returned to England after it was over, or became ‘poor whites...’”
A Maryland priest observed that “white servants, after their terms of bondage is out, are stroling [sic] the county without bread...” Governor Bradford of Massachusetts lamented that “by one means or another, in 20 years time, it is question whether ye greater part be not growne ye worser.” In South Carolina, Frederick Law Olmsted commented that “the poor white people, meaning those, I suppose, who bring nothing to market in exchange for money but their labor...are worse off in almost all respects than the slaves...”