Hi. I am a civil rights lawyer. My goal in going to school was to become a movement lawyer or work for the Civil Rights Divsion of Justice. I ended up on Wall St. but still do pro bono work. This fact is obscured. Of course, they were not legally slaves but they were de facto slaves. I believe the term is indentured servant. Watching Daniel Boone on TV growing up (my age is showing), I thought all indentured servants suffered a small amount of time and then had a wonderful life as Rebecca Boone seemed to have on the show.
Only a few years ago I read a book on Slavery by the leading academic in the country who teaches at Yale. Indentured servants had such restrictions in their indenture contracts that they often became perpetual slaves with even fewer rights than black slaves. Certainly, in common parlance, we would classify them as slaves. Most were children.
The Abolitionist movement prospered better in England than in the United States. One of the primary objections to the Englsih abolitionisment was that, in reality, the life's of factory workers, and especially children in factories, was far worse than Southern slavery. I can't recall the details but such workers rarely had food, saw little sunlight, and lived in hovels. Progressive British people thought it was better to fix the immediate problems at home than bother with the Atlantic Slave trade.
I assume that literacy was very hard to achieve for these workers. The problem was not only with Irish workers, altho they prob. were the majorty. Native English born people could readily end up in such a system.
The author said that slavery has always existed. No one alive today is not a descendant of both slaves owners and slaves. The Atlantic Slave Trade was so bad, though, b/c for the first time in history, race was tied to a property classification.In his view, slavery was an equal opportunity property status in the past.
I suspect that most Irish people today would be shocked to know about this period. Indeed, my American legal history taiught us about basic common law civil rights by comparing the situation with another colony, Ireland. The Irish never had a chance. It was so brutal. Irish lawyers were executed with their clients. John Adams, co-drafter of the Declaration of Independence, our first v-p, second president, ambassador to France and England, served as a full common lawyer when he represented the English soldiers involved in the so-called Boston Massacre. Americans viewed themselves as English citizens and demanded what they perceived as their full const'l rights afforded English citizens. Our General Assemblies were allowed to flourish, without interference from England for many decades. The idea of a general assembly in Ireland was a joke. I remain so moved by these stories decades after the time I first learned the information.
Growing up, I thought that Ireland were a separate state of England, sort of as in Ohio is a separate than New York but part of America. Gaellic was brutally surpressed. Irish sports were suppressed. The utter brutality shocked me.
