When Ralph Northam is speaking! WTH? Ralph Northam really should have quit (talking) while he was ahead
In an interview with Gayle King, today “We are now at the 400-year anniversary — just 90 miles from here in 1619. The first indentured servants from Africa landed on our shores in Old Point Comfort…”
Ralphie, until now, I had some sympathy for you. Now, you just sound defiant and stupid. Even indentured serviitude is a form of slavery; many indentured servants were unable to buy their way to freedom and spent their entire lives ‘serving’ aka enslaved to their masters. And, btw - those so called ‘indentured servants’ were rounded up like wild animals, whipped and tortured and kept in cages or chained up as they voyaged to the New World to serve their new ‘benefactors’!
There were also free people African decent, who did come here as indentured servants, and worked for the required number of years before being fulfilling their contracts and being released.
What Northam is probably referring to are the African slaves seized from Spaniards in 1619 who were given the status of indentured servants by the British because they had been baptized. They were released after some years, after they had, I guess, “paid back” the cost that British supposedly incurred by freeing them, or perhaps the amount that the British forwent by not selling them. The Spaniards had already brought slaves with them to a number of failed attempts to colonized North America, and the British were keeping Africans as slaves in their Caribbean colonies.
The Spaniards had slaves in the Americas from the indigenous people of the Americas and slaves that they brought from Africa (as well as free Africans) from the time they set up their first colonies on the Americas, at the end of the 15th and the early 16th centuries, so at least 100 years earlier.
Most non-Hispanic whites are descended from indentured servants, if they can trace their ancestry in the US far back enough. If indentured servitude is a form of slavery, then maybe most non-Hispanic whites in the US are descended from slaves.
@roethlisburger ‘…if they can trace their ancestry in the US far back enough.’
Not only US ancestry - I am sure that most people, regardless of color or creed, could probably consider themselves descended from one form of servitude or another. ie. Serfs in Europe; Jews in Egypt (and Europe); Islamic slaves, Roman slaves, Korea / Japan / China etc etc etc
For any region of your ancestry, your ancestors almost certainly include people ranging from kings and emperors to the lowliest paupers, serfs, slaves, etc. (of those who had descendants whose lineages did not die out) if you go back enough generations.
But most people do not know the specifics that far back. Of course, it is the more recent ancestral generations that may be more relevant in their influence on your life, opportunities, choices, and inheritance.
I’ve read a family history saying one ancestor of mine was impressed into the British Navy. Men would be rounded up by a press gang and forced onto a ship. Pay was meager if they got any and 50% of sailors died of scurvy. My ancestor jumped ship when it got close to America, but he was caught, forced back on ship but jumped again and stayed in America. Times were cruel back then for almost all people.
1865, when slavery ended in the US, can’t be considered recent by any normal definition of the term. No college age black students have recent ancestors who were slaves.
^It’s not that many generations back. I was shocked to learn that Thomas Jefferson’s longest living (acknowledged) grandchild died the same year that my grandfather was born, 1887. My great grandfather was brought to Texas as a toddler during the war for Texas’ independence from Mexico in the 1830s. And yes, unfortunately, that side of my family owned slaves.
The crazy thing is that he even brought up indentured servants, Old Point Comfort (interesting history on that), when he wasn’t even being led in that direction. How he thought what he was saying about any of that would help him is beyond me. He probably needs to stop talking!
@roethlisburger no, they aren’t. Only a small number of European Americans are descendants of people who came over as indentured servants. Most people of European descent USA are the descendants of immigrants who paid for their passage with money, not indentured servitude. While as many of 2/3 of the original colonials arrived as indentured servants, by the time the mass immigration started in the middle of the 19th century, the relative cost of passage was such that even relatively poor people could afford the passage without resorting to indenture. Most European Americans are descendants of people who came during those mass immigrations.
Indentured servitude is not even close to being a slave. In indenture, the indentured party owes a set amount of labor to the person who holds their indenture in exchange for something else, which could be passage, payment of debt, or training (apprenticeship). The person who holds the indenture has no ownership over the person of the indentured servant, nor over any property owned by the indentured servant.
A slave has no ownership of anything, including their own person. Not only their labor and time, but everything they have belongs to their master to do with as they wish. That includes the body of slave.
Many Europeans were serfs, though I don’t think there is any way to figure out which people are descendants of serfs - while they were numerous, and may have been the majority, they also had the low survivorship, and the Black Death and other plagues hit them harder than it did freemen. If you’re Russian, though, it’s more likely than not that you are a descendant of a serf, considering how recent and how widespread serfdom was in the Russian Empire.
6 Generations back is still close. When my daughter was born in 2000, her great great grandmother was still alive. Her Grandparents were born slaves, and the furthest we have been able to trace our lineage is one generation further back when my daughter’s great great great great great grandfather was sold as a child from his family. We pass on that history in our family, from slavery to sharecropping/Jim Crow and now as a family with some who are doing great and others who have struggled generation after generation. Trust me when I say that 6 generations is not far enough away.
Many people alive today have parents or grandparents who experienced or witnessed things like imposed segregation, inferior segregated schools, racial discrimination in housing and jobs, redlining by government home loan agencies, worse treatment by police, etc… Some of that goes on covertly today, though it can be hard to prove or disprove in an individual case even though it can be revealed in matched pair testing. But when it was more common and overt in the 1950s and 1960s, black people were much more limited in sharing in the economic growth of that era, which was historically unusual in that it was otherwise widely distributed across the whole SES range instead of being concentrated at the top SES levels.
My dad’s father was born at the close of the Civil War, and his father (my dad’s grandfather) was born ~20 years before that. My dad’s grandfather was still alive when my father was born, and my dad was still living when my college aged children were born. That’s feels pretty recent.
Slavery ended in the mid 19th century in name only. There are still plenty of people alive today with fond memories of their Black “nannies” who were really house slaves under another name.
Yes, many whites came over with indentured servitude status. But - and here’s the big but - they had rights, a way out, and their future generations didn’t live with the same visible mark of their likely servitude on their skin.
There is no comparing the history of white servants to Black and Brown slaves.
Also, yes there were free Blacks but you know what that freedom meant? Nothing if you were captured in the north and sent to the south to be sold as a slave.
Yep. When my grandmother got here from Italy as a toddler, she was welcomed by “No Italians Wanted,” inferior schools (she never got past the 3rd grade), massive mistreatment by the police (who were then overwhelmingly Irish), segregation into ghettoes, very limited employment options, etc. Oh, and no welfare of any kind in those days, only charity and some very limited government programs after the New Deal. I knew my grandmother well - I taught her to read when I was 9 or 10 years old.
Despite the conditions, the immigrants from Italy kissed the ground because conditions in Southern Italy at the time were even worse. Few Americans know anything about the fallout from the Risorgimento on Southern Italian peasants, who in the late 19th century lived no better than African Americans at that time in the United States. I wish I could find the cite, but I recall reading and hearing that literacy rates and life expectancy were both lower for the Italian source groups than for African Americans.
It’s important to remember the sacrifices of our ancestors and remind our kids of them. But it’s even more important to not let the past haunt and destroy our futures.
There is an angle to consider of what author Deneen Borelli thinks of as modern day slavery, something she refers to as “government plantation”.
It is certainly not slavery as we define 1850 slavery, but her idea is very much in keeping with the title of this thread.
People give up the fruits of their labor to a big powerful entity in exchange for expecting to be provided housing, healthcare, clothing, food, child care, and maybe transportation by that entity. Although today that is voluntary, she compares that to slave/master relationship in 1850.
