Irish indentured servants were Irish people who became indentured servants in territories under the control of the British Empire, such as the Caribbean (particularly Barbados, Jamaica and the Leeward Islands), British North America and later Australia.
Indentures agreed to provide up to seven years of labor in return for passage to the New World
and food, housing, and shelter during their indenture. At the end of
this period, their masters were legally required to grant them "freedom
dues" in the form of either land or capital.
Those transported unwillingly were not indentures. They were political prisoners, vagrants, or people who had been defined as "undesirable" by the English state. Penal transportation of Irish people was at its height during the 17th century, during the Cromwellian conquest and settlement of Ireland (1649-1653). During this period, thousands of Irish people were sent to the Caribbean, or "Barbadosed", against their will. Similar practices continued as late as the Victorian period, with Irish political prisoners sent to imperial British penal colonies in Australia. Indentures and transportees have been conflated, though they were distinct.
Historical background
Like the movement of other European people to the Americas, Irish
migration to the Caribbean and British North America had complex causes.
The late sixteenth and early seventeenth century were a time of
upheaval in Ireland, while English conquest and colonisation, resultant religious persecution, and crop failures (some as a deliberate result of the Tudor conquest of Ireland)
drove many Irish people to seek a better life, or survival, elsewhere.
Like their English and Scottish counterparts, Irish people were active
participants in the "rush for American colonies" during the early
seventeenth century. Most travelled to the New World as indentured
servants, but others were merchants and landholders who were key players
in a variety of different trade and settlement enterprises.
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A modern Protestant mural in Belfast celebrating Oliver Cromwell and his activities. It was before and after the Cromwellian conquest that Irish indentured servitude boomed.
Many of the Irish laborers who travelled across the Atlantic from the
1620s did so by choice. However, convict labor had been used in English
colonies since the early 1600s, and the forceful transportation of "undesirables" from Ireland to the West Indies had begun under Charles I. The practice took place on a much larger scale during the rule of Oliver Cromwell in the years 1649-58. In the ensuing conquest of Ireland, many prisoners were forcibly sent to the Caribbean islands, particularly to Barbados.
Some of the first Irish people to travel to the New World did so
as members of the Spanish garrison in Florida during the 1560s, and
small numbers of Irish colonists were involved in efforts to establish
colonies in the Amazon region, in Newfoundland, and in Virginia between
1604 and the 1630s. According to historian Donald Akenson, there were
"few if any" Irish being forcibly transported to the New World during
this period. Widespread use of forced transportation by the English state did not take place until the 1650s.
Significant numbers of Irish laborers began traveling to colonies
such as Virginia, the Leeward Islands, and Barbados in the 1620s.
Between 1627 and 1660, laborers from Ireland and Britain crossed the
Atlantic in large numbers, with as many as 60 to 65 percent of
seventeenth-century migrants being indentured servants.
By 1640, large numbers of Irish settlers were present in the West
Indies, making up more than half the population of the region by some
estimates. Most were indentured laborers, small farmers, or artisans.
The type of labor being used in American colonies shifted dramatically after 1642, as the Irish Rebellion of 1641, the Irish Confederate Wars, and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms
led to a reduction in the number of voluntary migrants, while growing
numbers of prisoners of war, political prisoners, felons, and other
"undesirables" were sent to labor in the colonies against their will. After the Siege of Drogheda, for example, Cromwell ordered most of the Irish military prisoners who surrendered to be shipped to Barbados.
In 1654, the governors of several Irish counties were ordered to arrest
"all wanderers, men and women, and such other Irish within their
precincts as should not prove they had such a settled course of industry
as yielded them a means of their own to maintain them, all such
children as were in hospitals or workhouses, all prisoners, men and
women, to be transported to the West Indies."
Barbados
George Ayscue, an English Governor of Barbados. He conquered Barbados for the Cromwellian forces in 1651.
Servants who arrived in Barbados between 1640 and 1660 arrived at a
time of great change, when the colony was transitioning from tobacco and
cotton cultivation to sugar. The resulting "sugar boom" created a massive demand for labor, which prompted a gradual shift from white servant to black slave labor.
In 1638, the population of Barbados was about 6,000, with 2,000 of that
number being indentured servants and 200 being African slaves. Fifteen
years later, the Islands slave population had grown to 20,000, while
indentured servants numbered 8,000. There were also more than 1,000
Irish freemen (former indentured servants whose term had expired) living
on the island at that time. By 1660, there were 26,200 Europeans and 27,100 African slaves on the Island.
During the initial stages of sugar production, white servants sometimes
found themselves working side-by-side with black slaves, and according
to historian James Dunn, they "became wild and unruly in the extreme"
during this period.
By the mid-1650s, however, white servants and black slaves no longer
worked side-by-side, and by the mid-1660s, white servants were used only
in skilled or supervisory roles.
Irish servants on Barbados were often treated poorly, and Barbadian planters gained a reputation for cruelty.
The decreased appeal of an indenture on Barbados, combined with
enormous demand for labor caused by sugar cultivation, led the use of
involuntary transportation to Barbados as a punishment for crimes, or
for political prisoners, and also to the kidnapping of laborers who were
sent to Barbados involuntarily.
Irish indentured servants were a significant portion of the
population throughout the period when white servants were used for
plantation labor in Barbados, and while a "steady stream" of Irish
servants entered the Barbados throughout the seventeenth century,
Cromwellian efforts to pacify Ireland created a "veritable tidal wave"
of Irish laborers who were sent to Barbados during the 1650s.
Due to inadequate historical records, the total number of Irish
laborers sent to Barbados is unknown, and estimates have been "highly
contentious."
While one historical source estimated that as many as 50,000 Irish
people were transported to either Barbados or Virginia unwillingly
during the 1650s, this estimate is "quite likely exaggerated."
Another estimate that 12,000 Irish prisoners had arrived in Barbados by
1655 has been described as "probably exaggerated" by historian Richard
B. Sheridan.
According to historian Thomas Bartlett, it is "generally accepted" that
approximately 10,000 Irish were sent to the West Indies involuntarily,
and approximately 40,000 came as voluntary indentured servants, while
many also traveled as voluntary, un-indentured emigrants.
Leeward Islands
Irish people also made up a sizable portion of the Leeward Islands (Antigua, Montserrat, Nevis, and St Kitts) during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Many of these Irish were either indentured servants or former
servants, and many of them lived "materially impoverished" lives;
however, the Leeward Islands were also home to more affluent Irish, who
were members of powerful merchant families and had numerous servants
themselves.
Unlike Barbados, the Irish population of Montserrat was primarily
made up of individuals who had been "recruited to emigrate" by the
islands' elite residents (who were often Irish themselves), rather than
vagrants or convicts, and some of them had arrived as free laborers
rather than as indentured servants.
Treatment
Once
indentured, these servants had little control over their destination,
as their contracts were sold to local planters on arrival. Ships were
often overcrowded, and the mortality rate on voyages could be high: one
ship which arrived at Barbados in 1638 had lost eighty of its 350
passengers (23%) to sickness by the time it arrived.
In Barbados, indenture terms of four or five years were common, but those who arrived as prisoners were sometimes sentenced to ten years' indenture.
While all indentured servants were treated harshly, Irish Catholics were also subject to English settlers' "sense of cultural and religious superiority" and considered to be "naturally inferior."[2]
According to historian Jenny Shaw, the Irish people's Catholicism and
distinct customs "marked the island's population as fundamentally apart
from English civilization". English authorities used this perceived
difference "to justify the poor treatment of the Irish Catholics they
colonized," as well as to lay claim to Ireland itself.
Masters and government authorities were often suspicious of Irish
servants, and sometimes targeted them with special restrictions.
Legislators in Nevis,
for example, passed an act to prevent "papists" from settling on the
island or holding public office in 1701 – which was later repealed –
while Montserrat also considered similar legislation to exclude Irish
from public and militia positions. Authorities in Barbados did not place
similar restrictions, but did require Irish people to take an oath of abjuration
before voting or holding office. After suspecting that Irish laborers
had been involved in a 1692 slave revolt, Barbadian authorities wrote to
the crown in 1697, asking them not to send further "Irish rebels" to
the colony, "for we want not labourers of that colour to work for us,
but men in whom we may confide, to strengthen us."
Comparisons to slavery
Treatment of Irish indentured servants varied widely, and has been
the subject of considerable historical debate. Comparisons between the
treatment of Irish indentured servants (particularly in Barbados) and
the treatment of African slaves have been especially controversial.
While most recent academic studies have been careful not to equate
indentured servitude with chattel slavery,
some historians have nonetheless drawn close comparisons between these
two labor systems, and other writers have sometimes conflated them.
According to Kathryn Stelmach Artuso, even historians such as Hilary Beckles
(whose work Artuso calls "seminal in the field") have drawn
"surprisingly close parallels between the experiences of Africans and
Irish in the Caribbean."
Beckles has referred to some Irish indentured servants as "temporary
chattels" who were kept in "slavelike conditions" and lived in a state
"nearer to slavery than freedom." Beckles stops short, however, of
suggesting that Irish servants were "'slaves' in the sense that blacks
were."
Similarly, historian Nini Rodgers has written that Irish indentured
servants "were not slaves," but nonetheless argues that the "difference
must have seemed academic" to many of them.
According to Rodgers, this was particularly true in places such as
Barbados, where high death rates sometimes "cancelled out" the primary
difference between slaves and servants' experiences: that slavery was
permanent while indenture was temporary.
Rodgers notes, however, that there were other differences between the
experiences of servants and those of slaves: masters provided servants
with meat but denied it to slaves, servants received European-style
clothes (including shoes) while slaves did not, and the two groups slept
in different quarters. According to Rodgers, masters sometimes worked
servants harder because they only possessed their service for a limited
time, and this fact underscores "the complexity of making comparisons"
between slavery and indenture.
According to Kevin Brady, Cromwellian exiles in Barbados held a
position that was "between temporary bondage and permanent enslavement,"
stating that the main difference between the these servants and slaves
was that they were not sold as chattel. Brady states that they were
often subject to "glaringly inhumane treatment by aristocrats of the
planter class" and that they "were not given the material or monetary
compensation" usually provided to indentured servants at the end of
their term.
According to Simon P. Newman, Irish prisoners "were treated with
singular brutality" by planters who "disdained them as illiterate
Catholic savages."
Other historians, when discussing comparisons between slavery and
Irish indentured servitude, have focused on how Irish people were both
colonized and colonizers in the Caribbean. According to historian Donald Akenson's
study of Irish people on Montserrat, for example, white indentured
servitude on the island "was so very different from black slavery as to
be from another galaxy of human experience," and many Irish people
(including former servants) prospered there.
Similarly, philosopher Michael J. Monahan has argued that Irish
servants in Barbados occupied an ambiguous racial position in the
eighteenth century, which separated them both from other Europeans and
from African slaves, and could work to their advantage as well as to
their detriment. According to Monahan, even the highest "and most likely
exaggerated" estimates that as many as fifty thousand Irish laborers
were sent to the Caribbean against their will "pales by comparison" to
the millions of West African slaves who were sold into slavery, and it
is important to avoid what he calls "facile equivocations between the
conditions of (at least some) Irish laborers and chattel slaves" or
between slavery and involuntary indenture, which "are not the same
thing." Monahan nonetheless argues, however, that it is an "important
fact" that there were some similarities between the situations of some
involuntary indentures and African slaves. He is careful to note,
however, that this is not to deny that there were "significant, even
crucial differences" between the experiences of involuntary Irish
servants and those of slaves.
Some popular and non-academic writers have made much more direct
comparisons between the experiences of Irish indentured servants and
those of African slaves. Conspiracy theorist and Holocaust denier Michael A. Hoffman II, for example, wrote a self-published book in 1993 entitled, "They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of The Enslavement of Whites in Early America",
in which he argued that chattel slavery and indentured servitude were
similar enough to both be called slavery, and sought to recover the
"suppressed history" of Irish slavery. In 2000, writer Sean O'Callahan
published To Hell or Barbados, which argued that the "Irish white
slave trade" had been a key component of the "ethnic cleansing of
Ireland" during the eighteenth century. Similarly, television documentary producers Don Jordan and Michael Walsh claimed in their 2008 book White Cargo : The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America
that "slavery is not defined by time but by the experience of the
subject," and sought to expose the "forgotten history" of white slavery.
These books have been harshly reviewed by historians. Writing in The Historian,
for example, historian Dixie Ray Haggard wrote that Jordan and Walsh
had deliberately conflated two very different labor systems by comparing
slavery and indenture. According to Haggard, "they fail to acknowledge,
or maybe understand, that each institution, slavery and indentured
servitude, had its own purpose and position within the colonial economy
and society," and chose to "oversimplify and confuse" rather than
explore the complexity of colonial history.
Similarly, historian Dominic Sandbrook wrote that while Jordan and
Walsh were "right to remind us that African slavery was one form of
bondage among many," the indentured servants "were not slaves," and
"calling them slaves...stretches the meaning of slavery beyond breaking
point".
According to Nini Rodgers, these works developed out of the "horror of
white people being on a level with blacks" which accounts of servants
and slaves laboring together had prompted in Ireland during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and which survived into the new
millennium through works such as O'Callaghan's.
Since the books were published, white supremacist and white
nationalist groups have adopted the notion of "Irish slavery," often as a
means of countering the historical burden of African slavery and black
Americans' demands for redress, or of undermining and attacking the Black Lives Matter movement.
Because such memes and social media posts have widely spread the
myth in mass-market publications, it prompted scholars and writers such
as Liam Hogan, Laura McAtackney and Matthew C. Reilly to speak out
against the "myth of Irish slavery."
Decline of indenture
The
number of prisoners who were forcibly transported to the New World
dropped rapidly after 1650, and "convict transportation never became a
reliable source of coerced colonial labor" during the seventeenth
century.
Penal servitude was considered unsatisfactory by plantation owners: the
number of prisoners arriving was too small, and they were considered
poor workers. In addition, colonial authorities worried that Irish
Catholics would side with French troops in the event of an attack, or
conspire with slaves to revolt against plantation owners. Some Irish servants did indeed rebel during a French attack on Saint Kitts during 1666–1667, while others made common cause with slaves during a revolt in Bermuda during 1661.
According to historian Abigail Swingen, only about 4,500 convicts were
transported to Virginia or the West Indies between 1655 and 1699, while
the number of prisoners of war transported during this period was likely
less than 5,000-10,000.
According to historian Robin Blackburn, a total of about 8,000 Irish
captives were sent to the American colonies during the 1650s.
While Irish servants were a substantial portion of the population
of Barbados, Jamaica, Montserrat, and Saint Kitts from the seventeenth
until the middle of the eighteenth century, then, former indentured
servants typically either returned to Europe or migrated to British North American colonies as slave labor increasingly replaced indentured servitude as the primary labor system in these colonies. Some, however, stayed, and their descendants – such as the redlegs of Barbados – still live in the Caribbean today.
