The kidnapping of English children into slavery in America s actually legalized during the first quarter of the 17th century. In that period a large number of the children of poor parents, as well as orphan children, were targeted for the White slave trade. These poor White children were described as a “plague” and a “rowdy element.” Aristocrats who ran the Virginia Company such as Sir Thomas Smythe and Sir Edwin Sandys viewed the children as a convenient pool of slave laborers for the fields of the Virginia colony. In their petition to the Council of London in 1618 they complained of the great number of “vagrant” children in the streets and requested that they might be transported to Virginia to serve as laborers.
A bill was passed in September of 1 61 8 permitting the capture of children aged eight years old or older, girls as well as boys. The eight year old boys were to be enslaved for sixteen years and the eight year old girls for fourteen years, after which, it was said, they would be given land. (Robert C. Johnson, “The Transportation of Vagrant Children from London Virginia, 1618-1622,” in Early Stuart Studies, p. 139).
A directive was issued for the capture of children in London, empowering city aldermen to direct their constables to seize children on the streets and commit them to the prison-hospital at Bridewell, where they were to await shipment to America (Johnson, pp. 139-140). “...their only ‘crime’ was that they were poor and happened to be found loitering or sleeping in the streets when the constable passed by.” (Johnson, p. 142).
The street was not the only place child slaves were to be procured however. The homes of indigent parents with large families were also on the agenda of the slave-traders. Poor English parents were given the “opportunity” to surrender one or more of their children to the slavers. If they refused they 32 were to be starved into submission by being denied any further relief assistance from the local government:
“To carry out the provisions of the act the Lord Mayor (Sir William Cockayne)... directed the alder-man ...to (make) inquiry of those parents ‘overcharged and burdened with poor children’ whether they wished to send any of them to Virginia... those who replied negatively were to be told they would not receive any further poor relief from the parish.” (Johnson, p. 142).
The grieving parents were assured that the shipment of their children to Virginia would be beneficial to the children because it was a place where ‘under severe masters they may be brought to good-ness.” (Johnson, p. 143).
In January of 1620 a group of desperate, terrified English children attempted to break out of Bridewell where they had been imprisoned while awaiting the slave-ships to America. They rose up and fought:
“...matters were further complicated by the refusal of some of the children to be transported. In late January a kind of ‘revolt’ occurred at Bridewell, with some of the ‘ill-disposed’ among the children de-claring ‘their unwillingness to go to Virginia...” (Johnson, p.143).
“A hasty letter from (Sir Edwin) Sandys to the King’s secretary (Sir Robert Naunton) quickly rectified the situation.” On January 31 the Privy Council decreed that if any of the children continued in their “obstinance” they would be severely punished. It is possible that one of the children was actually exe-cuted as an example to the others. What is certain is that a month later the children, mostly boys, were forced on board the ship Duty and transported to Virginia.
From thence onward, English male child slaves came to be known as “Duty Boys” (Alexander Brown, The First Republic in America, p. 375). There would be many more shipments of these doomed children bound for the colonies in the years ahead.
“From that time on little is known about them except that very few lived to become adults. When a ‘muster’ or census of the (Virginia) colony was taken in 1625, the names of only seven boys were listed (of the children kidnapped in 1619). All the rest were dead... The statistics for the children sent in 1 620 are equally grim ...no more than five were alive in 1625.” (Johnson, p. 147).
On April 30, 1621 Sir Edwin Sandys presented a plan to the English parliament for the solution of the threat poor English people posed to the fabulously wealthy aristocracy: mass shipment to Virginia, where they would all be “brought to goodness.” When control of the colony of Virginia passed from the privately-held Virginia Company directly to the king, it was deemed more expedient, as time went on, to privatize the traffic in White children while placing it on an even larger basis to meet the cheap labor needs of all the colonies. In this way the Crown avoided the opprobrium that might have been connected with the further official sale of English children even as the aristocracy covertly expanded this slave trade dramatically.
The early traffic in White children to Virginia had proved profitable not only for the Virginia Company but for the judges and other officials in England who administered the capture of the children:
J. Ferrar, treasurer of the Virginia Company, indicated that he had been approached by the Marshal of London and other officials who had been involved in procuring children for the colony, proclaiming that they were owed a financial reward “for their care and travail therein, that they might be encour-aged hereafter to take the like pains whensoever they should have again the like occasion.” The officials subsequently received the handsome “cut” for their part in the loathsome traffic in kidnapped White children which they had desired. (Susan M. Kingsbury, ed., The Records of the Virginia Com-pany of London, vol. one, p. 424 and Johnson, pp. 144-145).
This collusion between the public and private sphere generated profits and established a precedent for many more “occasions” where “like pains” would be eagerly taken. The precedent established was the cornerstone of the trade in child-slaves in Britain for decades to come; a trade whose center, after London, would become the ports of Scotland:
“Press gangs in the hire of local merchants roamed the streets, seizing ‘by force such boys as seemed proper subjects for the slave trade.’ Children were driven in flocks through the town and confined for shipment in barns... So flagrant was the practice that people in the countryside about Aberdeen avoided bringing children into the city for fear they might be stolen; and so widespread was the collusion of merchants, shippers, suppliers and even magistrates that the man who exposed it was forced to recant and run out of town.” (Van der Zee, Bound Over, p. 210).
This man was Peter Williamson who as a child in 1743 was captured in Aberdeen and sold as a slave to the Planter, a “White Guineaman.” The Planter was destined for America with 70 other kid-napped Scottish children in addition to other freight. After eleven weeks at sea, the ship ran aground on a sand bar near Cape May on the Delaware river. As it began to take on water, the crew fled in a lifeboat, leaving the boys to drown in the sinking ship. The Planter managed to stay afloat until morn-ing however, and the slavers returned to salvage their “cargo.” Peter Williamson was twice-blessed. He not only survived the Planter but had the great good fortune to have been purchased by a former slave, Hugh Wilson, who had also been kidnapped in Scotland as a child. Wilson had fled slavery in another colony and now bought Williamson in Pennsyl-vania. He did so solely out of compassion, knowing the boy would be bought by someone else had Wilson not bought him first. Wilson paid for Williamson’s education in a colonial school and years later on his death, bequeathed to the lad his horse, saddle and a small sum of money, all Wilson had in the world.
With this advantage, Williamson married, became an Indian-fighter on the frontier and eventually made his way back to Scotland, seeking justice for himself and on behalf of all kidnapped children including his deceased friend Hugh Wilson. This took the form of a book, The Life and Curious Adven-tures of Peter Williamson, Who Was Carried Off from Aberdeen and Sold for a Slave. But when he attempted to distribute it in Aberdeen he was arrested on a charge of publishing a “scurrilous and infamous libel, reflecting greatly upon the character and reputations of the merchants of Aberdeen.” The book was ordered to be publicly burned and Williamson jailed. He was eventually fined and banished from the city.
Williamson did not give up but sued the judges of Aberdeen and took sworn statements from people who had witnessed kidnappings or who had had their own children snatched by slavers. Typical was the testimony of William Jamieson of Oldmeldrum, a farming village 1 2 miles from Aberdeen. In 1741, Jamieson’s ten year old son John was captured by a “spirit” gang in the employ of “Bonny John” Bur-net, a powerful slave-merchant based in Aberdeen.
After making inquiries, Jamieson learned that his son was being held for shipment to the “Plantations.” Jamieson hurried to Aberdeen and frantically searched the docks and ships for his boy. He found him on shore among a circle of about sixty other boys, guarded by Bonny John’s slavers who brandished horse whips. When the boys walked outside the circle they were whipped. Jamieson called to his son to come to him. The boy tried to run to his father. Father and son were beaten to the ground by the slavers.
Jamieson sought a writ from the Scottish courts but was informed “that it would be vain for him to apply to the magistrates to get his son liberate; because some of the magistrates had a hand in those doings.” Jamieson never saw his son alive again, “having never heard of him since he was carried away.” The testimony from Jamieson and from many others helped Peter Williamson to prevail. The Aberdeen merchants were ordered by the Edinburgh Court of Sessions to pay him £100. Williamson was personally vindicated and his book was printed in a new edition. The kidnapping continued, however.
The enslavement of White children from Great Britain later became the subject of a much better known book, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, which was based on the real-life case of James Annesley whose uncle, the Earl of Anglesey, had arranged for him to be seized and sold into slavery in America, in order to remove any challenge to the Earl’s inheritance of his brother’s estates.
Annesley was savagely whipped and brutally mistreated in America and it appeared he would die in chains. He was eventually resold to another master who accepted his story that he was an English lord and the heir to the Anglesey barony.
Annesley managed to make his way back to Scotland where he wrote a book, Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman, Returned from Thirteen Years’ Slavery in America, which years later came to the attention of Robert Louis Stevenson. Unfortunately this rare case involving the enslavement of a member of the English nobility attracted attention only because it involved royalty. The far more common plight of hundreds of thousands of poor British children who had languished and died in slavery in the colonies was ignored and awareness of the history of their ordeal remained unchanged in the wake of the publication of Stevenson’s classic.
The head of one kidnapping ring, John Stewart, sold at least 500 White youths per year into slavery in the colonies. Stewart’s thugs were paid twenty-five shillings for Whites they procured by force— usually a knock in the head with a blunt instrument— or fraud. Stewart sold the Whites to the masters of the “White Guineaman” slave ships for forty shillings each.
One eyewitness to the mass kidnapping of poor Whites estimated that 10,000 were sold into slavery every year from throughout Great Britain (information in a pamphlet by M. Godwyn, London, 1680).
From THEY WERE WHITE AND THEY WERE SLAVES The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America by Michael A. Hoffman II
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