WHITE SLAVES AND BLACK SLAVE OWNERS

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Greetings and Salutations to All my Kith and Kin and All the Ships in Outer Space:

Here's a couple of items that most folks seem to not be aware of.

First of all, the Dutch ship, "WHITE LION", arrived at Jamestown, Virginia in 1619, having taken twenty African Negroes bound for slavery in Mexico from a Spanish ship.

The African Negroes, given legal status as indentured servants, were freed after a stated period.

One indentured African Negro, Anthony Johnson, became a wealthy landowner.

In 1654, Anthony Johnson, a black man, petitioned a court in Northampton County, Virginia for the lifetime services of his indentured servant, John Casor, also a black man.

Thus began slavery in America, with a black slave owner and his black slave.

Secondly, did you know there were WHITE slaves on the Southern plantations?

Since many slave owners were Negroes, especially in South Carolina, maybe it's possible that some of the white slaves had black slave owners, although I have no documentation of it.

Do you remember the novel, "KIDNAPPED", by Robert Louis Stevenson, and the Walt Disney motion picture production?

While fiction, it's based on real events.

For several decades, even after Great Britain had outlawed the practice, Scottish orphans were indeed kidnapped and sold into slavery on the Carolina plantations.

My own recorded family history, "THE TRUEBLOOD FAMILY IN AMERICA 1682 - 1963", relates an incident calling attention to this.

(NOTE: I was adopted as a baby, which is why I am now John Robert Mallernee, but the name I was given at birth was David Roy Trueblood.)

The Truebloods, who were Quakers from England seeking religious freedom (an ancestor, Arnold of Cripplegate, died in the gaol of Lincoln Castle), originally settled in North Carolina, and some, if not all, were slave owners.

But, the Religious Society of Friends (i.e., the "Quakers") decreed that no member of their religious order could have slaves.

This posed a serious problem for Quakers in North Carolina, for they were a humane people, and they knew that their freed Negroes would be quickly enslaved by non-Quakers, and treated more harshly.

After that, many Quakers, and therefore, many Truebloods, left North Carolina and moved to Southern Indiana, becoming involved in operating the Underground Railroad.

One of the people they helped to escape was a "mysterious white slave boy, who never spoke".

Could it be that the reason the "mysterious white slave boy" never spoke was because he was a Scottish orphan who spoke only Gaelic?

Remember, this was in Southern Indiana, and it was the Quakers.

Does this remind you of something else?

It reminds me of one of my favorite Hollywood motion picture productions, "FRIENDLY PERSUASION", starring Gary Cooper, Dorothy McGuire, and Anthony Perkins.

Again, as recorded in my family history, the folks in Southern Indiana were so outraged that President Abraham Lincoln was sending an Army to invade the South, that they threatened to secede.

That didn't happen, because President Abraham Lincoln immediately had the Army occupy the Border States of Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland, which of course, isolated Southern Indiana, rendering any simmering rebellious sympathies impotent.

Not all the Truebloods moved away from North Carolina, which is why I have an ancestor, Corporal Jonathan Trueblood, who served in the North Carolina Seventh Regiment, Confederate Senior Reserves, at the Battle of Bentonville.

Corporal Jonathan Trueblood 
North Carolina Seventh Regiment  
Confederate Senior Reserves

Aside from the kidnapped Scottish orphans enslaved on Carolina plantations, there were also innumerable other white slaves elsewhere, and in these cases, there was ample documentation of black overseers exerting extreme abuse.

These were mostly Northern Europeans, but some were Americans, kidnapped by Arab raiding parties from coastal villages or from ships on the high seas, and then sold into slavery on the Barbary Coast in North Africa.

Their slave owners were usually Arab Muslims, but the overseers and taskmasters were Negroes.

The kidnapping and slavery was ended through the efforts of Admiral Sir William Sidney Smith, organizer of the SOCIETY OF THE KNIGHTS LIBERATOR OF THE WHITE SLAVES IN AFRICA, which managed to persuade the English monarchy to dispatch the Royal Navy to shell Algiers in 1816.

Thank you.

John Robert Mallernee

Official Bard of Clan Henderson
Armed Forces Retirement Home
Washington, D.C. 20011-8400

NOTE: "My unpopular and controversial personal opinions are independent of my Scottish clan."

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