The Irish Slaves Myth: 2025 Encore

White supremacy has been rising at an alarming rate in the last few years. The “Irish Slaves” myth has been given new life by these extremists. The famous “Irish: the Forgotten White Slaves” email has been unearthed and promoted heavily again during the St. Patrick’s season. It’s an abuse of history, as well as being reprehensible morally.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Ladies and gentlemen to sound you here as a buzz
saw ripping through a painting of George Washington chopping down
cherry trees. It's time for Professor Buzzkill busting myths and taking.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Names, ah buzzkillers. All of you know the depth of
my love hate relationship with the Internet. On the one hand,
I love the Internet and the crazy history stories that
fly around it via email and blog posts. They provide
christ for the Buzzkill Institute mill, and of course they

(00:48):
keep us floated financially as well as emotionally. And I
hate the Internet because, despite our heroic efforts, these crazy
and holy misinformed stories still seem to be convincing large
sections of humanity. Some of those folks, some of those

(01:11):
sections of humanity, Some of those people are adults. They
actually have driver's licenses, and they may be responsible for
the health and education of the children. But it goes
on and on, and perhaps the worst thing about the
whole Internet myth machine is that even when false and
often dangerously false, and even when debunked, these myths live

(01:34):
forever in cyberspace, like tribes of Internet ghosts that come
out and haunt us. They get revived and the whole
cycle of belief in this garbage, and the necessary debunking
starts again. And so here I am again trying to
save all of you from going down that spiral into
historical misunderstanding. The myth we're destroying in this episode is

(01:57):
one of the worst, but also one of the hardiest.
It's the Irish slaves myth. It's on the Internet everywhere,
and unfortunately, it seems to be getting more attention and
garnering more believers in more countries as time goes by. Essentially,
the Irish Slaves myth claims that Irish people were enslaved

(02:19):
by the British and sent to the Americas, especially the Caribbean,
to work on plantations and in other primary resource industries.
In these mythological emails and on Facebook, Irish people were
enslaved roughly between sixteen forty and the late eighteen sixties
or eighteen seventies, and in greater numbers than people enslaved

(02:42):
from Africa, so the myth goes, and again, so the
myth goes, they were treated worse than African slaves. And finally,
the stories claim that later generations of Irish Americans and
Irish Canadians and Irish and the Irish diaspora or wherever,
have never whined about their treatment and demanded reparations. They

(03:06):
picked themselves up, dusted themselves off after emancipation, rebuilt their
lives and thrives because of their native industriousness and drive.
Members of that Irish diaspora risen in North American culture
despite their slave origins. So goes the story, and in
fact is the various versions of the Irish slave myth

(03:27):
will sometimes tell you slavery made them stronger as a
quote race, and they don't complain about it. How you
may have seen this story in an email or on
the internet, you know, the one that comes to your
nutting inclere or that guy in the office. It's entitled
the Irish the Forgotten White Slaves. Many important legitimate historians,

(03:53):
specialists in Irish history, historians in Ireland, specialists in the
colonial Caripean specialists in the Atlantic world have spoken against
this myth time and time again. They've published open letters
to major publications and websites who were taken in by
the story, which include by the Way, the Scientific American
website and by the way Scientific American quickly revised their

(04:13):
story when it's a historical basis what's pointed out to them.
We've included a copy of that letter in the blog
post on our website that accompanies this episode. And I'm
particularly grateful Buzzkillers for the work of Liam Hogan, Laura Mcatackney,
and Matthew Riley for their work demunking this myth. Lots
of very good, deep historical work based on evidence. But

(04:37):
before I scorched this myth, I'd like to play a
recording of the first part of the email version in
case you haven't heard it or read it before. It's
read to us by Linda, one of the voice actors
here at the Buzzskill Institute. Now, the first part mainly
deals with the numbers of Irish people quote enslaved and
sent across the Atlantic. Here it is.

Speaker 3 (04:59):
Irish, the forgotten white slaves. They came as slaves, human
cargo transported on British ships bound for the Americas. They
were shipped by the hundreds of thousands and included men, women,
and even the youngest of children. Whenever they werebelled or

(05:19):
even disobeyed an order, they were punished in the harshest ways.
Slave owners would hang their human property by their hands
and set their hands or feet on fire as one
form of punishment. Some were burned alive and had their
heads placed on pikes in the market place as a
warning to other captives. We don't really need to go

(05:44):
through all the gory details, do we. We know all
too well the atrocities of the African slave trade, but
are we talking about African slavery. King James the Sith
and Charles the First also led a continued effort to
enslave the Irish. Britain's Oliver Cromwell furthered This practice of

(06:06):
dehumanizing one's next door neighbor. The Irish slave trade began
when James the sixth sold thirty thousand Irish prisoners as
slaves to the New World. His Proclamation of sixteen twenty
five required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and sold
to English settlers in the West Indies. By the mid

(06:30):
sixteen hundreds, the Irish were the main slaves sold to
Antiga and Montserrat. At that time, seventy percent of the
total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves. Ireland quickly became
the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants. The

(06:50):
majority of the early slaves to the New World were
actually white. From sixteen forty one to sixteen fifty two,
over five hundred thousand Irish were killed by the English
and another three hundred thousand were sold as slaves. Ireland's
population fell from about one half million to six hundred

(07:14):
thousand in one single decade. Families were ripped apart as
the British did not allow Irish dads to take their
wives and children with them across the Atlantic. This led
to a helpless population of homeless women and children. Britain
solution was to auction them off as well. During the

(07:37):
sixteen fifties, over one hundred thousand Irish children between the
ages of ten and fourteen were taken from their parents
and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and
New England. In this decade, fifty two thousand Irish mostly

(07:58):
women and children, were sold to Barbados and Virginia. Another
thirty thousand Irish men and women were also transported and
sold to the highest bidder. In sixteen fifty six, Cromwell
ordered that two thousand Irish children be taken to Jamaica
and sold as slaves to English settlers.

Speaker 2 (08:22):
Okay, we're back in the first place. Buzz killers. This email,
and again all of its social media and self published
book variants, provides no evidence for any of these claims,
especially the numerically based ones. So let me do some
quick debucking. The James sixth they were referring to. Here
was James sixth of Scotland, who became James the First

(08:45):
of England when he ascended to that throne after the
death of Queen Elizabeth First in sixteen oh three. So
now James the First of England, who by the way,
was still James sixth of Scotland, don't ask, died in
sixteen twenty five without issuing the proclamation that this email

(09:05):
claims that he did. Charles the First, James's successor, did
issue a sixteen to twenty five proclamation about settling Virginia,
but that proclamation didn't sell quote sell thirty thousand Irish
people as slaves to the English settlers in the West
Indies unquote. The proclamation was about setting up the nature

(09:29):
of government and the way the tobacco economy would work
in the quote plantation the colony of Virginia unquote. Now
earlier sixteen twenty five proclamations by James about the growing
and the harvesting and the exporting of tobacco to England.
They hadn't worked the way the Crown wanted him to,

(09:49):
so that's why Charles wrote this other proclamation. But there
was nothing about selling or capturing or sending thirty thousand
Irish people as slaves to the West Indies. Now there
had been earlier proclamations from fifteen ninety seven under Elizabeth
I and sixteen o three under the new James, the

(10:11):
first about banishing quote rogues, vagabonds and idle and dissolute
persons unquote who'd been convicted as criminals. These laws sent
these rogues, vagabonds and criminals to quote Newfoundland, the West
and East Indies, France, Germany and the Low Countries end quote.

(10:35):
But as I've said, these laws applied to individuals that
Elizabethan and Stuart governments considered criminals and had convicted as criminals.
Now that we don't get into the nature of crime
in the early modern Britain, I mean that's you know,
very very different. But these people had been convicted, but

(10:57):
more importantly for our purposes here, they were English people,
they were Scottish people, they were Welsh people. They were
Irish people that were convicted of criminals under this law
and sent they banished. More or less. There was no
law or proclamation that specifically targeted Irish people because they
were Irish. And there's certainly no evidence that thirty thousand

(11:23):
Irish prisoners were sold as slaves at any time, no
evidence at all. Now, the next big number of buzzkillers
that they claim in this myth is that quote by
the mid sixteen hundreds, the Irish were the main slaves
sold to Antigua and Monserrat in the Caribbean at that time.

(11:45):
I'm still quoting seventy percent of the total population of
Monsrat were Irish slaves. End quote. Well, not only is
this not true, it's simply a case of adding the
word slaves to a more or less accurate estimate of
how many Irish people lived on Montserrat. Here's how this happened.

(12:07):
The original evidence for this was analyzed by Richard dunnoth
the University of Pennsylvania, and he wrote that in the
late six I'm not directly courting here, but almost in
the late sixteen thirties, sixty nine percent of Monsrat's population
were Irish. Somewhere along the line, one of the promoters

(12:28):
of this myth simply added the word slaves to the
word Irish at the end of that sentence, so it
became sixty nine percent of monsrats population were Irish slaves,
and they rounded the percentage up to seventy. Now, in
terms of numbers of letters and numbers of numbers of numbers,

(12:50):
these are small, These are quick textual changes, but they
changed the entire meaning of the sentence and of the
history involved. We're talking about Irish people. That's one thing,
talking about Irish slaves. By changing the evidence, that's different.
The other numerical claims in the myth are just as
fantastic buzz killers, and I mean fantastic as in the

(13:15):
product of fantasy. I could go through the email or
other versions of the myth line by line and using
the evidence based historical analysis that genuine historians have produced,
I could show you that the numbers are just made up.
But there's only so much time allotted for each podcast

(13:37):
episode by the podcast gods. And there are other fantastic
claims in this myth that simply must be exposed. But
quickly stick with the number sitting just for a minute.
Five hundred thousand Irish people were not killed between sixteen
hundred and sixteen fifty The population did not fall in
Ireland by nearly two thirds. Three hundred thousand Irish people

(14:00):
were not sold to the West Indies between sixteen forty
one and sixteen fifty two. In fact, during the entirety
of the one hundred years of the seventeenth century, only
fifty thousand people migrated from Ireland to the West Indies. Hey,
so you've got a claim that three hundred thousand people
went between sixteen forty one and sixteen fifty two, which

(14:21):
is only eleven years. But the evidence is that in
the one hundred years of the seventeenth central only fifty
thousand people went. Again, please look through what we've put
on the Buzzkill bookshelf and you'll see that those numbers
in the email and the other versions of this myth
are all, as I've said before, just made up. The

(14:45):
second part of the myth tries to eliminate the central
fact of what happened and tries to change the definition
of the roles of the people involved. Again, Linda, one
of our buzzkill voice actors reads it for us.

Speaker 3 (15:00):
People today will avoid calling the Irish slaves what they
truly wear slaves. They'll come up with terms like indentured
servants to describe what occurred to the Irish. However, in
most cases from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Irish slaves
were nothing more than human cattle. As an example, the

(15:24):
African slave trade was just beginning during the same period.
It is well recorded that African slaves, not tainted with
the stain of the hated Catholic theology and more expensive
to purchase, were often treated far better than their Irish counterparts.

Speaker 2 (15:44):
The authors of this myth start this section with a
shot across the bow of legitimate historians when they say, quote,
many people today will avoid calling the Irish slaves what
they truly were slaves. They'll come up with terms like
indentured servants to describe what occurred to the Irish. Quote.

(16:05):
Legitimate and responsible historians quote come up with terms like
indentured servants end quote, not only because that's the best
term to describe what happened to these immigrants, to describe
their legal status, and to describe what the you know,
the work that they did in the colonies is the term,

(16:25):
the legal term that was used at the time. Therefore,
we didn't really come up with the term. We call
them indentured servants because that's what they were, indentured servants.
Many of you may have heard determ indentured servants or
indentured servitude, either in history classes or general discussions of history.

(16:49):
And by the way, if you're having general discussions about
history that include indentured servants, that level of historical discussions
quite impressive, you know, if you're sitting around Arbucks with
your friends, or you maybe have found it or heard
it in you know, historically themed television shows such as
the PBS Blockbuster Roots from the nineteen seventies. What happened

(17:14):
was there weren't enough people in the New World, in
the colonies, in the New World anyway to meet the
labor demands in the seventeenth century, and at the same time,
there were periods of high labor surplus in Europe. So
indentured servitude was the way that big agricultural or other

(17:35):
business concerns in the New World were able to bring
over the workers they needed from Europe. Let's take the
Roots example. They're often depicted as you know, overseers or
mid level workers on plantations, and that's true. Many indentured
servants worked in those types of positions, or they worked
in and around the plantation house, but others were field hands.

(18:00):
What happened was indentured servants signed or agreed to a
form of contract in their home country which said that
in return for passage to the Americas in food and
housing while they were there, the indentured servant would work
for a master. And I don't want to use the

(18:21):
term employer in this episode because that's not the right
legal term for the time and it doesn't quite work
as really is a kind of a master because of
the contract for a certain number of years, usually anywhere
from one to seven, and those that number of years
was set out in the contract. In the vast majority
of cases, they were not paid a wage for their

(18:42):
work during the contracted years. The agreement was that their
passage across the Atlantic was more or less half of
their payment, and their upkeep while they were in the
colonies was the other half. Once the contracted years of
work were finished, the indentured servant was released from his
her servitude, released from the contract I'll tell you more

(19:03):
about my obsession with the term contract in a minute,
and could seek you know, paid work. Sometimes plantation owners
hired back their own former indentured service as normal workers,
especially if they'd shown facility with the work or had
developed you know, expertise and skills which would have become
by that time after their contract years were finished, essential

(19:26):
to the plantation's prosperity. Don't get me wrong, buzzkillers. Most
indentured servants lived and worked a very difficult life, especially
in the Caribbean colonies. Conditions were harsh, both in terms
of weather and in terms of the expectations of masters.
There is no evidence at all that indentured servitude was easy,

(19:53):
although obviously the quality of life for indentured service varied widely.
Indentured service were more or less tied to the contract
they had agreed to, and among other things, this contract
could be sold to another person. A servant would start
working for the other person for the remainder of the

(20:13):
contracted time. This usually happened when a plantation on a
went broke or was about to go broke, So the
owner would then sell his slaves if he had to,
and would often sell whatever indentured servitude contracts he held.
This is why indentured servitude is often described as quote
unfree labor. Indentioned servants were legally required to work off

(20:38):
the length of their contracts and were punished by the
legal system if they left their master, if they ran
away or whatever before the contracted terms were satisfied. Were
other types of unfree labor, white unfree labor that included
prisoners of war, political prisoners, and convicted criminals. Then these
people were usually treated worse than indentured services. Their labor

(21:01):
and treatment was more or less the same as though
that of convict laborers in the United States today. In
this case, after they landed in the Americas business back
in colonial times, they were hired out to owners for
certain work and for a certain period of time, they
were sort of between slaves and indentured servants. Now, at

(21:24):
the risk of repeating myself, Buzzkillers, no one is claiming
that life is an indentured servant, or life as a
white person working as an unfree laborer under different terms
was easy or pleasant, or that it was an entry
level position on the train to American prosperity. It wasn't.

(21:47):
It was very very harsh, usually very harsh. Some indentured servants, again,
like I say, particularly those were talented organizing and running
farms and plantations, or who had worked themselves up to
be made overseers, were able to use that experience and
get good paying jobs once their indentured contract was finished.
Some of the eventually bought pieces of land and started

(22:10):
building their own fortunes. Most indentured servants did not end
up like this. Some died laboring in the heat and
the humidity of the West Indies, and most took low
paid field hand jobs or other manual labor jobs after
their contract was finished, and they lived out their lives
as very poor people with little hope of economic advancement.

(22:35):
But they were not slaves and certainly not held in
chattel slavery like the slaves brought from Africa during this period.
To suggest otherwise, and try to bolster that suggestion with
frankly invented facts and invented statistics is a historical. One
useful way to understand the difference between white unfree laborers

(22:59):
and Africa chattel slaves is this. I used to try
to use this an example for my students. Indentured servants
were more or less owned and controlled by the contract,
by their contract that I've been talking about all this time.
As I said, the contract could even be sold to
another master. Again, I don't like to use the term employer,

(23:21):
but if that makes you think of a different situation
than a master slave relationship, that's fine. And because the
whole relationship was based on a recognized contract, indentured servants
were subject to the legal system at the time. If
they broke a law, they were punishment was through that
legal system. Chattel slavery was entirely different, more complete. It

(23:45):
was not subject to contracts or a legal system. Chattel
slaves were the property of their owners to do whatever
they wanted with them without recourse to a legal system
for mistreatment or abuse of slave. Couldn't say it's not
in my contract that you do X, Y or z.
Slave owners could even kill their slaves if they wished

(24:07):
without well mean if they wish, but if they got
out of control, and when they were punishing them or
beating them without any threat of legal punishment. No further,
and perhaps the most significant and most brutal is that
chattel slavery was perpetual through the generations. Any child born
to a slave was also a slave from the moment

(24:30):
of birth onwards. If slavery hadn't been abolished in North America,
people would still be being born in bondage. Buzzkill, you know,
it would be an unbroken lineage of slavery to this day.
And it's very clear from the evidence available to us
about the attitudes towards slavery and the justification used for

(24:52):
its retention, you know, as an institution. In nearly every
case since ancient times, slavery has been based on racial
or ethnic grounds. In addition to simple hatred a simple
economic selfishness, slave owning groups have condoned slavery on the
basis that their own cultural or race was superior to others,

(25:15):
and usually superior to a specific group that they were
in slavery. The slave owning culture would have said genetically
superior if they'd known about genetics at the time, and
that they were justified in enslaving other groups. And perhaps
more most importantly and often forgotten, is that the slavery
was a benefit for the enslaved group. The idea is

(25:36):
that enslave peoples might you know, over the centuries gradually
improve because they were exposed to superior peoples. No one
thought this about the people who became indentured servants. If
they had, they would have gone at great lengths to
categorize indentured servants the same as chattel slaves and were

(25:58):
justified it in the same way. But they didn't because
it was fundamentally different. Let's take a break, and when
we get back, i'll briefly bust the final aspect of
this myth, force breeding of Irish slaves with African slave men.
Back in a second. The final aspect of the Irish

(26:24):
slaves myth that I want to address is the forced
breeding of Irish slave women with African slave men. And
here's the section of the email version of the myth,
read again by Laura our voice actor.

Speaker 3 (26:39):
African slaves were very expensive during the late sixteen hundreds.
Fifty pounds sterling. Irish slaves came cheap no more than
five pounds sterling. If a planter whipped, branded, or beaten
Irish slave to death, it was never a crime. A
death was a monastery setback, but far cheaper than killing

(27:02):
a more expensive African. The English masters quickly began breeding
the Irish woman for both their own personal pleasure and
for greater profit. Children of slaves were themselves slaves, which
increased the size of the master's free work force. Even
if an irishwoman somehow obtained her freedom, her kids would

(27:25):
remain slaves of her master. Thus, Irish mothers, even with
this new found emancipation, would seldom abandon their children and
would remain in servitude. In time, the English thought of
a better way to use these women to increase their
market share. The settlers began to breed Irish women and girls,

(27:50):
many as young as twelve, with African men to produce
slaves with a distinct complexion. These new will lack whose
slaves brought a higher price than Irish livestock, and likewise
enabled the settlers to save money rather than purchase new
African slaves. This practice of interbreeding Irish females with African

(28:15):
men went on for several decades and was so widespread
that in sixteen eighty one legislation was passed forbidding the
practice of meeting Irish slave women to African slave men
for the purpose of producing slaves for sale. In short,

(28:35):
it was stopped only because it interfered with the profits
of a large slave transport company.

Speaker 2 (28:42):
Okay, this is a myth within the larger Irish slavery myth.
We've established that there's no evidence for Irish white slavery,
so it's impossible for white Irish slaves to be forced
to breed with black African slaves. But since this false
history keeps getting repeated, address some of these claims. There's

(29:03):
no evidence for force breeding of white Irish women with
African slaves in the Caribbean colonies or anywhere else. This,
of course, does not mean that interracial relationships or even
interracial marriages did not happen. The history of colonial America
contains lots of instances white masters having sexual relations with

(29:27):
African slaves, and the evidence of those relations comes not
only from legislation attempting to ban it, but also from
the obvious fact of mixed race children on plantations and
in the rest of early modern North America. All the
evidence about sexual or marital relations between black people and

(29:48):
white people shows in fact that it was a crime,
and that any children of such unions would be legally free. Okay,
this goes direct against the grain of the argument made
in the Irish slaves myth that Irish quote, slave women
were used to create new slaves. In fact, they wouldn't

(30:10):
be new slaves, they'd be free children. Now, obviously, cases
where white women voluntarily married black slaves are recorded, there
are only a handful of them recorded, but in each
case the children of those married were legally free at birth.
That's the very opposite of the definition of chattel slavery. Finally,

(30:36):
what happened to indentured servitude. It declined greatly from the
early nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, but it
wasn't banned, actually banned in the British Empire and in the
United States till nineteen seventeen. Anyway. Historians disagree about the
reasons for the decline of indentured servitude, but one of

(30:56):
the key causes in the content the United States, anyway,
was the expansion of slavery. Natural increase slaves being born
to slaves had become large enough that indentured servants were
no longer needed. More or less paid labor could take
over what they had done, and there were so many slaves,

(31:17):
three slaves could do the work of one indentured servant.
Even greatly increased cotton production in the early nineteenth century
didn't outstrip the supply of slave labor, because the two
went hand in hand. There are many other aspects of
the Irish slavery myth, including the ways it was invented
and has been spread in the twentieth and twenty first centuries,

(31:39):
and how it's continuing to grow, and how it's now
especially used by white supremacist groups in the United States.
Perhaps most unfortunate of all, it's now spread to Ireland,
where it's becoming an Internet meme that's popular with some groups.
And there's even now a Scottish version of the white

(32:01):
slaves myth, which also needs to be buzz killed. I
said just now, perhaps the most unfortunate thing of all
is that the myth has spread to Ireland. But of course,
by far the most unfortunate thing, by far, the most
detrimental effect this myth has had has been to negate

(32:25):
and attempt to minimize the actual suffering of African slaves
and American born black slaves. Most versions of this myth
continually claim that white Irish slaves were greater in number
and suffered far more from the brutality of slavery than
African slaves. Yet so the myth goes, the Irish American

(32:50):
descendants of these slaves never complain about their supposed history
of slavery and oppression. They never asked for reparations or
further concation of the historical crimes committed against them. In
other words, they say, and they say this literally, why
should we pay attention to movements like Black Lives Matter

(33:11):
when Irish people quote had it worse. Throughout this episode,
I've talked about the difficulties and the genuinely harsh working conditions,
and the second class citizen status that indentured servants endured
throughout their servitude. All of those things need to be
better known in our culture, but not at the cost

(33:32):
of recognizing the truly inhumane nature of chattle slavery. And
if the Irish Slaves myth promoters put half the energy
into considering the entirety of brutality in the history of
Atlantic world that they put into retailing this myth, we'd
have a much better educated populace. Indeed, and that much

(33:56):
better educated populace might, I hope, ask further questions about oppression.
Eventually they might ask about slavery and human trafficking in
our own twenty first century. That's certainly a subject that
needs far greater attention than is getting, as well as
far greater energy devoted to its abolition. And though I

(34:21):
rarely do this, I'd like to make a plug for
an organization that's trying to write a contemporary as well
as an historical evil. Anti Slavery International is the oldest
human rights organization in the world. It was founded in
eighteen thirty nine, six years after the abolition of slavery
in the Bridge Empire, because anti slavery protesters and campaigners

(34:45):
knew that slavery would continue in other parts of the
world and people would continue to profit off slavery in
Europe and in America. Well, not only has it continued,
it's prospered. Millions of peace people in the world today
are either enslaved or directly affected by slavery. So butzkillers.

(35:06):
Please go to antislavery dot org and do what you
can donate, volunteer, spread the word. After all, what good
is knowing more about history if one of history's greatest
evils can't be stopped. Talk to you next week.