White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America (32 page)

Those sent to the West Indies, however, faced seven years’ toil in the sugar factories or plantations, which was often considered a death sentence.

In 1745, Charles Edward Stuart – Bonny Prince Charlie – tried once more to retake the crown for the Stuart line. The story of the Young Pretender and the ’45 is so well known that it hardly needs repeating here. It is enough to give the bare bones and say that this rising was of much more consequence than that of thirty years before. For a start, unlike the Old Pretender, the Young Pretender turned up to lead his armies, arriving in Scotland in July 1745

to run a campaign that would last nine months. Charles expected that not only would the clans gather to support him but also that further large-scale support would be forthcoming in England.

He also believed he would have considerable French assistance, for they had nearly mounted an invasion in support of him the previous year.

As things worked out, after an advance into England that almost reached Derby, Charles had to retreat. Ultimately, the French saw which way the military wind was blowing and cancelled their invasion fleet. Charles stood at Culloden with an army of little more than 5,000, composed of two-thirds Catholic 230

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Highland clansmen and one-third Episcopalian Scots. They faced a much stronger English force of 8,000. The battle went against the Jacobites. The superior forces commanded by the Duke of Cumberland (the son of Hanoverian King George II) quickly overwhelmed the Scots. The Prince’s lack of skill as a commander did not help.3

The bloody aftermath is perhaps better known than the battle itself. Cumberland ordered all prisoners and the wounded to be killed. Charles Stuart escaped capture by hiding and ultimately escaping in disguise to France. In all, some 3,500 were imprisoned following Culloden.4 Many clan leaders were banished, having been granted the historic Scottish punishment that allowed the person under sentence to choose their destination. Some of their clansmen no doubt followed them to the Continent, while others were able gradually to drift back home.

Of the remainder, two merchants, Samuel Smith of London and Richard Gildart of Liverpool, were licensed to transport rebels to the colonies. Gildart and Smith were to be paid £2

10s upon proof of shipment, with the balance of £2 10s upon notice from the colonies that their prisoners had arrived. Shortly afterwards, the merchants were empowered to offer pardons to rebels who gave themselves up to transportation and indenture for seven years. Although the total number of pardons issued was 866, it seems only 610 were actually transported.

The reason more were not transported was probably because the powers in London decided that breaking up the clan system would be a much more effective and long-term solution to destroying support for the House of Stuart. Some of those sent to Maryland who refused to sign indentures were eventually bought and set free by Catholic planters whose sympathies were at odds with the wishes of the government in England.

In this way, many Scottish rebels went on to thrive in their new country, establishing plantations of their own, while others finally returned home to Scotland. The fate of some of the transported rebels of the risings of 1715 and of the ’45 was undoubtedly grim indeed, especially in the sugar islands, while the fate of others turned out to be much superior to that intended by those 231

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who had so recently passed sentence upon them.

The bitter aftermath of the Jacobite risings would send echoes through not only history but also works of fiction for many years to come, as would the fate of another group of people who suffered being sent to the colonies – the kidnapped.

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In 1722, the prolific Daniel Defoe wrote a novel in which the hero is kidnapped. Defoe liked his fiction to have contemporary themes and he knew that kidnapping sent shivers down delicate spines as much as it had in the preceding century.

The eponymous Colonel Jack is a London orphan who becomes a pickpocket. After graduating to highway robbery, Jack is forced to flee to Scotland. Finding his options growing thin, he enlists in the army and soon deserts. A ship’s captain says he will take him to London. Once at sea, Jack discovers he has been kidnapped and is bound for Virginia.

After thirty-two days at sea, the ship reaches its destination, where Jack is sold: ‘I was disposed of, that is to say sold, to a rich planter . . . brought to the plantation and put in among about 50

servants, as well Negroes . . .’

Jack is fictional but the detail in his tale has the tang of the Atlantic and the smell of Virginian fields about it. He reflects upon what brought him ‘into this miserable condition of a slave’. At the time of writing, Defoe would have known that since Bacon’s Rebellion European and African colonial workers were subject to different conditions, with Africans now enslaved for life. The fact that Defoe continued to refer to white servants as slaves indicates an understanding that slavery could exist in different forms. In
Moll Flanders
, published in the same year as 233

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Colonel Jack
, he again referred to indentured servants as slaves.

Jack repents his ways and is given his freedom. He becomes a plantation owner and grows critical of how servants are treated. As a woman is taken ill and is carried into a shelter for sick workers, Jack observes: ‘I think they should call it the condemned hole, for it was really only a place for people to die in, not a place to be cured in.’ He reflects that ‘masters in Virginia are terrible things’.

Occasionally, real life could mirror fiction and fortune shine on those taken against their will to be sold into the colonies.

On the Isle of Skye, two wily lairds concocted a scheme to make money by selling some of their tenants. In 1739, Sir Alexander MacDonald and Norman MacCleod sold 100 men, women and children to merchants who planned to resell them in the American slave markets, where the unlucky islanders were to be presented as criminals. The scheme fell apart when the ship carrying them put in at Donaghadee in the north of Ireland for supplies and the innocent islanders escaped. Following an official inquiry they were given their liberty; MacDonald and MacCleod were not prosecuted.1

For others, freedom came even after they had crossed the Atlantic. In an unusual case in 1753, a planter called Ann Dempsey petitioned the Philadelphia court to release one of her servants from indenture. This woman had proved to her mistress’s satisfaction that she had been taken from Ireland against her will. Ms Dempsey was a paragon among the servant-owning classes.

A very late example of someone taken against their will comes from London in 1775 and involves seventeen-year-old Elizabeth Brickleband. Her name first turns up in the customs lists of those emigrating, entered as Elizabeth Brittleband.2 It seems reasonable to assume that it is the same person, for in either form the name is unusual. The lists of émigrés are the nearest thing that has survived of a record of emigration levels in the latter part of the seventeenth century. In 1773, records were ordered to be kept because of government fears that a depressed economy was giving rise to a level of emigration and depopulation that could not be sustained.

Elizabeth is listed as leaving for Baltimore in June, one of ninety-nine ‘redemptioners’ on board the brig
Nancy
. The records 234

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add a few years to her age, listing her as twenty-one. This could be significant. Whoever entered her name could have wished to disguise her true identity by making her older and deliberately misspelling her surname. Her mother must have been a resourceful and tenacious woman, for she not only discovered that her daughter had been kidnapped but also managed to track down the culprits who had taken her.

The guilty ones were a married couple called John and Jane Dennison, ‘office-keepers’ with a ‘lock-up house’. Sadly, by the time Mrs Brickleband discovered who had taken her daughter, she was too late – the
Nancy
had already sailed, carrying her daughter towards an uncertain future. Although Elizabeth’s fate is unknown, we do know what happened to her abductors. Thanks to the efforts of Elizabeth’s mother, they were put on trial, but not before they attempted to buy Mrs Brickleband off with the reported – though unlikely to be forthcoming – sum of £500, saying that if they went to trial they would be hanged. Elizabeth’s mother was not to be bought. From the court records we see that John and Jane Dennison, together with their clerk Quirforth, were charged with ‘conspiring to send into foreign countries one Elizabeth Brickleband’.3

The Dennisons and their clerk admitted that they had signed up ‘near an hundred people’ for which they had been paid £9 7s 6d – scarcely the level of income that would enable them to lavish large bribes to avoid being taken to trial. In the event, the trio need hardly have worried. They got off lightly. John Dennison was jailed for one month on the condition he posted security with the court against his good behaviour for one year. Mrs Dennison and Quirforth appear to have been judged the ringleaders. They were sentenced to three months apiece and ordered to find security for two years – not the sentences one might have expected for abducting a young woman and selling her into slavery in the colonies, to be separated from home and family for ever. The courts appeared to take no sterner view of spiriting in the eighteenth century than they had in the seventeenth. No wonder, then, that spiriting was such good business and persisted for so long both in reality and in the popular imagination.

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John Jamieson was an example of an even younger victim. He went missing from his home at Old Meldrum in Scotland in 1741, at the age of eleven. His father William heard that the merchant

‘Bonny’ John Burnett had shipped John to Maryland. Aberdeen magistrates refused to sign a warrant for Burnett’s arrest, so William obtained the backing of his landlord, the Earl of Aberdeen. Under pressure from the Earl, Burnett promised to return young John.

But the Earl died, Burnett went bankrupt and John was never seen again.

As far as their parents were concerned, most kidnapped children vanished off the face of the earth. Miraculously, a very few reappeared. Peter Williamson and James Annesley were among those that did. Though James was taken from Aberdeen in north-east Scotland and James from the backstreets of Dublin, their stories shared interesting characteristics – both not only came back but also wrote about their experiences and set out to seek justice.

There was another confluence in their stories: James Annesley, newly returned to Britain, published his memoirs in 1743, the same year that Peter Williamson was snatched.

Peter Williamson’s memoir is a remarkable account of experiences that must have been shared by others who were rounded up to fulfil the insatiable labour demands of the colonial tobacco and sugar industries. It is filled with high adventure. The hero was kidnapped, suffered shipwreck, sold into slavery, captured by Native Americans and finally managed to return home to Scotland. Even if parts of Williamson’s account are fabricated or exaggerated to excite the reader, it provides insights into the nature of ‘spiriting’

in the eighteenth century and of conditions in the colonies.

Williamson’s story begins in 1740, when, at the age of ten, he was sent to live with his aunt in Aberdeen after his mother had died and his father, a crofter in Aboyne, found himself with too many children to look after. Three years later, while playing by the dockside, Williamson was inveigled on board a ship lying by the quay. Two men told him stories of a new life beyond the seas and easily turned the young boy’s head. The ship that carried him away was aptly named the
Planter
. After that, like so many thousands of others, he might never have been heard of again if it were not for 236

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his remarkable resourcefulness. Williamson was a victim of a trade in youngsters that was endemic in Scotland. Young people were daily rounded up in the towns and country to feed the colonial trade. The practice of scooping up fresh labour by any means, fair or foul, was well established, there being no effective force against it, nor any real remedy for it. In his memoirs, Williamson described the racket:

Almost all the inhabitants of Aberdeen knew the traffic . . .

which was carried on in the market places, in the High Street, and in the avenues of the town in the most public manner. The trade in carrying off boys to the plantations in America and selling them there as slaves was carried on with an amazing effrontery . . . and by open violence. The whole neighbouring country were alarmed at it. They would not allow their children to go to Aberdeen for fear of being kidnapped.

When they kept them at home, emissaries were sent out by the merchants who took them by violence from their parents

[and] if a child was missing, it was immediately suspected that he was kidnapped by the Aberdeen merchants.4

The picture Williamson paints appears extreme but at the time groups of children were regularly gathered up against their parents’

wishes and forcibly held in Aberdeen for transportation to America.

To a considerable extent, the town authorities and merchants were part of the illicit trade. There were holding houses in which the children were corralled until a ship could be found for them. There were people who supplied them with food and drink. And the local magistrates were geared up to process large numbers of children in groups ‘in a parody of indenturing’.

Williamson’s later investigations revealed that he had been abducted by agents working for one of several members of the town’s business community involved in the trade, one James Smith, a saddler. No child from either the town or the surrounding countryside seems to have been safe from the merchants’ agents.

They operated openly and with impunity. When parents who had lost their children came looking for them in the town, their elation 237