Slavery And The Irish

One of the topics of interest to a number of our people is the Irish language in America. This is intimately related with the subject of indentured servitude and slavery in America. Gerry Kelly has contributed the following information, as a sample of the research he and others do on this subject.

Given that tens of thousands of Irish people were shipped into slavery, isnt it strange that Ireland has no day remembering them?

Records are replete with references to early Irish Catholics in the West Indies. Gwynn in Analecta Hibernica, states, "The earliest reference to the Irish is the establishment of an Irish settlement on the Amazon River in 1612."

It's a case of 'swords at dawn' in Co Louth in a row over whether Oliver Cromwell transported innocent Catholic men, women and children to the West Indies.

The initial plan was to offer freedom to indentured Irish slaves on the island of Barbados and elsewhere or to take more rebellious Irish slaves and transport them to Jamaica where they would be offered their freedom and 30 acres of land to work.

They came as slaves; vast human cargo transported on tall British ships bound for the Americas. They were shipped by the hundreds of thousands and included men, women, and even the youngest of children.

At the beginning of the 17th Century, in the reign of James I of England, England faced a problem: what to do with the Irish. They had been practicing genocide against the Irish since the reign of Elizabeth, but they couldn't kill them all. Some had been banished, and some had gone into voluntary exile, but there were still just too many of them.

During the 1600s, African slaves and Irish natives shared a common fate on the island of Barbados. Slaves first arrived on the island in the 1620s with the first white settlers and continued to be brought there as the need for labor created a new market for the international slave trade.

Slavery in one form or another has existed in Ireland since the earliest times. Early Celtic society had five classes of people from King to slave. Nial of the Nine Hostages an early King of Ireland (379-405) regularly went on slave raiding trips during and after the Roman withdrawal from England, on one of these raids he is believed to have captured St Patrick from Wales or Cornwall.

In 1855, Frederic Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who designed New York's Central Park, was in Alabama on a pleasure trip and saw bales of cotton being thrown from a considerable height into a cargo ship's hold. The men tossing the bales somewhat recklessly into the hold were Negroes, the men in the hold were Irish. Olmsted inquired about this to a shipworker. "Oh," said the worker, "the niggers are worth too much to be risked here; if the Paddies are knocked overboard or get their backs broke, nobody loses anything."

A Radharc report from 1976 about the Black Irish of Montserrat. Irish people exiled by Cromwell and African slaves arrived on Montserrat at about the same time.

They came as slaves; vast human cargo transported on tall British ships bound for the Americas. They were shipped by the hundreds of thousands and included men, women, and even the youngest of children.

"I am determined wherever I go ... to speak with grateful emotions of Mr [Daniel] O’Connell’s labours. [Cheers] I heard his denunciation of slavery. I heard my master curse him, and therefore I loved him." [Great cheers] - Frederick Douglass: Cork speech, 1845.

The transportation of Irish people to slavery in the Americas predates Oliver Cromwells reign with the first Irish political prisoners being sent to Virginia in 1620 under the reign of James I.

If Queen Elizabeth I had lived in the 20th Century, she would have been viewed with the same horror as Hitler and Stalin. Her policy of Irish genocide was pursued with such evil zest it boggles the mind of modern men.

It was the Stuarts who introduced the Irish to the slave trade. Charles II returned to the throne in 1660 at a time when it was becoming clear that sugar plantations were as valuable as gold-mines.

Brothers, by the time you read this edition of the Digest, the convention in Cincinnati will be another piece of history. As I write this column today I think of history and our ancestors and what they went through for centuries.

The Irish Famine Curriculum was approved in September 1996 by the New Jersey Commission for inclusion in the Holocaust and Genocide Curriculum at the secondary school level. That year the New York legislature also passed an amendment "with enthusiastic bipartisan support", for an appropriation bill supporting the development of a Great Irish Famine curriculum in that state.

The historical treatment of Irish Catholics by the English and British governments has been the subject of much examination, but systematic research on the social, economic, and political impact of Irish refugees who sought asylum in Spain and Latin America at various times since the sixteenth century has only recently drawn the attention of scholars.

The historical treatment of Irish Catholics by the English and British governments has been the subject of much examination, but systematic research on the social, economic, and political impact of Irish refugees who sought asylum in Spain and Latin America at various times since the sixteenth century has only recently drawn the attention of scholars

What is it about this small island and it’s people, six thousand miles away from Ireland, and with a population that originated mainly from a different continent, that made me feel so at home, that caused me, and many like me to make it our home, and to cause many to ask if "I man born ya?".

In a previous article about early Irish settlers in St. Augustine, the 1783 Spanish Census of East Florida revealed that many of these Irish settlers owned slaves.

On Sunday the 19th of June 1631, two boats were taken from Dungarvan, in Co. Waterford, each about 12 tons burden and went to the old head of Kinsale, Co. Cork

On Sunday the 19th of June 1631, two boats were taken from Dungarvan, in Co. Waterford, each about 12 tons burden and went to the old head of Kinsale, Co. Cork.