In 'White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America' by Don Jordan and Michael Walsh, a disturbing and tragic tale is told of indentured servants in Great Britain's colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The importation of black Africans as slaves early in American history gets a lot of attention, and rightly so. But all too often, the narrative seems to be both believed and repeated uncritically and without closer examination that black slavery in the colonies and Antebellum South before emancipation was the only kind of slavery practiced, and the only kind of slavery which the scope and nature of bears much mentioning.
Before black slaves were brought in en masse, however, Britain exported many white undesirables - Irish, Scots, convicted criminals, vagrants, unattended children, prostitutes - and both brought them into the colonies and disposed of them with much the same mindset. Many were pressed into service through lies, false promises, false pretenses, and even against their will. And as this book tells it, many of those pressed into service were similarly whipped, beaten, abused, poorly fed, poorly clothed, poorly housed, and kept under foot.
Be careful with this work. A certain strain seems to run through it which reminds me of Howard Zinn's 'A People's History,' and it would be unwise to see all our history and present circumstances as little more than class struggle pretending at higher ideals.
Nevertheless, there is more than one important and worthwhile take-away to be had here. For starters, people can be awful to people, and find any and all excuses by which to justify their sins.
Second, though actually first in importance, the fact of our sinful nature and what to do with it is actually the really remarkable thing here. What is not special or unusual in human history is that people hurt and oppress one another, nor that the strong and rich prey on the weak and vulnerable. The really rare thing is when there is a turning away from the kind of practices which are cataloged here by Jordan and Walsh.
And if we have similar attitudes and ways of relating cropping up again in our day - since there is no new thing under the sun, and the nature of man has not changed in all our history since Adam and Eve were justly and fairly ejected from Eden - the obvious question is what has proven to work in defusing and disarming those attitudes.
Can we repent on the one hand, forgive on the other hand, when such things become a feature of our civilization and culture? If so, we ought to. Just so, we can in Christ, and find grace for both ourselves and one another there. And I believe this is no small part of why American civilization was able to continue on and build on itself despite the sorts of things happening and being done which we read about in books like 'White Cargo.'
It was not from an excess of Christianity that these things were done, but from a sufficient quality and quantity, depth and sincerity of Christianity that they were stopped to the extent that they were, however completely or incompletely.
