I highly recommend you read this book:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-irish-slave-trade-the-forgotten-white-slaves/31076
Heres another link describing the life of the indentured servants they were slaves.
http://www.politicususa.com/2013/02/24/american-capitalism-embraced-white-slave-black.html
From the article above:
Ironically, says Phillips, black slaves, selling for roughly three times as much, often got better treatment because they were a lifetime investment.
[19]
(a lot of the time they died, their sentence added on to and continued to work until they died, the women sexually bred with the Africans for more pleasing colored mulato's in which this white indentured servant no longer has the right to her own child... call it by whatever term you like to make yourself feel better - but indentured servants were slaves)
And another link:
http://www.answers.com/topic/indentured-white-slaves-in-the-colonies-1770-by-william-eddis
From the article above:
[FONT="]Negroes being a property for life, the death of slaves, in the prime of youth or strength, is a material loss to the
proprietor; they are, therefore, almost in every instance, under more comfortable circumstances than the miserable European
Either way - there is no convincing people who are taught at an early age that in America - their slavery was unique and their experience unique and the worst treatment there ever was - that in fact - it wasn't.
[/FONT]
Dude, that's a nutter proggie site dedicated to promoting the idea that Republicans are attempting to usher in the new indentured servitude. Let's see what PBS, a mainstream liberal source, has to say on the matter.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/slavery/experience/legal/history.html
The legal standing of African Americans in North America has changed over time, varying according to historical period and place. During the earliest years of settlement, laws delineating the civil status of African laborers did not exist. Black workers seem to have occupied a social station similar to that of white European indentured servants who were contract-bound to their employers for designated periods.
Although their station was one of inferiority that left them vulnerable to mistreatment by masters, black men and women, especially in New Amsterdam, enjoyed certain privileges that would later be denied enslaved blacks in America. For instance, like white servants, black laborers could take their employers to court. Some, like Pedro Negretto and Manuel Rues who sued for unpaid wages, even won their cases. Documents also show that Dutch courts occasionally granted blacks freedom.
Black people in the New Netherlands occupied a spectrum of positions that ranged between slavery and freedom. The Dutch West India Company often gave half-freedom to elderly blacks. This practice benefited the company for whom older slaves were a liability rather than an asset. Additionally, half-free people were required to pay annual tributes to the company. Because half-freedom could not be inherited, the children of manumitted slaves remained bound to the master.
In 1662, Virginia legally recognized slavery as a hereditary, lifelong condition. Even before this statute appeared, however, many blacks were being held as slaves for life, and as black laborers gradually replaced white indentured servants as the principle source of agricultural labor during the second half of the seventeenth century, laws restricting the activities of Africans were being introduced, codifying slavery as a race-based system. South Carolina, for example, passed an Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes and Slaves in 1696. This comprehensive code outlined severe penalties for a variety of offenses committed by blacks and excused any white who caused the death of a slave while carrying out a punishment. The South Carolina act was based upon the slave codes of Barbados and became the prototype for other American colonies writing black oppression into law.
Virginia was the first colony to define the status of slaves in explicit legal terms. According to the colony's 1705 law, all blacks, mulattoes, and Native Americans, all non-Christian persons brought into the colonies as servants (even should they later convert to Christianity) were considered slaves. The law went on to state that all slaves "shall be held to be real estate." Such laws, in effect, put all power in the hands of the master.
Although enslaved men and women experienced the most severe ramifications of the law, free blacks also suffered under colonial government. Among the legal restrictions placed on free blacks was a 1717 Connecticut law that required aspiring black business owners to get official permission to open shop, and when Virginia law extended voting rights in 1721, it extended them only among free white men.
Note that while initially African slaves were treated as indentured servants and/or serfs, the latter being an unfree class virtually vanished by America's colonization, beginning in the very early eighteenth century slavery began to be legally distinguished from indentured servitude. This differentiation was uniformly in removing rights from enslaved Africans, and increasingly the differentiation was based on race and skin color. Enslaved Africans lost the right to sue in court, the right to give testimony in court, the right to be secure in their own bodies against rape, the right to limits on physical punishment. A white woman giving birth to a mixed race child saw that child bound for a term of service, typically twenty to thirty years; a black or mulatto giving birth to a mixed race child saw that child bound for its life. Kill your indentured servant and face severe legal penalties; kill your black slave and face, um, loss of your black slave, who under the law was no longer considered an unfree human but a subhuman. Note also that even before the laws were written differentiating slaves from indentured servants, owners had made the distinction. A non-black (including Chinese as well as whites) was purchased for a term of service; a black was purchased for eternity, and even before this was enshrined in law it was a custom.
I'm not arguing that the two classes didn't start off identical, or that individual white slaves did not have lives more miserable than the average African slave, or that slavery did not persist longer in other places, or that slavery was not a more equal opportunity abuser in other places. I'm arguing that the two
institutions in the United States are simply not comparable in misery or effect, beginning around the start of the eighteenth century, so that by the time we were America rather than British colonies there was a huge difference. Even free blacks (who could properly be called Americans rather than Africans, although they did not enjoy full status until mid-twentieth century) suffered from quite significant legal disadvantages until mid-twentieth century. Blacks did not even win the right to equal respect in a courtroom - just simple equality of title, which costs absolutely no one a red cent and costs absolutely no one a job or imposes an inconvenience - until Mary Hamilton and the NAACP took Birmingham to SCOTUS in freakin' 1963.
I'm sure that having Irish blood, I have ancestors who were enslaved in all but name and possibly that. I'm even sure that having English blood, I have ancestors who were enslaved in all but name and possibly that. Whitfield (literally white field) isn't exactly a name that screams of the peerage, after all. I'm equally sure that having such ancestors puts me at absolutely no disadvantage compared to having grandparents who were legally barred from good educations and good jobs. My grandparents' success (or lack thereof) directly controls with what my parents started life, which directly influences what advantages my parents were able to give me, which directly influences what I am able to accomplish. Slavery of any name or stripe many generations back does not, but it's worth pointing out that when slavery ended, everything was not immediately reset. It's also worth pointing out that two generations after my ancestors were freed, they were largely indistinguishable from those not enslaved in America. The vast majority of black Americans after slavery did not have that luxury and were immediately identifiable (admittedly, sometimes wrongly) as descendents of slaves. As long as there were (and are) people willing to treat you differently, that's not a trivial distinction.
Try telling those black slaves that they have nothing to complain about, and that they should be happy their slavery "ended pretty quickly", especially compared to the rest of the world.
Heck, the way you're talking, they weren't slaves at all...just hired laborers.
Originally they were considered unfree laborers. That rapidly changed for the worse as owners wanted more work and more control.
And personally I see a huge difference between being told "I own you for thirty more years" and "I own you for a hundred more years and you should just be glad we aren't in Brazil."
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