Arguing with Idiots: Limey Edition

Timothy Birdnow

Having a Facebook fight with a limey. Eric Chapman started this off by posting this:

A Brit named Andy Dawson didn't like that:

However,it's worth pointing out those "tyrannical royalist" Brits abolished slavery across the Empire 32 years before you did - in was never permitted in the UK itself.

I retort:

That's because the Brits could force Irish peasants into defacto slave labor and it was a lot easier for them. They didn't need slaves when they had a bunch of Irish and Welsh to make do all the dirty work.Indians too; Guyana was settled primarily by East Indians who served the same function that slaves did in other Carribean areas. It was not exactly a choice by many of these colonissts.

Dawson doesn't like that:

Timothy Birdnow if you mean indentured labour that applied just as much to the English - so lose the chip on your shoulder.

We're not the ones who still had segregation in the 60s.

My reply:

I do not just mean indentured service - I mean impressed service. "To Hell or Barbados" was a common saying among Irish who would often wind up working in the sugar fields. The fact is Britain had a lot of cheap labor it could exploit - the U.S. always had a labor shortage, which got much worse after the invention of the cotton gin.

BtW Britain was happy to buy American slave-produced cotton.

And it was the English who foisted slavery on the U.S. Thomas Jefferson enumerated that as one of the charges in the original rough draft of the Declaration of Independence (it was removed to avoid tearing apart the coalition of colonies.)

And in fact the Constitution mandated that the slave trade be ended by 1808. Britain had no such plan in place, but moved quickly to end the slave trade in 1807 simply to one-up the U.S.

It was much harder to get rid of slavery in America than in the British Empire, which again, had plenty of cheap labor easily exploited.

And I would remind you America was a collection of British colonies for over a hundred and fifty years and slavery was legal, indeed it was English law that bequethed it to us. So whose fault was that?

I have no chip on my shoulder; I am simply responding to your rather self-satisfied comment.

Oh, and you guys didn't have any minorities until the last few years, so don't give me this bull about segregation; you didn't face the kinds of problems we had here with race relations. And you know nothing about them. I notice you are starting to have race problems now that you have a very small minority class.

Dawson keeps paddling up his creek:



Timothy Birdnowin that case, I think you're confused about the terms. Indentures were the main means by which Irish families funded emigration - their passage paid in exchange for an agreed term of work once in the US.

Impressment had a very specific meaning - forced service aboard Royal Navy ships. It was one of the issues that caused the war of 1812, because the RN was in the habit of stopping US vessels and removing former British sailors (many of them mutineers).

And, incidentally, American courts were quite happy to enforce Indenture contracts.

My response:

I know the difference Andy Dawson. Indentured service was voluntary. That was often not the case with many of the people who wound up doing work for the British. I pointed out Barbados and other British colonies were run as penal institutions aka slave labor but were not called that. Shoot; Australia was entirely a penal colony for a time. That is involuntary labor. Yes, indentured servants were voluntary labor, but that hardly changes the point; Britain had access to a lot of cheap labor which it could exploit. I know about the impressing of sailors; we fought a war with you guys over that in 1812. You guys called them mutineers; we called them American citizens who were kidnapped and forced into labor.

Dawson responds:

Timothy Birdnowwe did transport some criminals, but to Australia not North America. Other than that no-one was moved on a compulsory basis (or at least, not in significant number).

The overwhelming movement of whites to the Caribbean and North America was under Indenture; this, for example estimates half a million moved to the Caribbean under indenture, which accounts for the overwhelming majority of incomers after abolition.

https:// www.jstor.org/ stable/175675

And the particular flashpoint that triggered 1812 was the mutiny on HMS Hermione, where the mutineers killed not only their officers but their own shipmates who didn't mutiny.

https:// www.thetimes.co. uk/article/ fa1c9a20-1716-11 eb-a714-6e13d8c a860f?shareToke n=38cf38d1e313f 444252def040f6e acc3
ht

Now, if you're about to tell me that if something like that happens in the US Navy that the USN would not seize any perpetrators subsequently, you're either very misled or mendacious.

I reply:

Andy Dawson you are incorrect; after the battle of Kinsale, for example, the English transported a huge number of Irish POW's to work in the sugar plantations in the Caribbean. They were not called slaves,but they had "life sentences" and were forced to work like slaves, and they largely interbred with the African slaves who were also forced there.

The first time I ever saw Suzanna DePasse, the Motown and movie producer, I was shocked; blond hair and blue eyes even though she was called an "African American". I would never have guessed. Her family came from Montserrat and were descended from those same Irish slave laborers. James II sold 30,000 Irish as slaves after Kinsale in his 1615 proclamation, and the Irish were in fact the main group of slaves brought there for some time. Here is one link I found. https://www.africaresource.com/rasta/sesostris-the-great-the-egyptian-hercules/the-irish-slave-trade-forgotten-white-slaves/

And it still proves my point that they transported criminals (most of whom were quite petty criminals) to Australia at hard labor. Read The Fatal Shore if you want a view of how the British treated the primarily Irish "criminals".

Also, you are wrong about there being no North American penal colonies anyway; Georgia, for instance was founded as a penal colony (which was largely the model for Australia).

And as I mentioned Guyana has a very sizable East Indian population, and that because the Indians were brought as "indentured servants" very often against their will; shanghaied. (And in fact the term shanghaied comes from the rather unsavory British practice of grabbing some unlucky shmoe in port to serve on British ships.) It is likely many of these indentures servants were not exactly voluntary; who would go to a fetid, gator and snake infested swampland voluntarily? At a minimum, the recruitment of Indian labor was often done under false pretenses and the conditons were brutal. https://www.stabroeknews.com/2013/05/04/news/guyana/an-overview-of-indian-indentureship-in-guyana-1838-1917/

Yes, you Brits DID move large numbers of people involuntarily or less than voluntarily. Who do you think the slavers were during our colonial period? There were no Americans - it was British traders.

And again I point to the entire continent of Australia.

While you mention the Hermione, you simply ignore the fact that the British had been provoking the Americans for a while with this sort of thing. It wasn't the first time it happened. Impressment had been ongoing since 1803 at least. It was Britain that was the aggressor here, not the Americans. And furthermore, if the U.S. was seizing foreign sailors and making them serve them I rather doubt the American public would be cool with that, or demand retaliation for something like what happened on the Hermione. I would point out the British had the "Rule of 1756" in which they claimed the right to tamper with any trade ship in time of war. The U.S. and Britain negotiated a deal exempting American shipping (the Jay Treaty), but that didn't stop the British from resuming this practice during the Napoleanic Wars. Britain unilaterally withdrew from the treaty in 1805 and began harassing American trade ships in the Caribbean and elsewhere. Thousands of American sailors were impressed into service in the British Navy at that time, and in 1807 the HMS Leopard fired on the American Chesepeake, seizing three U.S. citizens. You seem to ignore all of this leadup to 1812. You Brits also stirred up Indian rebellions on our frontier in reprisal for trading with Continental Europe.

Oh, and the HMS Hermione affair happened in 1797; it was NOT the thing that caused the War of 1812.

Dawson replies:

we seem to have gone back to the 1600s here - I thought your argument was about the substitution of indenture/
Eric Chapman and yet, the US seems to have insisted that slaving was cheaper - to the extent that your home state was ready to fight a war to retain it.

Plus passing "Jim Crow" laws until 1955 - doing things like increasing sentences for mixed race couples living together.

I beg to differ:

Andy Dawson I started in the 1600 and went through a list of them including Indians brought to Guyana and Australian convict labor. I guess you missed all of that. And this was not strictly an argument about what happend AFTER abolition. You have changed the terms of the debate. I argued the British did not need slavery in the empire so much since they had defacto slavery all along.

Andy Dawson you do not know what the American Civil War was about, apparently.

First, it was about states rights, not slavery, to a large degree. Slavery was the lynchpin that set it off, but much of the fight was over the size and scope of the Federal government and how much it could influence state law.

The election of 1860 triggered secession primarily because the South feared Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans (whose sole reason for existence was abolition) would unilaterally declare slavery illegal.

I give you the words of Robert E. Lee "slavery is like holding a wolf by the ears - you don't like it but you are afraid to let go." In point of fact there had been discussions about how to go about abolition for years but no agreement. There were proposals floated to compensate slave holders (and slaves were expensive - as much as a hundred thousand dollars in antebellum money) but the radical abolitionists refused to pay a penny; their thinking was to punish the slaveholders for their evil deeds. But how do you ask a guy to give up so valuable a thing and not compensate them? I would point out there were a number of black slaveholders too; in fact, the biggest slaveholder in Louisiana was black.

And there was the question of what to do with the freed slaves; you can't just turn them loose without preparation. That was the eventual solution in America and it is the root of our race problems today.

To give credit where due, you Brits did a much better job of abolition than did we, but of course that was largely because you didn't really have slaves at home and you had plenty of cheap labor around. But you guys did well; you set it in stages,compensated slave holders, and educated slaves in the process. We could never come to an agreement about how to do it and in the end created a catastrophe in the South. The Ku Klux Klan, for instance, was formed as a vigalante organization to help impose some order in the chaos following the war. Too many freed slaves had nowhere to go and no way to make a living and became criminals. The Army was supposed to maintain order but refused to punish the Southerners, which is why the Klan came into existence.

The Jim Crow laws all stemmed from this fact. They were designed to control the black population, which had never been properly prepared. And the North was never going to render any aid in that regard.

I would add Britain controlled South Africa for a long time and they had laws even worse than the Jim Crow South, so don't get too cocky there Andy. You guys ran the place until 1934, and ditto Rhodesia which actually gained independence in 1965. You Brits also didn't mix with the locals, in India, or in Africa, to any extent. I couldn't find the date your own laws against mixed marriages ended, but you guys had them and I imagine well into the 20th century.

Pots really shouldn't call kettles black.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 07:23 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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