lies, felons, slave-drivers and profiteers
The recent Internet publication of old books and articles relating to the settlement of the American colonies has shocked many people looking for ancestral pilgrims and martyrs in accordance with the story of America's glorious past that they learned at school. They found instead, as Mikki did, convicted felons who evaded execution in the Old Country by transportation and worked as slaves alongside kidnapped Negroes on the tobacco plantations of Virginia."Reading the truth about our early colonists - even the so-called pilgrims and martyrs had blood on their hands and greed in their eyes – made being related to any of the early Americans nothing to be proud of," says Mikki. "The whole period of colonization from 1607 to 1775 was far from a glorious beginning -- it was tainted by convict transportation, white and black slavery, indigenous massacres, human misery, biblical greed and massive profiteering that make our current system look tame."
"After 1775, when convict transportation to the old American colonies ceased – and commenced in the new Australian colonies," says Mikki, "the Founding Fathers and esteemed citizens continued white slavery by a system euphemistically called 'indentured servitude' which involved corrupt officials, shippers, merchants and plantation owners kidnapping vulnerable people off the streets of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, shipping them to the USA, selling them in slave markets and forcing them to work as slaves in the small farms, workshops and homes of people not much better off than themselves who were averse to keeping Negro slaves.”
"It is true that some of the felons transported to the colonies and sold as slaves to the tobacco plantations were political dissidents -- Scots prisoners in the Cromwellian battles c. 1651 and those implicated in Monmouth's rebellion c. 1685, the Scottish rebellion c. 1678 and the Jacobite uprising c. 1716 -- and some, indeed, were part of the the interstate slave system, such as Dutch colonists from New Amstel rounded up c. 1665 and Boston Quakers unable to pay their fines," says Mikki, "but the actual number of political felons was minuscule in relation to the social felons (the murderers, robbers and rapists) and efforts by apologists to disguise this fact are understandable, but plainly obscuring the truth."
“It was particularly during the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell (1649-1660), following the execution of Charles I, that slavery was used as a punishment for political and religious dissent,” says Mikki. “Between 1659 and 1663 about 100,000 Irish Catholics -- men, women and children, most of whom had nothing to do with the Irish Rebellion -- were forcibly sent to the West Indies and North America to work as slaves for the wealthy plantation owners.”
“A similar fate befell the Scottish catholic supporters of James II in the late 1600s.”
"By 1775, felons who if convicted the year before would have been transported to America as slaves, were instead transported as soldiers to fight for the king in the American Revolution," says Mikki. "No wonder the British lost! I wonder how many of those reluctant felonious soldiers deserted and found a new life for themselves in the old colonies?"
Read more by Mikki on this issue:
Labels: felons, founding fathers, indentured servitude, lies, profiteers, slave-drivers, transportation
