Original_To:  BITNET%"HISTORY@RUTVM1.BITNET"
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.history
Date:         Wed, 19 Aug 1992 11:45:00 EST
From:         RATH@BRANDEIS.BITNET
Subject:      RE: Enslaved Scots

::::::::::::::::::::::::original message::::::::::::::::::::::::

From:         Tom Powers <TPOWERS@UNIVSCVM.BITNET>
Subject:      Enslaved Scots
To:           "Rich Rath" <RATH@BRANDEIS.BITNET>

     A former student came to me yesterday requesting information on
a curious subject which he'd run across in a book. He'd read that,
after the battle of Culloden, the victorious British rounded up some
1000 Scottish prisoners and "sold them as slaves to Southern cotton
plantations."
     I don't know anything about this, though, of course, I'm familiar
with indentured servitude and the involuntary "transportation" of
convicts of all sorts. Still, the terminology "slaves" is curious, as
is the reference to "Southern cotton plantations." (Consider the
year.)
     Can anyone elaborate on this event, and can anyone help me
respond to my student's inquiry?
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By coincidence, I just visited the Saugus Iron works in Saugus MA, the first
operative iron mill in North America, having the capability to produce
both cast and wrought iron from locally mined ore, charcoal from local
hardwood forests and locally mined flux.  The project was undertaken
with English underwriting, by John Winthrop the younger in 1643.
By 1650, Others were in charge and the mill had already seen a large share of
financial trouble.  Somewhere between fifty and one hundred Scotsmen
captured in a battle against Cromwell's forces in 1650 were forcibly
indentured anbd sold for shipping costs to the iron works.  There they lived
in an enclave community, not at all Puritan, called "Hammersmith," perhaps
the first company town in North America as well.

In 1650 the borders between
slave, prisoner, servant, indenture, and apprentice were not at all clearly
drawn.  The anachronistic tendency is to say that contemporaries
wrongly used the word slave when theyspoke of white bondsmen, but
it is my belief
that many of the racial justifications of slavery were not yrt in effect,
as North American slavery utilizing African bondsmenwas less favored than
indenture, even in the south, until the first quarter of the eighteenth
century.  Thus there was not as clear a distinction in actual meaning
in 1650 between slave prisoner and servant.  Actually, MA Bay records
for the first few decades of the colonies existence record instances of
Africans referred to as servants, and indians called slaves, as well as
several instrances of Puritan transgressors being sentenced to slavery.
Rather than holding Puritans to 20th cent. definitions, maybe it would
be enlightening to consider how the concept has come to be so clearly
demarcated in the past two centuries.  Race was not the defining
characteristic of slavery until the Atlantic Slave Trade had been banned
and slaves had to be replaced through natural increase, requiring some
"natural" justification for keeping people in bondage based on descent.

So to return to your question re whether the Scots were "slaves"
the answer would be no if they and the iron mill were transported whole
to the twentieth century, but yes if the contemporary (1650)
meaning of "slavery" is used.  I would like to qualify my argument by
stating that I do not discount that "race," or more accuratel the construct
of race, was a factor in consideratiopns of slavery, but not a
necessary or the sole factor in defining membership.

I found the tour of the mill fascinating, BTW, and it really helped to
clarify and ground the ideas ofiron production to walk through the whole process
on the tour, from collection, of the ore to smelting to forging, etc...
I have been interested in the process, but have found most historical
descriptions either presume knowledge of the process or are too abstract
to get a concrete handle on in textual form.  And its free.  The restoration
was done by the same people who did Williamsburg, and seems top-notch.
they actually run the equiptment--bellows, fires, water wheels and all,
although they don't produce any iron any more--Oh, BTW the mill failed in 1668
and most of the surving Scotsmen's bonds were sold to other Puritans.
best,
Rich Rath
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