Slaves of a different color

Historians mostly ignore the fact that some white people, too, were enslaved before the Civil War.

By Stephan Talty

Jun 15, 2000 | If you hear the words "white slavery" these days, it's probably as a punch line to an unsavory joke about female college students being shanghaied and sold into Arabian harems -- or in a remark by some amateur historian talking about the scandal of young turn-of-the-century prostitutes who were called, with a dash of hysteria, "white slaves." In any case, this loaded term is a metaphor at best and a racy urban myth at worst, because there were never any real white slaves in America. Right?

Actually, wrong. In writing a book on the mixing of black and white life throughout American history, I discovered that white slavery did occur before the Civil War in small but significant numbers. And in unearthing this fascinating lost chapter in American history, I also discovered how slavery has been partitioned into a piece of African-American cultural property -- made sacred by black Americans, abandoned by whites. Petrified by politics and shame, the richest and most central drama of early American history is now playing to segregated houses.

My history lesson began innocently enough: Deep in the stacks of the Brooklyn Public Library, I stumbled on a chapter in J.A. Rogers' obsessive, well-documented and slightly weird book "Sex and Race," called "Whites Sold as Negro Slaves." The title seemed crackpot sinister, and best left alone. But I read Rogers' accounts, checked out his sources and delved deeper into the murky history of American slave trading.

I discovered that there was strong anecdotal evidence of whites being kidnapped or sold into slavery from the early 1700s to the Civil War. Some were orphans, others poor immigrants or unwanted illegitimate babies. Some were snatched off country lanes, their skin dyed to look black; some were sold ostensibly as light mulattoes. A white woman was even sold down the river by her new husband, followed by her children, to a Georgia preacher. There were court cases, including the notorious 1844 New Orleans case of Sally Miller, a German child sold as a mulatto. There were newspaper accounts, sightings of white slaves in Southern travel memoirs, including Frederick Law Olmsted's influential "The Cotton Kingdom" (1862), and African-American slave narratives attesting to white slavery.

The numbers are impossible, so far, to pin down, but some white bondage clearly occurred. In an era when human beings were the most valuable commodities available to thieves and slave traders, greed occasionally trumped the crucial myth that there was a strict dividing line between the races. And while there were instances of what appeared to onlookers as "purebred" whites being sold on auction blocks, those Anglo-Saxons were being sold as "blacks." One had to become physically or socially accepted as black to be legally sold into chattel slavery and enter into the full degradation of American bondage. As light-skinned blacks sometimes gained their freedom by "passing" as white, so did hapless Caucasians make the reverse journey -- proving that race and bondage were even more fluid concepts in antebellum America than we would like to believe. And the phenomenon was not restricted to the United States: The Barbary captivity narratives, recounted in Paul Michel Baepler's "White Slaves, African Masters," in which Europeans and some Americans described their brutal episodes of slavery in the courts of Algerian and Moroccan pashas, were wildly popular in the 1800s.

When I finished my research, I wanted to know why this odd history had been forgotten. One scholarly essay published in 1999, Carol Wilson's groundbreaking "White Slavery: An American Paradox," argues that standard histories have overlooked white bondage. But apart from Rogers' obscure book, and one right-wing tract, discussed below, that was it.

Some historians I approached were initially shocked. Henry Mayer wrote the definitive biography of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, and he knows slavery scholarship cold; his voice spiked an octave or two in surprise when I broached the topic. "This is the flip side of the miscegenation debates about Thomas Jefferson, and now George Washington, having longtime black mistresses," he said. "People have to come to a better understanding of how the slave trade corrupted everybody."

Writer and academic Shelby Steele took the news more calmly. "It doesn't surprise me," he said. "It makes the point that slavery as a compulsion of man is bigger even than race." But why hasn't this been written about? "There was probably a time when whites were ashamed and wanted to suppress it," Steele said. "But now it's probably blacks who want to suppress it. Those who are grounded in the idea of black victimization may feel that this weakens their argument."

Next Page: "Can Negroes get a damn apology ... before whites jump on the slave ship?"

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