Why No One Talks About 'The Irish Slaves'

This whole idea of Irish slaves distorts some things that really did happen. So today we’re going to talk about that history, and how it’s being twisted and misused today. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. On a
very regular basis, when we post about slavery on our
Facebook page, especially when that post has some kind of

(00:23):
connection to the more recent past or the present, somebody
always comes along and leaves a comment that what we
should really be talking about is the Irish slaves and
these were, according to the comment or, people who were
enslaved earlier and treated worse than people from Africa. Where
it's really like clockwork, And the more widely a post

(00:44):
gets shared, the more likely it is to get these
kinds of comments. This idea that Irish people were enslaved
and that that is what we really should be talking
about tends to be circulated a whole lot more aggressively.
Anytime there's a lot of mainstream news coverage or other
really prominent discussion about equal rights or social issues related

(01:04):
to black Americans like this is not a unique to
the United States, but that's where our experience is. So
for example, right now, when there's ongoing and very widespread
protest against police brutality, and racism going on in the
United States and around the world. This whole idea of
the Irish slaves really distort some things that really did happen.

(01:28):
So today we're going to talk about that history and
how it's being really twisted and misused today. And yes,
I recognize the irony in doing this episode at all,
but this has come up so many times that I
would really like to dispel it. And before we get started,
I also wanted to note that one particular researcher, which
is Irish librarian and independent scholar Liam Hogan, has done

(01:51):
enormous amounts of work documenting not just the history of
this idea, but also how it's become a racist meme.
His work is and of several resources that were used
in this episode, and he has been so diligent and
so prolific on this subject for so many years um
that even though it's not sourced only from his work,
we would be remiss not to mention it upfront. In general,

(02:13):
memes and viral posts about the idea of Irish slaves
misrepresent the English subjugation of Ireland, which is something that
really did happen. They also misrepresent the nuances in how
European powers, specifically Britain, used unfree labor while colonizing the America's.
That is another thing that really did happen. All of

(02:34):
this history gets meshed together, and we're going to start
with the general background of unfree labor. When European nations
started colonizing the America's, they wanted a plentiful source of
inexpensive labor, and there just were not enough free people
who wanted to emigrate and could pay their way by themselves.
And of course, unfree labor can be a lot cheaper

(02:56):
than paying free people fair wages. So a lot of
the colonial labor force was not free. It was made
up of people who were indentured or enslaved. The colonists
first enslaved workforce in the America's was primarily indigenous people
from the places that were being colonized. Colonists either enslaved
indigenous people and forced them to work in the colony,

(03:19):
or they captured indigenous people and transported them back to
Europe to self for profit. And as we talked about
in our episode on King Philip's War, colonial officials also
enslaved indigenous people and transported them to other colonies. This
practice started to wane in the late seventeen hundreds as
the Transatlantic slave trade became more established and African people

(03:41):
and their descendants made up more and more of the
enslaved workforce. We talked about indentured servitude and our episode
on Bacon's Rebellion back in April of twenty nineteen. So
as a recap and an indenture, a person signed a
contract to work for a specific period of time. During
that time, they were not free. Although they were still

(04:01):
considered to be people, they still had a lot of
the same legal rights and protections as non indentured people
of the same nationality. Indentures typically lasted for between five
and eight years, although in some cases that might be
as long as ten years. In exchange for this commitment,
indentured workers were given passage to the America's at least

(04:22):
in theory. They were also supposed to be given food, shelter, clothing,
the tools they needed to do their work, and some
kind of compensation when their indenture ended. However, there were
definitely cases in which indentured people were not given any
of that, and cases in which people did not live
to see the end of their contract. Whether that was

(04:43):
due to disease, overwork, poor living and working conditions, abuse,
or some other cause. The degree of choice and freedom
that a person had in signing one of these contracts
was really all over the map. There were people who
wanted to immigrate and to start new life for all
kinds of reasons, but couldn't afford to do it unless

(05:03):
they signed an indenture. Other people were indentured and deported
after being convicted of a crime. Some indentured workers were
prisoners of war or political prisoners, And of course there
were a lot of people who technically signed an indenture
of their own free will, but whose social and economic
circumstances really left them no other option. Irish slave memes

(05:25):
typically referenced Irish indentured workers who were transported to the
island of Barbados in the Eastern Caribbean. Of course, colonists
and their labor force were not the island's first inhabitants.
The first people to settle on Barbados probably arrived from
the South American continent sometime in the seventeenth century b c.

(05:45):
By about five hundred CE, the island was home to
both carib and Arawak peoples. The first Europeans to arrive
on the island where the Spanish in the sixteenth century,
and the name Barbados was coined by the Portuguese not
long after, means bearded ones, and it's probably a reference
to the islands bearded fig trees. Spanish forces used the

(06:07):
indigenous population of Barbados as a source of enslaved labor
extensively through the sixteenth century, enslaving people from the island
and moving them to colonies elsewhere. After nearly stripping the
island of its population, they essentially abandoned it in the
late fifteen hundreds. Then an English expedition arrived on Barbados
in sixteen twenty five, carrying about eighty English people and

(06:30):
about ten enslaved Africans. Within two years, England was actively
building a colony on the island and looking for a
profitable export crop to grow there. The first exports were
primarily cotton and tobacco, along with products like indigo and aloe,
and smaller amounts. At first, most of the labor force
on Barbados was indentured people from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales,

(06:55):
most of whom had come voluntarily. But as early as
sixteen thirty six the Barbados Council was outlining the distinction
between indentured people from Europe, often described as Christian in
laws and other documents, and enslaved people from Africa or
the America's That year, the Council resolved that quote Negroes

(07:15):
and Indians that came here to be sold should serve
for life unless a contract was before made to the contrary.
On the other hand, Europeans who arrived without a contract
were put into an indenture according to the quote custom
of the country. That's basically saying five to eight years.
In the sixteen forties, the island started shifting its production

(07:37):
over to sugar. That change happened pretty rapidly. By sixteen fifty,
sugar was essentially the only export crop that was being
grown on the island, although food crops were also being
grown to support the island's population. Before this shift, there
had been lots of smaller farms, each with its own
relatively small workforce of free, indentured, and enslaved workers, and

(08:00):
most of the indentured workers had signed their indentures voluntarily.
As the island turned to sugar production, many of these
smaller farms were consolidated. There were still free, indentured and
enslaved people working, but the farms got bigger and bigger
and they were owned by fewer people As they shifted
to sugar. These plantations also needed a lot more labor.

(08:23):
Sugar production was difficult and dangerous. Many of the planters
and overseers developed a reputation in Barbados for being particularly
cruel to the workers, including the indentured servants. Laws specifically
targeted indentured workers behavior, with punishments for most infractions involving
time being added on to their indenture, but some punishments

(08:45):
included being whipped or pilloried. All this meant that fewer
people in Europe were choosing to come to Barbados voluntarily,
and whether they came voluntarily or involuntarily, a lot of
them were leaving the island when their indenture ended. This
just led to a lot of turnover and a general
shortage of labor. English law at this point didn't really

(09:06):
differentiate between voluntary and involuntary indentures, and it didn't really
differentiate among English, Irish, Welsh and Scottish indentured workers. It did, however,
increasingly differentiate between indentured and enslaved workers. And we're going
to talk more about that in just a bit. At
the beginning of the sixteen forties, so at the same

(09:27):
time as this sugar transition was happening, events in Europe
dramatically affected the indentured labor force in Barbados as well
as in other parts of the Caribbean, and we will
get to that after a quick sponsor break. The use
of Irish indentured labor in Barbados, as well as in

(09:50):
other English colonies, was directly tied to English subjugation of
Ireland during the seventeenth century, which of course had roots
going back much further. Briefly, England took control of a
portion of Ireland in the twelfth century. As part of
the island under direct English control became known as the Pale,
and over the next few centuries, England repeatedly tried to

(10:13):
expand its influence and its territory beyond that region. This
included a series of plantations or resettlements of English people
into Ireland, and it was also complicated by religious divisions
following the Protestant Reformation. Between sixteen thirty nine and sixteen
fifty one, there was an interconnected series of violent conflicts

(10:34):
in England, Scotland and Ireland, which are sometimes grouped together
as the War of the Three Kingdoms. One piece of
this was the Irish uprising in sixteen forty one, also
called the Ulster Rebellion, and that followed on the heels
of the Ulster Plantation of sixteen o nine. This rebellion
led to massive sectarian violence and the deaths of at
least twelve thousand people. Another of the conflicts was the

(10:58):
English Civil War, but when the royalists who supported the
monarch Charles the First and the parliamentarians, who the name
suggests supported Parliament. There were a lot of factors involved
with this war, and one of them was that the
king raised an army against the wishes of Parliament in
order to deal with this rebellion in Ireland. Prior to

(11:18):
all of this, most indentured workers sent to the America's
had either gone voluntarily or had been convicted of a
specific crime. But during and after the war, political prisoners
were increasingly indentured and deported as well. For example, the
parliamentarians deported people for serving in the Royalist army, although
there was an exception for people who were compelled to

(11:41):
fight rather than having joined the Royalists voluntarily. After the
Battle of Worcester, which was the last major battle of
the war, in sixteen fifty one, at least ten thousand
people were deported, including people from Britain and Ireland, as
well as people from Germany. Although these indentures were supposed
to be temporary, the deportation was permanent, with those deported

(12:03):
quote not returning at any time to the prejudice of
this kingdom. Although this wave of mass deportations in the
seventeenth century has become most associated with Ireland, the first
wave of people to be deported were Scottish Royalists. Parliament
ordered this first wave of mass deportations in sixteen forty eight,
and it's not clear exactly how many people were deported.

(12:25):
Estimates ranged from the hundreds to the thousands. English Royalists
Sir Edmund Verney described it as saying, quote, I think
they mean to transplant the whole nation of Scots. The
deportation of Scottish Royalists and other people from Scotland continued
after the sixteen forty order, although they were more often
sent to New England instead of to the Caribbean. The

(12:47):
next year, mass deportation began in Ireland. On September three,
sixteen forty nine, Oliver Cromwell's forces lay siege to Drada,
finally breaching the city's walls on September ten. What followed
was a massacre, with Cromwell's forces killing Catholic priests and
monks on site and burning Catholic churches. At least two

(13:08):
thousand people were massacred, with accounts of English soldiers killing
one in every ten of the surviving Irish force and
sending the rest to Barbados. Soon, so many people were
being sent to Barbados and other Caribbean islands that the
name became a verb meaning to send a prisoner to Barbados.
Parliament's deportations to Barbados paused briefly in sixteen fifty because

(13:31):
the colony's government had Royalist sympathies, but they resumed in
sixteen fifty two. That same year, Parliament passed the Act
for the Settlement of Ireland, which confiscated Irish land from
people who had participated in the Rebellion of sixteen forty one,
redistributed that land to Cromwell's supporters, and it also penalized
people who had participated in the uprising in any way,

(13:54):
this involved still more people being deported to Barbados. As
we said earlier, Eish people had also been subject to
involuntary indentures. One reason was that England had a very
broad law that authorized the transport of quote rogues, vagrants
and sturdy beggars in England to the colonies in the
America's As all of this was going on, this law

(14:17):
was also applied to Ireland, with authorities given incredibly broad
authority to deport any Irish person who was believed to
be quote dangerous to the Commonwealth. By the time this
law was applied to Ireland, King Charles the First had
been beheaded, the parliamentarians had won the Civil War, so
people who were dangerous to the Commonwealth included Catholics, Royalists,

(14:40):
poor people, and Oliver Cromwell's personal enemies. In general, the
English thought that the Irish were uncivilized barbarians. They disapproved
of Irish people's religion and dress and sexual morays and culture.
This is especially true of Irish people who had retained
strong connections to Celtic customs. So it's very likely that

(15:00):
some of the people who were deported were deported simply
for being Irish. It is not clear exactly how many
people were deported during these years. Estimates range from as
low as ten thousand to as high as fifty thousand
Irish people between sixteen forty and sixteen sixty, when King
Charles the Second was restored as monarch and rolled back

(15:21):
some of Cromwell's policies. These forced deportees were arriving as
Barbados was shifting its system of agriculture from a variety
of exports to just sugar, meaning that Barbados saw a
huge influx of Irish indentured labor, and unlike in earlier
years of English colonization of the island, a lot of
these people had been indentured against their will. Although the

(15:45):
law recognized clear differences between indentured and enslaved workers, they
generally ate similar food, lived in similar housing, and did
similar work. A critical difference between the indentured and enslaved
workers was at the indentured people's bondage was temporary. As
we've noted, there were certainly cases where people were not

(16:05):
freed when they were supposed to be, or otherwise did
not live to the end of their indenture. But it
is also clear that there were more and more formally
indentured Irish people living in Barbados as time went on,
some of whom didn't want to work on sugar plantations anymore,
but also didn't have a means to leave. By late
sixteen fifty seven, there were reports of large numbers of landless,

(16:28):
unemployed Irish people in Barbados who were roaming the countryside,
causing mischief and supporting themselves through theft. In September of
that year, Governor Daniel Searle issued a public proclamation requiring
Irish indentured workers to have permission slips to leave their plantations.
He also ordered that Irish people who had no fixed

(16:49):
address and couldn't really explain what their purpose was when
questioned could be forced to work on a plantation for
a year. He also made it illegal to sell weapons
and amy into Irish people, and any Irish person found
in possession of weapons could be whipped and jailed. If
you have studied u s history at all, this probably
sounds a little like the freedom papers that free black

(17:11):
people were required to carry to prove that they were
not really enslaved, and like the laws that restricted free
people's behavior and movement, and while there is some similarity there,
there are also some key differences between the indenture of
Irish people and the enslavement of Africans in Barbados. And
we're going to get into all of that after we
first paused for a sponsor break. Although indentured service SUDE

(17:42):
was common in British territory in the seventeenth century, there
were some discussions happening about whether this was something English
people should be subjected to. In sixteen fifty nine, two
english Men named Marcellus Rivers and oxen Bridge Foil published
England Slavery or Barbados Merchandise, and that compiled various correspondents,

(18:03):
along with a petition that they presented to Parliament quote
on behalf of themselves and three score and ten more
free born Englishmen sold uncondemned into slavery. In their account,
those three score and ten men had been arrested following
an uprising in Salisbury in sixteen fifty four, but they
claimed that some of them had never been to Salisbury

(18:26):
or borne any kind of arms. Rivers and Foil also
claimed they had been sent to Barbados without any sort
of fair trial, where they were sold quote as the
goods and chattels of Martinel. They described, quote grinding at
the mills and attending at the furnaces, or digging in
this scorching island, having not to feed on, notwithstanding their

(18:47):
hard labor, but potato roots, nor to drink but water
with such roots washed in it, besides the bread and
tears of their own afflictions, being bought and sold still
from one planter to another, or attached as horses and
beasts for the debts of their masters, being whipped at
the whipping posts as rogues for their master's pleasure, and

(19:10):
sleeping in sties worse than hogs in England, and many
other ways made miserable beyond expression or Christian imagination. Sir
Martin Noel gave his own testimony that merchants on Barbados
had asked him to bring back artificers, and that these
artificers were indentured for five years and then given a
year's salary. He said that the work was hard, but

(19:31):
that the workers were treated civilly, and that the most
odious work was quote mostly carried on by the negroes.
This testimony about conditions in Barbados was not particularly honest
or forthcoming. This was somebody whose livelihood involved transporting large
numbers of indentured workers across the Atlantic, So Noel was
definitely protecting his own interests by minimizing conditions for indentured

(19:55):
workers on Barbados. And the debate in Parliament that followed
this petition had not touch on the larger question of
whether slavery was wrong, just whether it was wrong to
subject Englishmen to it, even temporarily. They didn't reach a
satisfactory answer to this question, in part because chattel slavery

(20:15):
had become deeply established in Barbados by the time Rivers
and Foil filed their petition, and it was replacing indentured
servitude as the primary form of labor. Barbados was shifting
from a society that had slaves to a true slave society,
one in which slavery was the primary source of labor,
with the society itself focused on maintaining and defending slavery.

(20:39):
You should also know this petition is one of the
sources for like how bad conditions were for Irish indentured labors,
but like to be clear, they were English and they
were filing it on the behalf of English people. Not Irish.
So although slavery as a practice was well established in
Barbados by the time that Parliament heard this petition, it
wasn't really encoded in law. That changed in sixteen sixty one,

(21:02):
when Governor Humphrey Walhon signed an Act for Better Ordering
and Governing of Negroes. It outlined a series of increasingly
severe and horrifying corporal punishments if an enslaved person quote,
offered any violence to any Christian, while also stating quote,
and it is further enacted and ordained that if any

(21:23):
Negro or other slave, under punishment by his master, unfortunately
shall suffer in life or member, which seldom happens, no
person whatsoever shall be liable to any fine. There For,
in other words, it was legal to kill an enslaved
person as punishment. This sixteen sixty one law was the
first comprehensive slave code in English territory, and it became

(21:46):
the template for other slave codes in the English colonies.
It used the words negro and slave interchangeably, use the
word Christian more often than it referred to like a
specific nationality, because at this point, like the idea of
Negro meaning all Africans, like that was used in the
language a lot, but like the idea of white at

(22:07):
least like whiteness existed in terms of how it was
influencing society, but it had not made its way into
language in the way that people use it today. Really.
On the same day that he signed this sixteen sixty
one Law about the Ordering and Governing of Negroes, uh,
the Governor also signed the Act for Good Governing of
Servants and Ordering the Rights between Masters and Servants. Unlike

(22:31):
the Act for Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes, this
act granted specific rights to indentured workers, including that justices
of the Peace had to hear disputes over how much
time and an indentured person had served, and a ban
on indenturing English children under the age of fourteen. It's
not totally clear if English is meant to include Irish

(22:53):
and Scottish children in this law. The law also required
masters to care for servants who became ill, and it
required married indentured workers to be sold together. Enslaved Africans
had none of these protections together. These two laws established
a legal difference between being an indentured servant and being

(23:13):
a slave. Servants being under English law were entitled to
being tried before a jury of their peers if charged
with a crime, but enslaved people explicitly were not. Servants
and enslaved people both needed tickets, which were essentially permission
slips to leave their plantations, but servants were required to
get them from their masters, while masters were required to

(23:36):
issue them to enslaved people. Slave owners were required to
capture and whip escaping slaves, but there was no similar
provision requiring the capture and punishment of indentured servants who
left before their indenture was up. For most but not
all crimes, Punishments for indentured people involved adding time onto
their contract, although in some cases the law allowed for

(23:59):
indenture people to be lashed or pilloried. Punishments for enslaved people,
as we referenced earlier, involved this series of increasingly severe
disfiguring and just horrifying corporal punishments ending in execution. By
the time these two laws were passed, enslaved Africans had
become the majority of the population of Barbados. By the

(24:21):
mid sixteen seventies, the island had about thirty three thousand
enslaved Africans and their descendants and twenty one thousand, five
hundred total Europeans, both free and indentured, and about one
thousand enslaved indigenous men from Northeast North America. Most of
the planters on the island were English, although some were Irish,
Scottish or Welsh, some of whom had arrived in Barbados

(24:44):
as indentured workers. Definitely was not possible for every indentured
person to move into the planter class, but there were
definitely people who did. The shift and population both created
and solved some problems from the answers point of view.
As we said earlier, the system of indenture had involved
a lot of turnover and labor shortages as people stopped

(25:07):
coming to the island voluntarily and as they left at
the end of their contracts. This of course did not
happen with enslaved workers, who were enslaved for life and
whose enslavement was passed down to their children through their mother.
But since so many former indentured workers were leaving Barbados
at the end of their contract, there also just were
not enough white people on the island to maintain the militia. Consequently,

(25:32):
the Barbados Assembly passed a series of laws to encourage
planters to hire more white labor, and to encourage white
laborers to stay on the island after their indentures were over.
This included the Act for the Encouragement of White Servants,
which gave white servants the right to bring complaints of
severe or harsh usage before the court. It's likely that

(25:54):
there were people who didn't bring such complaints because of
a fear of retaliation, but there were also indentured workers
who were freed by court order because of mistreatment under
this law. The law had no such provision for enslaved Africans.
These legal differences between enslaved and indentured people continued to
grow through subsequent laws. For example, an indentured worker could

(26:18):
testify against the person who held their indenture and court,
but enslaved people in Barbados could not testify against any
white person Until eighteen thirty one. It was illegal to
murder an indentured servant, but the murder of an enslaved
person was legal until eighteen eighteen. While it was true
that indentured people could be bought and sold as property

(26:40):
during the term of their indenture, once that indenture was
over they were free, while not only were enslaved people
property for life, but as we noted, their children were
also property from the time they were born, based on
the enslaved status of their mother. Although indentured servitude declined
steadily through the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century Barbados,

(27:00):
slavery wasn't abolished in Barbados until eighteen thirty four. We
should note that at various points in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, Irish indentured workers were involved in uprisings against
Barbados planter class, both on their own and as part
of uprisings that were planned and carried out primarily by
enslaved Africans. But the differences between the two groups were

(27:24):
present even in the way colonial authorities responded to these uprisings. Overwhelmingly,
Africans were executed for their role or even just alleged
role in uprisings, Irish workers often received no punishment. For example,
one Set two plan involved indentured Irish workers getting English

(27:45):
officials drunk ahead of the uprising. After the plan was uncovered,
ninety two enslaved people were executed. More than twenty others died,
either from injuries they had sustained or from other causes.
The Irish were ers who were arrested were ultimately released
with no punishment. After this, landowners started petitioning not to

(28:06):
be sent any more Irish laborers. So, to be very clear,
England oppressed Ireland systematically and violently for centuries, and Irish
people were involuntarily deported to Barbados and other colonies in
massive numbers as indentured servants. And in the first years
of English presence on Barbados, most of the workers were

(28:27):
indentured Europeans and not enslaved Africans. But there are real
and meaningful differences between indentured servitude and slavery and in
how these two populations fared in Barbados and elsewhere in
the decades and centuries that followed. The sources that people
generally cite to back up the idea of Irish people
being the first slaves generally conflate and dentured servitude and

(28:50):
slavery as the same thing. One book called to Hell
or Barbados uses the word slavery very broadly and applies
descriptions like actual historical descriptions of the mistreatment of enslaved
Africans to Irish indentured workers even when there's no evidence
to back that up. The book White Cargo, The Forgotten

(29:11):
History of Britain's White Slaves in America, similarly conflates chattel
slavery and indentured servitude, and the words of the authors
quote slavery is not defined by time, but by the
experience of the subject. The biggest online source for the
idea that Irish people were the first slaves is a
two thousand eight article called the Irish Slave Trade the

(29:31):
Forgotten White Slaves that was published by the Center for
Research on Globalization, which PolitiFact describes as quote, a Canadian
website that bills itself as an alternative news source but
has advanced specious conspiracy theories on topics like nine eleven,
vaccines and global warming. A lot of the claims put
forth in that article are demonstrably untrue, including that there

(29:54):
was a forced breeding program between indentured Irish people and
enslaved Africans. There is just no evidence for any of this.
There are also lots of viral images and memes purporting
to be about the realities of Irish slavery in the Caribbean,
and these posts frequently use pictures that have nothing to
do with seventeenth century Barbados. Many of them are photos

(30:18):
that are at least two hundred years more recent, showing
people in a completely different place and time. And some
of them really do depict actual historical injustices and atrocities,
like prisoners of war who were liberated from a Japanese
camp in World War Two, or child laborers working in
a coal mine in nineteen eleven. This does a disservice

(30:40):
to those people and that history, and to the people
in history of the Caribbean. If you want to see
a lot of examples of this, of just pictures that
are being used to supposedly be about Irish slaves that
are really about something completely different. Liam Hogan, who we
mentioned at the top of the show, has collected a
ton of them with references to what is really shown

(31:01):
in the picture. Lastly, in addition to conflating indentured servitude
and slavery and using imagery dishonestly and distorting the history
of both Ireland and Barbados, memes about Irish slavery are
often shared in a way that tries to shut down
conversations about the real systemic oppression that black people in

(31:21):
the United States and elsewhere, including Ireland, but the US
is where we have experienced with this, where that's happening
every day. The tone is often along the lines of
Irish people were the first slaves and they slash We
aren't asking for some kind of reparations. This deflection is
another disservice to everyone involved, but especially to black people.

(31:44):
It glosses over the centuries of sustained and systemic racism
that black people really have faced, including hundreds of years
of hereditary race based chattel slavery, discriminatory black codes that
were passed after the US Civil War, gem Crow segregation, lynching,
massive waves of racist anti black mob violence, and housing

(32:06):
and lending discrimination, all of which we have talked about
on the podcast before. That also glosses over some things
we haven't talked about but are on the list to
be talked about at some point in the future, like
the way Black Americans were excluded from a lot of
the programs involved with the New Deal during the Great Depression,
and excluded from many elements of the g I Bill.

(32:28):
It really goes on and on. It also glosses over
the real discrimination that Irish people have faced, both in
Britain and Ireland and in the US, especially as Irish
immigration to the US peaked after the Great Famine in
the eighteen forties, Irish people did face prejudice, housing discrimination
and job discrimination both were being Irish and in the

(32:50):
case of Irish Catholics because of their religion. And the
use of these memes and the way they are implemented
in these conversations derails an honest discussion of how Irish
American communities in the nineteenth century took an active part
in perpetuating slavery and racism. That's been touched on a
bit in the archive and our episode on the New

(33:11):
York Draft Riots, in which a predominantly Irish mob attacked
black communities for four days, burning down the homes of
black people and abolitionists, as well as the Colored Orphan Asylum,
but that was not an isolated incident. There were definitely exceptions,
but as a group, Irish Americans in the nineteenth century
were vocally against the abolition of slavery, in part because

(33:34):
free black and Irish workers would then be competing for
the same jobs, but also because of perceptions that abolitionist
organizations were focused on the needs of Africans and their
descendants instead of on the suffering of Irish people affected
by the famine. In reality, a lot of abolitionist organizations
also raised money for famine relief that in the years

(33:55):
leading up to the Civil War, there was a movement
in Ireland to repeal the Act of Union that had
made Ireland and England to line Kingdom. And one of
the most vocal proponents of this repeal movement was also
an ardent abolitionist, and the thread of anti abolitionism in
Irish American communities was so strong that abolitionists like William

(34:16):
Lloyd Garrison suspected that their strong support of the repeal
movement was basically like, if we can get this repealed,
that guy will have no more platform and maybe he
will shut up about this whole slavery thing. Also, all
of this feeds into the path that Irish Americans took
to move out of being second class citizens in the US,

(34:39):
both through local, state, and federal politics and through moving
into civil service jobs, including becoming firefighters and police, which honestly,
that feels like a subject for a whole different episode.
That's why nobody talks about the Irish slaves. I resisted
the temptation to just say, because that wasn't a thing

(34:59):
for half an hour. Um, I'm laughing only at your
temptation resistance, not at the subject. Uh. Do you have
listener mail for U? S? Tracy? I do have listener mail.
This listener mail is from Thomas, and Thomas says, I'm
conscious that what I am writing about is possibly a
misspoke moment rather than an error in the script. But

(35:22):
the figure you used early in the episode, that episode
being about what Tyler's rebellion early in the episode of
sixty thousand in England pre plague is a very low estimate,
and so much lower than any I've ever heard. I
had a double take attached to the paper calculating it,
page twenty two. The figure is given from what estimate
is four point eight one million, just before the plague. Obviously,

(35:45):
calculating the exact number of people in historical eras is
a really contentious topic, a is there are so many variables,
but I've never known a source to put England's population
so low and recorded history, which for England is traditionally
from Julius Caesar's invasion. I wonder if you found a
figure for a county and assumed it meant England. I'm
gonna pause here and say, I don't know how I

(36:08):
made that error. Usually, when we get an email about
an error, like I try to figure out where that
error got introduced into the show, because maybe there's something
I could do in my own process that would prevent
a similar error from happening in the future. In this case,
I have no idea. It's likely that paper was talking
about a specific county or a specific town and like,

(36:32):
and I misread it and thought that it was talking
about all of England. But at this point I tried
to go back through my sources and I was like, wow,
I have no idea. Um, so that number was way
too low. U to return to the email. It was
a great episode as ever, and the line about bad
takes about the plague made me cackle like an old witch.

(36:52):
In my schooling, we were taught at the plague ended
serfdom in England, introducing a wage economy, but not that
it caused the rent of signs. As an aside, it's
often said that my home county of Norfolk didn't regain
its pre plague population. We have a number of churches
without villages to this day. Though the overall population has
recovered greatly in the last century and exceeded pre plague

(37:14):
at last. There are still many churches that stand alone
in the fields or with a single farm for their
whole parish. Some of the latter still hold a church
service at harvest, but the otherwise are kept as historical
relics by the church's conservation trust or have become ruins.
In Devon, Yorkshire and other places, you can often see
ridge and furrow on the uplands, now mostly sheep grazing.

(37:36):
This is often where marginal land pre plague was farmed,
and after the plague was abandoned to livestock since there
weren't enough folk to farm marginal land. This is most
obvious from the air. Spend some time on Google Earth
over Dartmoor or x More and you could probably spot them.
This goes on with some additional details UM about medieval

(37:58):
villages in the area UH and a local legend about
where plague victims were buried at dead Man's Hill in Norfolk. UM.
Just a lot of ways that you can still see
evidence of the plague in the area today. So UH.
It's a little bit of a longer email. I'm just
gonna skip to the end, which is keep up the

(38:21):
good work. Podcasts are currently a great tonic and break
from the present. Yours, sincerely, Thomas. Thank you Thomas for
this note. Again, I have no idea now I made
that error. Um. I kind of wish I did, because
that's a very significant number between what I put into
script and what existed in reality. My theory is that

(38:41):
it is probably something as simple as Yeah, I can
sort of visualize in my head a PDF with the
number sixty in it. Um. Uh. But like I, my
attempts to go through uh the sources like to, they
did not yield the answer. Um, but also a typo

(39:04):
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(39:28):
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