Stillbirth of a NationJames Lafond
https://smile.amazon.com/Stillbirth...oding=UTF8&qid=1593373380&sr=8-2Primary source history is the best history, and James LaFond gives us primary source material that will sear your undies.
This is the story of Peter Williamson, a child captured/kidnapped in Scotland and sold into bondage ("indentured servitude") with the help of the local Scottish law judges at the age of 12 years. He Served out his indenture (unlike so many who died indentured) and started a family...and was then captured by indians in New England. He survived them, fought them for years, then went back to Scotland and told his tale, whereupon he was imprisoned by local Scotish law judges (some of whom were the ones who help sell him into bondage) and others who wanted to maintain the profitable racket of white slavery. He eventually sued them and depsed many witnesses to their crimes and was eventually freed and then wrote his autobiography.
Lafond largely lets Peter Williamson tell his own story and only adds commentary to aid the reader understand the implications of Williamson's tale. Cutting to the chase, Williamson's tale of pre-revolutionary America is one of 13 slave states, each unique in many ways, but all based on master/slave plantation economies. And most of thse slaves were white: Irish, Scottish, English. African slaves were a luxury item costing 4x what an Irish boy or Scottish rebel sold into slavery might cost. Lafond also examines the difference between slavery and indentured servitude when
1. 95% of the indentured died while serving out their indenture
2. The indentured was captured and went unwillingly.
3. The capturer/buyer and seller were the only parties to gain from the transaction.
Stillbirth of A Nation is the story of America’s birth as a slave nation. Among the author’s startling claims are:
-Slavery in the English Colonies, from Carolina to Canada, did not have its origins in the transatlantic slave trade conducted by Portugal, Spain and Holland, but in England’s own ancient and rich history of child slavery, transformed into a hideous human trafficking industry with the criminalization of poverty in Elizabethan England.
-American notions of freedom, liberty and autonomy did not rise from a free pioneer society, but were learned from Native Americans.
-That the American tradition of bearing arms was a reaction against the enslavement of whites by whites, whose masters armed and paid Indian warriors to police the frontiers for runaways.
These three key concepts and many more fascinating facts about early American life are illuminated through the memoir of Scottish slave Peter Williamson, who had his freedom taken four times, by British, French and Indians.
