Adults weren’t the only whites being kidnapped and sold into colonial slavery. Forcible seizure of homeless and orphaned children was widespread. It was commonly known as “kid-nabbing,” later mangled by the Cockneys into “kidnapping.” Hundred of thousands of British kids were nabbed into slave work not only for colonial plantations, but also into forced domestic child labor for Britain’s smoke-snorting industrial machine.16

Because kidnapped men, women, and children were assigned forged contracts of indenture—or, in several cases, no indentures at all until they arrived in the New World—it’s difficult to gauge what percentage of white indentured servants came here against their will. In The Mind of the South, W.J. Cash guesses that “the greater number” of indentured servants “seem to have been mere children or adolescents, lured from home by professional crimps or outright kidnapped.”17

As with black slaves from Africa, white slaves from Europe were being kidnapped and shipped overseas not for reasons of unvarnished human hatred, but because it was profitable. When all the horrors are peeled away, the spirit business was precisely that—a business. Without a strong profit motive, the wholesale seizure of white flesh wouldn’t have occurred. “One could kidnap a man at random in the alleys of London and be sure of a ready sale for him in the South,” writes Thomas J. Wertenbaker in The First Americans.18 An ad in a 1784 New York newspaper refers to a still-vibrant “traffick of white people,”19 and an 1829 judicial decision notes that “It was formerly a considerable business to import Irish and German servants.”20

Although the spirit was himself frequently drawn from London’s lower classes, he was merely the hired gun of higher-ups so insulated by their wealth—merchants, judges, shipowners, and New World planters—that they could afford paying others to do their dirty work. Amazingly, kidnapping was in many cases a legally sanctioned practice. A 1618 Parliamentary bill allowed for constables to forcefully nab all orphaned children over eight years old and to detain them in prisons awaiting shipment to colonial plantations.21 Other laws allowed for the bodily capture of debtors and criminals. A 1652 Commonwealth law permitted officials to identify “begging or vagrant” subjects and cause them to be “seized on and detained” in order to be schlepped in shackles to the colonies.22 Similar initiatives arose throughout the British Isles as local officials realized it was cheaper to sail their lumpen proles westward than to continue doling out poor relief. Hoping to send their underclass en masse to New York, the Scottish Privy Council in 1669 issued orders for local officials to round up “strong and idle beggars, vagabonds, egyptians, common and notorious whoores, theeves, and other dissolute and lousy persons.”23 It was a new, and sparklingly effective, method of taking out the trash.

An estimate published in 1670 alleged that 10,000 British subjects had been kidnapped that year.24 A pamphlet issued ten years later reckoned that ten thousand Brits were still being captured per year, every year.25 If those stats are reliable, this would total 100,000 British kidnapping victims in the 1670s alone. In the history of slavery in America, fewer than 400,000 black slaves were imported.26 For all the bad rep Amerikkka gets about black slavery, it probably received no more than six percent of all African slaves shipped to the Western Hemisphere.27 (Psst—blame Brazil.) Making only mild extrapolations from these British kidnapping estimates, and surmising that roughly ten thousand whites were also abducted yearly for a forty-year run all told, the total of unwilling white immigrants brought to America would equal or surpass the number of Africans forced here against their will. And this estimate is probably low, as indentured servitude flourished for over two hundred years, not forty. And I’m not counting the fifty or sixty thousand convicts dragged over here in the 1700s.