ROOTS & BRANCHES

“You should have known better.”

I heard that a bunch of time growing up since it was my mother’s favorite way to rebuke me.

I thought of the phrase again – for the first time in a long time! – when looking at a blog post by Dick Eastman a couple of weeks ago.

Under the headline “Africans Weren’t the Only Ones Sent to North America as Slaves,” Eastman then wrote about convicts and prisoners of war that the English “transported” to America and used as forced-laborers.

In Eastman’s version, he called them “the legal equivalent of slaves.”

The reaction of many in the genealogical community was swift and sharp.

I had an e-mail conversation with Eastman, who has been a friend of mine for a long time, in which he defended his statements, especially those about some thousands of Scottish prisoners of war, one of whom was an ancestor of Eastman.

It took a little bit into the conversation to understand that Eastman wasn’t talking about all white indentured servants – he freely admitted that he had confused the issue by using as a graphic a photo of a German indentured servant contract with the blog post – but his use of the word “slavery” to represent the treatment of this Scottish POWs was still disturbing.

I don’t think that anyone was disputing Eastman’s assertion that the Scottish POWs were mistreated and that some died as a result of that mistreatment without having been released from bondage.

Among my criticisms, I wrote that I could have freely accepted a headline along the lines of “Scots Shipped to America Endured Slave-Like Conditions” (especially observant “Roots & Branches” readers may recall I was a headline writer in my first career, so this is a hot button thing for me).

Others noted that unlike the enslaved African-Americans, who had no legal recourse to the courts and whose status was passed down to their children, these whites had at least theoretical legal rights and that there was no hereditary component to their servitude.

There is an undercurrent in the historical world – call it the “climate change denial of the genealogical community” – that tries to use a mythos of “whites were slaves, too” as a way of trivializing the African-American enslavement experience.

I am convinced that Eastman is not of that crowd. If anything, I think that he was a little bit emotionally carried away by the brutal treatment of his Scottish ancestor.

I won’t fault him for that, but I did score him using an outrageously unsourced presumption in the post about the Scots who were sent to the Saugus Iron Works in Massachusetts: “Little is known of the prisoners’ lives while working in the Iron Works but we can assume they worked in slavery conditions.”

No, if little is known about the prisoners’ lives then we most emphatically can’t assume anything – except that, well, little is known.

Dick, my friend, you should have known better!