[Notes on Barbadoes and Irish Slaves] [updated 15 Aug 2003] http://www.ushistory.org/franklin/courant/issue41.htm New England Courant Boston, Monday May 14. 1722. Cleared out William Fletcher, Richard Murphey, William Dunwell, Francis Bignal, and Thomas Forster for West Indies ================ http://www.celticcrossroads.com/celt1600.htm 1649- Oliver Cromwell invades Ireland at Dublin and quickly imposed English authority on Ireland. His troops killed 2,000 men in Dublin. With Irish resistance on the wane he takes Drogheda by storm and then Wexford. He found on entry that the local protestants had been tortured and massacred, not only by the locals but also by the English garrisons. He gave no quarter and put to death 2600 in Drogheda and 2000 in Wexford. Cromwell paid his soldiers and investors in the war effort with land confiscated largely from the Anglo-Irish Catholics of the Irish midlands who had joined the rebellion hesitantly and only to defend themselves against Puritan policies. 1652- Cromwell confiscates land from those who participated in the rebellion. A list of inhabitants of most of the southern part of County Dublin is assembled. Thousands of Irish men and women were involuntarily "transported" as laborers to the West Indies by Cromwell's forces. Many of these people and their descendents later moved to the United States (America?-no US that time). Plans to forcibly move Ulster-Scots from Ulster to the South drawn up but never enforced. 1653- Cromwell dissolves the "Rump" and becomes Lord Protector 1654-1656- A civil survey is recorded of major landholders. 1655 England divided into 12 military districts by Cromwell; seizes Jamaica from Spain 1656-1659 War between England and Spain 1656 Over 60,000 Irish Catholics had been sent slaves to Barbados, and other islands in the Caribbean. 1678- About 100 Irish families sail from Barbados to Virginia and the Carolinas. =========================== [Murphys & others in "The Complete Book of Emigrants, 1607-1660", by Peter W. Coldham, 1987.] p. 423 1659, 22 June. John Crews of Brixham, Devon, mariner, bound to James Wathen to serve 4 years in Barbados. 1659, 27 June. ...Darby Murfey of cork, Ireland, tailor, bound to Hugh Jones to serve 4 years in Barbados. 15 Aug 1679 (someone or something shipped) by the Friendship, Mr. William MURPHY, from Barbadoes to New England. 06-08 Nov 1679 ...by the Hopewell, Mr. William MURPHY, from Barbados to Antigua. 03 Aug 1683 . . . apprenticed in Middlesex to go for four years to Maryland, by the (ship) Content, Mr. William Johnson: . . . Richard MURPHY of London, Merchant. 04- 06 Sept 1699 The following were apprenticed in Liverpool to Richard MURPHY to go to VA by the Lamb of Dublin, said Richard Murphy master . . . =========================== Colonial Soldiers of the South, 1732-1774, by Murtie June Clark His Majesty's Ship "Lyon" Muster Book . . . dated at Jamaica 20 Jan 1740/1741 through January-February 1742 . . . Arthur Murphy, Discharged 31 May 1741, Port Royal . . . =========================== http://www.ireland.org/irl_hist/hist32.htm In the years 1652 and 1653 the plague, following the desolating wars had swept away whole counties, so that one might travel twenty or thirty miles and not see a living creature". In September 1653, was issued by parliament the order for the great transplanting. Under penalty of death, no Irish man, woman or child was to be found east of the River Shannon, after the 1st May 1654. ============================ (Handwritten Note: Genealogical - Murphy. Given to the Dept. by Mrs. Nora Hawkins, 553 Page Avenue, N.E., Atlanta, Ga.- This confuses more than one Richard, and some dates, but has probative value) RICHARD MURPHY The first Murphy who settled in America, of whom we have record, was Richard Murphy, born in Ireland about 1670 or 1675. When he was seven years old, he was kidnapped in Ireland and brought to America with a group of colonists about 1677-1680. He was apprenticed to William Byrd I, on the James River, between Richmond and Jamestown. When Richard Murphy was 21 years of age, he was released from his apprenticeship and, about 1696 or 1698, he married Mary Elisabeth Byrd, the youngest daughter of William Byrd of Virginia. While the author has no proof of the early history of Richard Murphy and his wife, Mary Byrd, the same story has come from five different sources and is the same in all details- that he married Mary Elisabeth, the youngest daughter of William Byrd I of Virginia. [DAR has proven this in not Wm Byrd I, father of WM II of Westover.] There are proofs that Richard Murphy was in Virginia in 1738. He owned land in Henrioo, Halifax, and Frederick Counties Virginia. (See Hening's Statutes of Va., Vol. 7, p. 215). Richard Murphy owned ferry boats that crossed the James River and landed on property owned by William Byrd I. (See Hening's Statutes of Va., Vol. 8, p. 130) The children of Richard Murphy (b. About 1670, m. about 1696) and Mary Byrd were: (2) Richard Murphy, Jr. born about 1698 (3) Tillman Murphy born about 1700 (4) Arthur Murphy born 1701 (5) Simon Murphy born 1703 (6) William Murphy born 1705 ...William Byrd II inherited most of his father's large estate, which included stores, warehouses, and about 26,000 acres of Virginia land. Mary received only a small legacy because she had angered her father by marrying his apprentice and an Irishman, Richard Murphy. [I disagree with this-mm] =========================== Edmund Morgan, _American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia_, Norton, 1975 "Up until the 1640's, when the principal crop in Barbados was, as in Virginia, tobacco, the labor force was mainly composed, as in Virginia, of white servants. But a shift from tobacco to cotton and then to sugar in the early 1640's made the islands less attractive than the mainland for servants who crossed the ocean voluntarily. Sugar production required such strenuous labor that men would not willingly undertake it. Sugar planters, in order to get their crops grown, harvested, and processed had to drive their workers much harder than tobacco planters did... Moreover, when a servant turned free, he found land much scarcer than in Virginia or Maryland. And even if he could hire a plot, at high rents, sugar production (unlike tobacco) required a larger outlay of capital for equipment than he could likely lay hands on. For these reasons, when Barbados servants became free, they frequently headed for Virginia or other mainland colonies. The sugar planters may thus have bought slaves partly because they could not buy servants unless they were shanghaied, or "barbadosed" as the word was at the time, or unless they were sent as prisoners, like the captured Scottish and Irish soldiers whom Cromwell shipped over. A dwindling supply of willing servants may have forced a switch to slaves." =========================== http://www.cyndislist.com/new1201.htm # The Davenport Family Genealogy This site offers views of several lines of the Davenport's from England, Barbados and the United States. [remember 1673 will of Simon Murphy, Lancaster Co Va left all to Davenport brothers] =========================== http://www.ewtn.com/library/HUMANITY/SLAVES.TXT In 1641, Ireland's population was 1,466,000 and in 1652, 616,000. According to Sir William Petty, 850,000 were wasted by the sword, plague, famine, hardship and banishment during the Confederation War 1641-1652. At the end of the war, vast numbers of Irish men, women and children were forcibly transported to the American colonies by the English government.(7) These people were rounded up like cattle, and, as Prendergast reports on Thurloe's State Papers(8) (Pub. London, 1742), "In clearing the ground for the adventurers and soldiers (the English capitalists of that day)... To be transported to Barbados and the English plantations in America. It was a measure beneficial to Ireland, which was thus relieved of a population that might trouble the planters; it was a benefit to the people removed, which might thus be made English and Christians ... a great benefit to the West India sugar planters, who desired men and boys for their bondsmen, and the women and Irish girls... To solace them."(9) Emmet asserts that during this time, more that "100,000 young children who were orphans or had been taken from their Catholic parents, were sent abroad into slavery in the West Indies, Virginia and New England, that they might lose their faith and all knowledge of their nationality, for in most instances even their names were changed... Moreover, the contemporary writers assert between 20,000 and 30,000 men and women who were taken prisoner were sold in the American colonies as slaves, with no respect to their former station in life."(12) Dunn claims in Barbados the Irish Catholics constituted the largest block of servants on the island.(13) Higham estimated that in 1652 Barbados had absorbed no less than 12,000 of these political prisoners.(14) E. Williams reports: "In 1656 Cromwell's Council of State voted that 1,000 Irish girls and 1,000 Irish young men be sent to Jamaica."(15) Smith declares: "it is impossible to say how many shiploads of unhappy Irish were dispatched to America by the English government," and "no mention of such shipments would be very likely to appear in the State Papers... They must have been very considerable in number."(16) Estimates vary between 80,000 and 130,000 regarding the amount of Irish sent into slavery in America and the West Indies during the years of 1651 - 1660: Prendergast says 80,000(17); Boudin 100,000(18); Emmet 120,000 to 130,000(19); Lingard 60,000 up until 1656(20); and Condon estimates "the number of Irish transported to the British colonies in America from 1651 - 1660 exceeded the total number of their inhabitants at that period, a fact which ought not to be lost sight of by those who undertake to estimate the strength of the Celtic element in this nation..."(21) It is also of importance to be aware of the fact, as Dunn confirmed, that most population lists for Barbados, Jamaica and the Leeward Islands concern only parish registers of the Church of England, all other people were essentially ignored in the head count."(29) From 1651 to 1660, between 80,000 to 130,000 Irish were transported. From 1660-1700, there was a large steady flow of Irish immigrants. ============================= http://www.nalanda.nitc.ac.in/resources/english/etext-project/history/irishrace/chapter16.html To relieve the government of this difficulty, Bristol merchants, and merchants probably from other English cities, trading with the new British colonies of North America, thought it a providential opening for a great profit to accrue to the soils of the benighted Irish women and children, and likely at the same time to add something to their own purses and those of their friends, the West India planters. A brilliant thought struck the minds, at once pious, active, and business-like, of those above-mentioned Bristol merchants-a thought which was the doom of thousands of Irish women and children. The names of a few of those Bristol firms deserve to be handed down. Those of Messrs. James Sellick and Leader, Mr. Robert Yeomans, Mr. Joseph Lawrence, Dudley North, and John Johnson, are furnished by Mr. Prendergast, who tells us that-"The Commissioners of Ireland under Cromwell gave them orders upon the governors of garrisons to deliver them prisoners of war . . . upon masters of work-houses, to hand over to them the destitute under their care, `who were of an age to labor,' or, if women, those 'who were marriageable, and not past breeding;' and gave directions to all in authority, to seize those who had no visible means of livelihood, and deliver them to these agents of the Bristol merchants; in execution of which latter directions, Ireland must have exhibited scenes in every part like the slave-hunts in Africa." A contract was signed on September 14, 1653, by the Com missioners of Ireland and Messrs. Sellick and Leader, "to supply them (the merchants) with two hundred and fifty women of the Irish nation, above twelve years and under the age, of forty- five." The fate reserved for the human cattle, as they must have been looked upon by the godly gentlemen who bartered over them, may be well imagined. It is calculated that, in four years, those English firms of slave-dealers had shipped six thousand and four hundred Irish men and women, boys and maidens, to the British colonies of North America. The age requisite for the females who were thus shipped off may be noted; the boys and men were not to be under twelve or over fifty. These latter were condemned to the task of tilling the soil in a climate where the negro only can work and live. As all the cost to their masters was summed up in the expense of transportation, they were not induced to spare them, even by the consideration of the high price which, it is said, caused the modern slave-owners of America to treat their slaves with what might be called a commercial humanity. It is easy to imagine, then, the life led by so many young men forced to work in the open fields, under a tropical sun. How long that life lasted, we do not know; as their masters, on whom they entirely depended, were interested in keeping the knowledge of their fate a secret. It is well understood that, when the unfortunate victims, had once left the Irish harbor from which they set sail, no one ever heard of them again; and, if the parents still lived in the old country, they were left to their conjectures as to the probable situation of their children in the new. Sir William Petty says that "of boys and girls alone "-exclusive, consequently, of men and women-" six thousand were thus transplanted; but the total number of Irish sent to perish in the tobacco-islands, as they were called, was estimated in some Irish accounts at one hundred thousand." The "Irish accounts" may have been exaggerated, but the English atoned for this by certainly falling below the mark, as is clear from the fact that, according to them, the Commissioners of Ireland required the "supply" for New England alone to come from "the country within twenty miles of Cork, Youghall, Kinsale, Waterford, and Wexford;" that "the hunt lasted four years," and was carried on with such ardor by the agents of many English firms that those men-catchers employed persons "to delude poor people by false pretenses into by-places, and thence they forced them on board their ships; that for money sake they were found to have enticed and forced women from their husbands, and children from their parents, who maintained them at school; and they had not only dealt so with the Irish, but also with the English." For this reason, the order was revoked, and the "hunt" forbidden. "The first Irish people who found permanent homes in America," says Thomas D'Arcy McGee, "were certain Catholic patriots banished by Oliver Cromwell to Barbadoes. . . . In this island, as in the neighboring Montserrat, the Celtic language was certainly spoken in the last century, 1 (1 The Celtic language-- that sure sign of Catholicity--was not only spoken there last century, but is still to-day. The writer himself heard last year (1871), from two young American seamen, who had just returned from a voyage to this island, that the negro porters and white longshoremen who load and unload the ships in the harbor, know scarcely any other language than the Irish, so that often the crews of English vessels can only communicate with them by signs.) and perhaps it is partly attributable to this early Irish colonization, that Barbadoes became 'one of the most populous islands in the world.' At the end of the seventeenth century, it was reported to contain twenty thousand inhabitants." Although Barbadoes is the chief island concerned in the present considerations, nevertheless nearly all the British colonies then existing in America, received their share of this emigration. Several ship-loads of the exiles were certainly sent to New England, at the very time that New-Englanders were earnestly invited by the British Government to "come and plant Ireland; " Virginia, too, paid probably with tobacco for the young men and maidens sent there as slaves. The "Thurloe State Papers" disclose the fact that one thousand boys and one thousand girls, taken in Ireland by force, were dispatched to Jamaica, lately added to the empire of England by Admiral Penn, father of the celebrated Quaker founder of Pennsylvania. ===================== http://www.ewtn.com/library/HUMANITY/SLAVES.TXT "In 1656 Cromwell's Council of State voted that 1,000 Irish girls and 1,000 Irish young men be sent to Jamaica."(15) Smith declares: "it is impossible to say how many shiploads of unhappy Irish were dispatched to America by the English government," and "no mention of such shipments would be very likely to appear in the State Papers... They must have been very considerable in number."(16) Estimates vary between 80,000 and 130,000 regarding the amount of Irish sent into slavery in America and the West Indies during the years of 1651 - 1660: Prendergast says 80,000(17); Boudin 100,000(18); Emmet 120,000 to 130,000(19); Lingard 60,000 up until 1656(20); and Condon estimates "the number of Irish transported to the British colonies in America from 1651 - 1660 exceeded the total number of their inhabitants at that period, a fact which ought not to be lost sight of by those who undertake to estimate the strength of the Celtic element in this nation..."(21) It is also of importance to be aware of the fact, as Dunn confirmed, that most population lists for Barbados, Jamaica and the Leeward Islands concern only parish registers of the Church of England, all other people were essentially ignored in the head count."(29) It is a matter of great importance to realize that most of the white slaves, servants and small farmers abandoned the West Indies for the mainland colonies in America. Dunn reports: "Between 1678 and 1713, Leeward sugar planters became more rich and powerful and controlled all local councils and assemblies so white servants and small farmers abandoned the Leeward Islands."(32) Craven said that between 1643 and 1667, about 12,000 left Barbados for other plantations(33) and Dunn said the white population of the Leeward Islands was reduced by 30 percent between 1678 and 1708.(34) According to Craven, in Colonies in Transition, prior to the 1680's, the hopes which sustained the Carolina venture continued to depend chiefly upon the migration of settlers from the older colonies, especially from the West Indies.(35) Smith asserted that after 1670, the emigration of whites from the smaller islands at least equalled the immigration.(36) Condon declared: "In [the] course of time many of those who had been transported to the West Indies in this manner found their way to the colonies on the continent, in search of greater freedom and a more healthful climate."(37) =============================