I know that 'slavery' has greatly different meanings for different groups of people and I am interested in understanding the context in which this occurred an the context of how it played out.
I am specifically interested in learning about things like: How many Irish were brought to the Americas as slaves? What were the conditions these Irish slaves lived in [with specific regard to how African slaves were treated]? How long were the Irish brought to America in this regard?
Here is the link that was posted on my fb wall that made me think "Huh."
The article says things like:
"Slave owners would hang their human property [referring to Irish slaves in America] by their hands and set their hands or feet on fire as one form of punishment. Some were burned alive and had their heads placed on pikes in the marketplace as a warning to other captives."
and
"The Irish slave trade began when James VI sold 30,000 Irish prisoners as slaves to the New World. His Proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies."
"Ireland quickly became the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants. The majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white."
"From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English and another 300,000 were sold as slaves. Ireland’s population fell from about 1,500,000 to 600,000 in one single decade."
"During the 1650s, over 100,000 Irish children between the ages of 10 and 14 were taken from their parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and New England. In this decade, 52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to Barbados and Virginia."
Are the above quotes true? If so what were the conditions of the average Irish slave in America?
and
Was slavery a main contributing factor to this population decline?
This is a notorious bad history myth. Liam Hogan has written a lot on it. A summary of his rebuttal is published [here] (https://www.opendemocracy.net/beyondslavery/liam-hogan/%E2%80%98irish-slaves%E2%80%99-convenient-myth).