Irish Slaves?
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There was a group of Natives who became rich and they had white servants and white chauffers. Peoples from other ethnics groups are not allowed in the Native reservations
https://www.history.com/topics/westward-expansion/buffalo-soldiers
Buffalo soldiers
I was aware of that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_among_Native_Americans_in_the_United_States
The Civilized Tribes competed as successful farmers and were seen as a threat to local whites, one reason why they were deported west on the ‘trail of tears’ from their land.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears
They also developed their own written language for printing.
But there were not one rule fits all.
The Seminole tribe of Florida consisted of runaway slaves intermarried with the Creek.
https://www.thoughtco.com/black-seminoles-4154463
And there were cases of a few freemen ex-slaves owing slaves, so as you say…a very murky business.
In 1830 about 13.7 percent (319,599) of the black population was free. Of these, 3,776 free Negroes owned 12,907 slaves, out of a total of 2,009,043 slaves owned in the entire United States, so the numbers of slaves owned by black people over all was quite small by comparison with the number owned by white people.
42 percent owned just one slave and it is assumed that it was probably to own a family member to protect that person, as did many of the other black slave owners who owned only slightly more slaves.
But not always. In North Carolina, “Without doubt, there were those who possessed slaves for the purpose of advancing their [own] well-being … these Negro slaveholders were more interested in making their farms or carpenter-shops ‘pay’ than they were in treating their slaves humanely.”
In other words, most black slave owners probably owned family members to protect them, but others turned to slavery to exploit the labor of other black people for profit.
https://www.africanamerica.org/topic/did-black-people-own-slaves
In other words like we always said, the owning class is multinational, multiracial, multiethnic, multilinguistic, multireligious. So is the working class.
Therefore the working should organise on a class and not on any other basis; in fact should oppose any attempts either by the owning class or by elements within the working class to split them by “race”, “ethnicity”, nationality, language, religion, gender, etc.
From the Socialist Standard of July 1919;
The enclosure of the common lands in France, Germany, and England gave rise to a multitude of starving outcasts, some of whom turned their eyes toward the New World in the hope of finding an amelioration of their lot. These provided ready material for the kidnapper and emigration agent, who enticed them across the Atlantic and then sold them into a species of slavery (indentured service) even worse than the slavery of the blacks.
The records of the American white slave traffic exhibit an almost unbelievable barbarity. This traffic is fully discussed by James O’Neal in “The Workers in American History,” where the worst evils of Negro slavery are shown to be paralleled if not surpassed by the system of indentured service.
Of course, the followers of the “meek and lowly one” had to have a finger in the pie, and we read that—
The famous Whitfield, and the two Wesleys, visited America at this period (1743) and urged the expediency of allowing slavery. (Ludlow, p. 38.)
In his “Story of the Negro” Booker T. Washington points out that the white man sold his own people in America years before the first black slaver sailed into Jamestown, Virginia (1619).
That book by James O’Neal The Workers in American History is online here:
http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/inauthors/view?docId=VAC1311&brand=ia-books
Chapters 2 and 3 on white slavery and the white slave trade are real eye-openers and give the lie to those Irish historians who argue that indentured labour was relatively benign and did not amount to slavery.
There is a new form of slavery known as wage slavery which is imposed in all races, colour of the skin, nationalities, ethnics groups, sex, and sexual orientation, and it takes places at the point fo production that is the one that we must eliminate completely. I do not see any type of protest against that type of slavery
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