As many of you know I have been doing a bit research into this topic, (Scottish Slavery) and I thought you may have an interest in this reply I got from the MacLean List. There were two situations for the Highland Scots and Irish, indentured servants and outright slaves. The Indenture servants were much as describe by previous e-mails and the treatment of the servant was depended on the person the servant was indentured to. It was still for a fixed period and the person was free after his or her indenturment. But slavery was also employed. A number of the chiefs, the very people appointed to protect the highlanders and their lands betrayed them. These chiefs knew that many of the Cleared Highlanders that they forced to emigrate to America were being sold into slavery in the southern United States. When it was found out that some of the new spiritual representatives were accepting substantial sums of money from Southern US slave-owners the lay members of the church, the Press and the people of Scotland generally were abhorred that they should even contemplate taking money from slave- owners and they were regaled with cries of "Send back the money." After due deliberation The Free Church of Scotland's official response was, "Neither Jesus Christ nor His holy apostles regarded slaveholding as a sin" - and kept the money. In 1803 the Rev. James Hall commented, "The state of our Negroes is paradise compared to that of the poorest Highlanders" Ironic words considering that many of these poor Highlanders would soon become slaves themselves working beside the enchained Negro slaves. This practice of sending defeated people into slavery was started by Cromwell in Ireland. More than 100,000 Irishmen were sent to the West Indies as slaves. In the 1980's the tiny Caribbean Island of St Kitts erected a monument to the 25,000 Irish slaves that Cromwell people had sent to work in the sugar fields. Many died of disease and overwork. If an Irish slave was caught trying to escape, they branded his forehead with the letters FT (Fugitive Traitor). Other common punishment meted out by the English land owners including whipping or hanging them by their hands and setting them on fire. The records state that some 150 Irish slaves practicing Catholicism were shipped to an uninhabitable island and left to starve. The one difference between these white slaves and the black slaves was that slavery for the white person ended with him when he died. Or if he escaped he could disappear in the general populations since he looked like all the other white people.