Rating: 
Summary: A Paradigm shiftin novel
Review: While I had heard of the terms redneck or redleg, little did I know that these terms originated from insults hurled by African Slaves unto White Slaves on plantations in the new world. This is the type of information that author Hoffman transmits to the reader in this book!The thrust of this book is shocking and apparantly unassailable. Namely that the vast majority of slaves in the New World to perhaps the 1830/1840's period were poor whites enslaved by creditors, by welfare 'agencies' or perhaps kidnapped off the streets of England, Ireland, and Scotland for slave labor picking tobacco in the New World. Constant acts of cruelty and inhumanity are chronicled. Everything from entire English and Irish families being sold to different slavemasters piecemeal in different states. Husbands and wives, one sold to work in New York, one sold to work in Georgia, never to see each other again. Children used by the modern Victorians to clean putrid chimneys so reducing their health that the vast bulk of the merry Chimney Sweeps we see caricatured in Merry Poppins never made their 16th Birthday in real life conditions, and startlingly, the abolitionsits who advocated so hard to an end to African Slavery, in the same breath and in the same day did nothing to free their own 'white slaves' and worked and beat many to death while advocating the freeing of African slaves. What does this book boil down in the final analysis. It will assure that you will scoff at those asking for slavery reparitions, that furthermore, the vast bulk of our population with roots in North American going back before 1850 are the descendants of slaves, that indentured service was really a racket that even Benjamin Franklin had to escape from it as a boy. Nothing could be more perfect to sum up this book than the quote from Shakespeare at the start of 'They Were White and They Were Slaves' which was "NOW STEP I FORTH TO WHIP HYPOCRASY". Hoffman's little book is an important piece of history, and will forever alter your perspective on current 'reparations' demands, the lawsuits upon companies that used to insure slaves, etc.
| 
