Ireland had been for centuries a source of slaves for many different cultures from Europe and Africa. This was thought ended by Queen Elizabeth when she switched from Irish slaves to African slaves by decree. However, the Puritans brought the practice back using religion as a cause. How much this is true is questioned and research into it more detailed. But is it an interesting part of history and believed by many.
-----------------------
Historical Sketch of the Persecutions Suffered by the Catholics of Ireland 1884.
Jamaica and the adjoining islands had lately passed into the hands of England, and slaves were wanting to cultivate the sugar and tobacco plant on that deadly soil. Sir William Petty writing in 1672, states that six thousand boys and women were thus sold as slaves from Ireland to the undertakers of the American islands. Bruodin estimates the total number of the exiles from Ireland at 100,000, and adds that of these some thousands were transported to the tobacco islandsi‘ A letter, written in 1656, cited by Dr. Lingard, reckons the number of Catholics thus sent to slavery at 60,000. “The Catholics are sent off in shipsfull to the Barbadoes and other American islands. I believe 60,000 have already gone; for the husbands being first sent to Spain and Belgium already, their wives and children are now destined for the Americas.
When the Rev. John Grace visited these islands in 1666 he found that there were as yet no fewer than 12,000 Irish scattered amongst them, and that they were treated as slaves.—(From his letter of 5th Of July, 1669.)
The Irish historian, M‘Geoghegan, also writes that, exclusive of the women and children, “from fourteen to twenty thousand, both soldiers and country-people, were sold as slaves, and transported to America ” (p. 577).
The contemporary author of the supplement to Alithinologia published in 1666, thus writes :-“ The Puritan Government, in July, 1654, decreed that the Irish nobility should lose their rank, the people their liberty, wives their husbands, youth the opportunity of learning their religion; and further, that every Irishman would wear some servile badge or token by which to distinguish him from the English, and would be so weighed down by poverty that he could have but little means by his labour and industry for the bare support of his family (ad familiam parcius alena'am). The people should either give their labour at home for a small hire (temn' mercedc), or, as the early Christians were sent to the stone-quarries, so were the Irish Catholics now banished to the most remote Indian islands, there to discharge the most abject duties for the colonists, and the women were sold in the public‘
-------------------------------
Source "The American Catholic Quarterly Review" 1885 pages 289-293
Pym had declared in Parliament that they would not leave a priest in Ireland, and Cromwell himself had declared that " where the English Parliament had power no Popish Mass would be endured." It had now full power, and the Protector set himself in earnest to make good his words. The Catholic clergy were hunted down by armed parties. During the continuance of hostilities the priests who fell into the hands of the soldiers were, for the most part, at once executed, and even after the submission of the country the same practice was occasionally followed. Three bishops, O'Brien of Emly, MacMahon of Clogher, and MacEgan of Elphin, with about three hundred priests, were thus put to death by the Parliamentary soldiery, and all the remaining bishops save one, the aged and nearly helpless Bishop of Kilmore, were driven from the country. The remaining priests were keenly pursued everywhere....
...With the cant which was so characteristic of the Puritan declarations, Cromwell, at the same time that he declared the mass should not be endured, said, " he meddled not with the internal conscience of any man." To show what value was to be attached to these words, an oath was drawn up, in which the leading Catholic doctrines were declared to be false and damnable, and all Catholics were required by law to solemnly invoke the name of the Divinity to a denial of their internal faith. The oath might be tendered by any magistrate, and the penalty was the forfeiture of one-third of all property for a first refusal to take it, and of life imprisonment for a third. The Catholics who had received lands in Connaught, or still retained some movables, were summoned frequently to take this oath; but we are told it was almost generally refused. For the laborers and others who could not be fined, for the simple reason that they had nothing, another means of punishment was invented. Contracts were made with the Bristol merchants for the supply of Irish slaves for the West Indies, and the military governors of various posts, as Carlow, Kilkenny, Clonmel, Ross, and Waterford, got orders in 1654 to arrest "all such Irish within their precincts as could not prove they had a settled course of industry enough to maintain them," and deliver them and all children in hospitals and work-houses to Captain Morgan, Mr. North, and John Johnson, English merchants, who were empowered to transport them as slaves to the West Indies. Six thousand four hundred were thus carried into slavery before May, 1655, when the orders were repealed, because the slave hunters were found to be carrying off English children as well as Irish when occasion offered.
David Upton