I was a history education major in college, but I do not recall actual white slavery being practiced in the colonies. I do know that indenture contracts were sold back and forth in the same manner as any other commodity. Indentured servitude was little better than slavery at that time. Could that possibly be what was meant? I do not know, myself, but I think seeing these ads in the actual papers would be intriguing.
ST762
Indentured servitude for a period of years, usually seven, was separate and distinct from slavery. White slavery was actually practiced, most often against the Irish because they were in a constant state of rebellion against the British. Irish were more plentiful and less expensive than the Africans that later replaced them. Most white slaves ended up in the Carrbbean working on sugar plantations rather than in the North American colonies.
"The Establishment has created the misnomer of "indentured servitude" to explain away and minimize the fact of White slavery. But bound Whites in early America called themselves slaves. Nine-tenths of the White slavery in America was conducted without indentures of any kind but according to the so-called "custom of the country," as it was known, which was lifetime slavery administered by the White slave merchants themselves.
In George Sandys laws for Virginia, Whites were enslaved "forever." The service of Whites bound to Berkeley's Hundred was deemed "perpetual." These accounts have been policed out of the much touted "standard reference works" such as Abbott Emerson Smith's laughable whitewash, Colonists in Bondage.
I challenge any researcher to study 17th century colonial America, sifting the documents, the jargon and the statutes on both sides of the Atlantic and one will discover that White slavery was a far more extensive operation than Black enslavement. It is when we come to the 18th century that one begins to encounter more "servitude" on the basis of a contract of indenture. But even in that period there was kidnapping of Anglo-Saxons into slavery as well as convict slavery."
Read the link....
http://www.revisionisthistory.org/forgottenslaves.html