"As I remained silent, he still went on — "Supposing, though, this Cassy to have been a sweetheart of yours, — and I can't conceive why else you show so much interest in her, — still I can hardly set you down as a votary of the sable Venus. She rather belonged to the white race; but you know, here at the south, we reckon all slaves as 'niggers,' whatever their color. Just catch a stray Irish or German girl, and sell her, — a thing sometimes done, — and she turns a nigger at once, and makes just as good a slave as if there were African blood in her veins."

Chapter 50
The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive (1852)
by Richard Hildreth

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_White_Slave,_or_Memoirs_of_a_Fugitive/Chapter_51



"WHITE PEOPLE SOLD AS NEGRO SLAVES
THE bleaching out of the Negroes until they were indistinguishable from
whites, profited immensely one group of lawbreakers, the kidnappers.
\Vhite people could now be seized and sold as Negro slaves. With so many
blond, blue-eyed negroes trying to win their freedom by claiming that
they were white, the unmixed white who fell in the toils of the kidnapper,
especially if he were poor and friendless, had little hope of escape. James
Annesley, son and heir of Lord Altham of England was "sent into America
and there sold as a common slave" for thirteen years.'
In 1791, William Cunningham confessed on his death-bed that in August
1771, that he had brought in a number of white people, kidnapped in Ireland
and sold them into slavery in America.When these Europeans arrived
young it was easy to sell them as Negroes, the more so as when they
were kidnapped they had no papers or proof of whom they were. Later,
as we shall see, white American children were kidnapped and sold in the
South.
Charles Mackay, a visiting Englishman, tells of seeing an Irishman who
could very well have been kidnapped as a child. "He seemed as white a s
myself and whom I at once put down as an Irishman of the purest qualities
from County Cork." When Mackay expressed his surprise at seeing such
a one for sale, the slave-dealer told him that he had sold "much whiter men" ;
that the Irishman's mother was colored; and bade him look at the man's
hair and lips as proof of the latler's ancestry? which, of course, was no
proof that the man hadn't been born in Ireland as Negroid-looking Irishmen
may still be seen in Ireland.
Even the courts sometimes ruled against these white people held as
Negroes, denouncing them as frauds. The most celebrated case of this kind
was that of a German woman, Salome Mueller, who was declared a Negro
by the Supreme Court of Louisiana, and of whom we shall hear later.
Anne Royal], who visited Virginia in 1823, wrote, "it appears that these
people instead of abolishing slavery are gradually not only becoming slaves
themselves but changing color"

"The Abbeville Banner of Alabama tells of one James C. Wilson, white,
who married a white woman, and later sold both her and her children to a
preacher, named Guilford, as slaves. Later. he sold his wife's fifteen-
year old brother as a slave, too.s
Bourne tells of a white boy who was kidnapped and was "tattoed and
tanned" until he was a "genuine nondescript. neither of the white, Indian nor African species," and then sold. T h e abolitionists finally helped him to escape."--Sex and Race Vol 2 J.A. Rogers

https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/e355ddf3-88d2-4dd3-b317-a96bbb51e0c5/Sex%20and%20Race%2C%20Volume%202%20Negro-Caucasian%20Mixing%20.pdf

"Some years since, a white boy about seven years old, was stolen from his parents. He was tattooed, painted, and tanned. Every other method was also adopted which wickedness could devise, to change the exterior appearance of the unfortunate creature, into one uniform dark tinge. In this wretched and forlorn condition, he grew up to maturity; driven, starved, and scourged, like the coloured people with whom he was obliged to associate.' He was a genuine non-descript, neither of the white, Indian, nor African species of man. At length, some friends of freedom compassionating his anguish, mercifully contrived to procure his escape to his parents in Ohio, who had lost this boy about twelve or fourteen years previous, when about to remove from Virginia, and of whom no vestige could be discovered. Like the Patriarch Jacob, they had been constantly bewailing their child, without however the additional pungency of knowing the desperate sufferings which were his constant portion.

The kidnapper was a pretended Christian, and when it was cominunicated to him, that the youth was in safety under the protection of his family, he cursed and reviled all those persons Avho had aided in his flight, as notorious knaves, who had united to rob him of his property, and threatened them with the punishment of the civil law : for it is one of the most flagrant crimes in the slave-driver's catalogue of iniquity, to encourage and assist a slave to escape from his fetters and agony."

Picture of slavery in the United States of America

by
Bourne, George, 1780-1845

https://archive.org/details/pictureofslavery00bour/page/n171/mode/2up