White Indentured slaves/Servants

[Capt. Bo of the WTF co.]

Bo,

Go over anything in class to support this statement?

Women and children made the journey as well, some voluntarily with high hopes for America, while others were “lagged” or kidnapped off the streets.

Capt. Sterling; a request to help speed the process.

Could you post the specific questions so I can paste them to a word doc and print them off? It will be easier for me to get specific answers from the instructors this way.

You have MY curiosity up and going now, and I can do the research through inter-library loans etc.

We breeze through information so fast in class, and alot of the details we get are not in the textbook, but from the instructors knowledge/memory. There was mention of women and children "making the voyage", but I do not recall mention of the kidnapping. It seems to me that I remeber the auctions were in South carolina, as there were less scrupulous individuals running the government intrests in that area. I will research this, it may come in very handy for me later as well. thanx for this topic! I'm sure few have taken it on!

Bo

[Capt. Sterling]

Will pm you... thanks!

[Cheeky Actress]

It seems to me that I remeber the auctions were in South carolina, as there were less scrupulous individuals running the government intrests in that area....

Bo

Thank you Capt. Bo! We understand that it may take a bit of time to dig through your textbooks and lecture notes.

Wow! You struck the nail right on the head with that topic, Bo! I’ve been thinking along the same lines about such a thing, but I am going to have to see if I can find any research that can back that up. I am sure that even though the colonies were under British law, they did what ever it took to ensure their growth and livelihood. Even though some practices may have not been the norm…never say never!

Most of the information is from the New England and Eastern colonies. I would really like to hear more about the ‘southern colonies, such as Virginia, the Carolinas, Kentucky or Georgia.

[Cheeky Actress]

He then goes on for another two pages, including a description of the english practice of extending the contract by sale.

This would be interesting to make reference to. PM me and we'll chat.

[Cheeky Actress]

This is Virginia, Lill... it will make Newport look better than Salem...now back to the rest of the thread

Thank you Captain!

[Capt. Sterling]

I am sure that even though the colonies were under British law, they did what ever it took to ensure their growth and livelihood. Even though some practices may have not been the norm…never say never!

Honestly, down here, after Jamestown but before the turn of the century, colonists viewed themselves as Virginians first, English second, if English at all...one author even goes so far as to state that Virginians were so into politics/law that English governors never had a chance... Virginians would pass laws, then put them on the books prior to the King's approval, then IF the monarch did disapprove of a law they created, they would take it off the books and automatically replace it with the same law, just rewritten... and then the entire process of sending it to England for the King's approval would start all over again, while the law remained in effect in the colony...got to love em!

[Cheeky Actress]

Captain Sterling, what do you know about the Virginia Rebellion (aka Bacon's Rebellion) of 1676?

Cheeky

[Capt. Sterling]

Captain Sterling, what do you know about the Virinia Rebellion (aka Bacon's Rebellion) of 1676?

Cheeky

Since this thread is for Indentured servants, and the Virginia Rebellion of '76 is another matter all together, I shall be happy to email you off the pub with information. And even though they have a tendency to teach it here that it was the start of standing up against the Crown, leading eventually to the American Rev. War... seems more like an excuse to try and eradicate the Indian populations at the time which turned into a pissing match between Berkley and his cousin.

[Cheeky Actress]

Since this thread is for Indentured servants, and the Virginia Rebellion of '76 is another matter all together, I shall be happy to email you off the pub with information.

Well, my reason for asking about the Virginia Rebellion of '76 here is because many of the supporters of the rebellion were indentured servants and slaves, who were a majority of Virginia's population.

I would like to learn more about this – off line, of course.

[Capt. Bo of the WTF co.]

I was too excited to wait on this! Just found a gold-mine in the text from my first History text to support your claims! Stephen B Oates, a well known and respected historian, has been putting out high quality work a long time, and most people know his name and reputation. "Portraits of America" vol.I,sixth edittion. I want to type out all references to this topic and send them to you, but here are a few that made me run to the computer like a kid to a Christmas tree; pg. 18 (From 1688)

"Orphaned, or more frequently illegitamate and abandoned at birth, they were sent to workhouses and to Parish nurses. A Parlimentary study found that of all such infants born or recieved in Londons workhouses in a three year period, only seven in every hundred were alive at the at the end of that time. As part of the "surcharge of necessitous people," orphaned and impoverished children who were public charges were sporadically dispatched to the colonies as indentured servants."

That's just one! Here is another just to get the spirit of things: pg. 18 in reference to the overpopulation of poverty classes;

"The growing need for labor in the colonies supplied the the answer, a system of indenture, based on the long established practice of apprenticeship, was devised. Agents paid for the ships passage of impoverished men and women who were willing to work off the cost of thier transportation."

I want to put this one here for certain also, on page 19 in reference to being "spirited away";

In 1653 Robert Broome secured a warrant for the arrest of a ships captain charged with carrying off his son, aged 11, who had been spirited aboard."

"Redemptioners" was the term used for those who were to auction off thier indenturement sto the highest bidder once landing in the colonies!

Capt. Sterling, I cannot wait to get the whole of this to you! I am still going to dig deeper to find out where Mr. Oates got this wonderful information!

Til then... Bo

[Capt. Sterling]

Thank you Sir! We are off to a good start indeed!!

[Capt. Sterling]

Bo, here's one for you....

See if you come across anything regarding ship captains known as "spirits" in the practice of Indentured Servitude.

[Capt. Sterling]

As to George Alsop:

"In these descriptions of servants' working conditions generally, Alsop, if not intentionally dissimulating, has at least based conclusions too exclusively on his own treatment by the considerate Captain Stockett. (who seems to be the exception regarding masters in Maryland at the time, not the rule) The fact is that Alsop, a servant for all but a few months of his time in Maryland, saw little of the province outside his immediate circumstances. Two men who did, who traveled the same territory extensively a few years later, viewed life and servitude in Maryland less benignly. Jaspar Dankers, or Dnackaerts, and Peter Sluyter were Dutch Labadists, members of a quietist sect dedicated to simple living and holding goods and children in common. Some 13 years after Alsop's book was published, Dankers and Sluyter visited the plantation lands as part of a settlement-scouting expedition that included visits to New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. They found Alsop's Maryland a place of privation, hard work, and hunger."

Alsop himself wrote a book, with possible help from them that were promoting the settlement of Maryland, called A Character of the Province of Maryland. Which is "such a strange, almost self-cancelling mixture of faithful observation and shameless promotion, conviction and posturing, bawdiness and piety, pastoral rhapsodizing and choleric anger, that one suspects Alsop himself could no longer distinguish what is imagined from what is fact. In his own preface he writes "If I have wrote or composed any thing that's wilde and confused, it is because I am so my self, and the world, as far as I can perceive, is not much out of the same trim; therefore I resolve, if I am brought to the Bar of Common Law for anything I have done heare, to plead Non Compos Mentis."

He also wrote about his own freedom "While I was linckt with the Chain of a restraining Servitude, I had all things cared for, and now I have all things to care for myself."

So one can only wonder how reliable his claims regarding yer auctions are...

Alsop, George. A Character fo the Province of Maryland.

Dankers (Danckaerts), Jaspar, and Peter Sluyter. Journal of a Voyage to New York and a Tour of Several of the American Colonies, 1679-80.

Bolton, Charles Knowles. Portraits of the Founders: Portraits of Persons Born Abroad Who Came to the Colonies in North America Before the Year 1701.

Van der Zee, John. Bound Over: Indentured Servitude & American Conscience

[Silkie McDonough]

Thank you all ...this is facinating!

[Capt. Sterling]

For the ladies:

Virginia was one of the first states to acknowledge slavery in its laws, initially enacting such a law in 1661. The following year, Virginia passed two laws that pertained solely to women who were slaves or indentured servants and to their illegitimate children. Women servants who produced children by their masters could be punished by having to do two years of servitude with the churchwardens after the expiration of the term with their masters. The law reads, “that each woman servant gott with child by her master shall after her time by indenture or custome is expired be by the churchwardens of the parish where she lived when she was brought to bed of such bastard, sold for two years. . . .”

[Silkie McDonough]

Never mind the fact that she may not have had ANY control over the decision to conceive the child.

[Cheeky Actress]

Bo, here's one for you....

See if you come across anything regarding ship captains known as "spirits" in the practice of Indentured Servitude.

Captain,

I did find some reference to "spirits - "Virginia Impartially examined, and left to publick view to be considered by all Judicious and honest men", by William Bullock, 1649

pg. 14

"...And lastly, the unfitnesse of the people transported for the Work, or being fit, not well ordered, hath hindred the Countries recoverie very much.

The usuall way of getting servants, hath been by a sort of men nick-named Spirits, who take up all the idle, lazie, simple people they can intice, such as have professed idlenesse, and will rather beg then work; who are perswaded by these Spirits, they shall goe into a place where food shall drop into their mouthes: and being thus deluded, they take courage, and are transported. But not finding what was promised, their courage abates, & their minds being dejected, their work is according: nor doth the Master studie any way how to encourage them, but with sowre looks, for which they care not; and being tyred with chafing himselfe, growes carelesse, and so all comes to nothing. More might be said upon this subject, were it fit: 'tis most certaine, that one honest labouring husbandman shall doe more then five of these."

The Charge, pg. 39

"The Servants are taken up by such men as we here call Spirits, and by them put into Cookes houses about Saint Katherines, where being once entred, are kept as Prisoners untill a Master fetches them off; and they lye at charges in these places a moneth or more, before they are taken away. when the Ship is ready, the Spirits charges and the Cooke for dieting paid, they are Shipped, and this charge is commonly.."

[Cheeky Actress]

More regarding "Spirits"

Slavery, Servitude, and British Representations of Colonial North America

by Mason, Matthew

Having little Tommy sold as a slave for life also heightens the drama of his sufferings, but it accords less neatly with the realities of colonial life. Smith, still unsurpassed as a scholar of white servitude in colonial America, concluded that "there was never any such thing as perpetual slavery for any white man in any English colony.

"To be sure, colonial labor recruiters abducted hundreds of white Britons. Several cases of kidnapping grabbed headlines in England, and led to legal prohibitions on the recruiting agents (known as "spirits" for their dubious and clandestine practices).

Defoe wrote of a regular trade in kidnapped children from England to Virginia.

Having young Tommy kidnapped off the streets of London, then, was no grand distortion on Kimber's part. But having him sold for life in Maryland did not square with the colonial racial divide: white colonists truly enslaved only people of African or Native American descent.

Kimber, however, was not alone in failing to draw a line between the term of unfreedom white colonists served and the lifetime bondage black slaves suffered. Non-fictional writers Hellier, Revel, and Moraley all joined in reviling planters who treated white servants and black slaves much the same. Cook applied the word "Slave" to an indentured servant woman he met, as well as more generically to the knaves of Maryland.

Defoe also used the terms "slave" and "servant" interchangeably. In Moll Flanders the heroine laments being "bound to Virginia, in the despicable quality of transported convicts destined to be sold for slaves.

“He also had Colonel Jack sold and put in the field alongside slaves in Virginia. He and his fellow white servants "worked hard, lodged hard, and fared hard" in the "miserable condition of a slave. “Nor were these writers alone, for all Britons tended to talk of the spirits' victims as "slaves."

A popular play produced in London in the late 1750s features a colonial agent attempting to kidnap an Irishman, who laments being sent "into the other world to be turn'd into a black negro."

And a Yorkshire newspaper complained that indentured servants were sold in America "for slaves at public sale. . . They might as well fall into the hands of the Turks, [for] they are subject nearly to the same laws as the Negroes and have the same coarse food and clothing."

And Another

From NIAHD Journals -

Suppression, Scaliwags, and Sivil Disobedience

author: Katherine Mary BUSS

"In the 1650’s, a river of indentured servants were sent over during the tobacco boom. Many were the scum of England; several criminals and many reluctant to work, sent away from the mother country to be dumped onto Virginia shores. Others, as Breen notes, were the victims of crooked port merchants called “spirits” who used propaganda to beguile the desperate and naïve into indentured servitude in Virginia. The Virginia masters were as disgusted with their labor force as the servants were frustrated by the abuse, malnourishment, and false expectations of the New World. Many accounts of beating, poor food, and perpetual servitude exist. The few servants that did obtain their freedom could not find land due to the fluxing Tobacco prices—thus evolved into a group of landless laborers, who wandered and lived off other landowner’s livestock. A “giddy multitude” of the dissatisfied, destitute, and detained had formed—composed of both black, white, the enslaved, and the freed but landless –all were united by the same exploitation of the master and the pretentious plantation owner."

[Cheeky Actress]

(Lilly Jumping up and down)....Lookie - I've Struck GOLD!

Preventive and punitive regulation in seventeenth-century social policy: conflicts of interest and the failure to make 'stealing and transporting Children, and other Persons' a felony,1645–73

Author: Wareing J.

Source: Social History, Volume 27, Number 3, 1 September 2002 , pp. 288-308(21)

[Cheeky Actress]

Update:

It seems that there were several good finds regarding the white indentured servant. Captain Sterling, Capt. Bo of the WTF co., have either of you obtain additional information since last we spoke?

[Capt. Bo of the WTF co.]

WOW! Talk about coincidence! I just logged on here to update you all! TOO WEIRD! Are you on my wave-length or what?

I have not had any luck locating the primary sources, nor could I find anything concerning this DURING the GAoP, so out of frustration, I went back to the textbook and read through both chapters again. Guess what?

I found two reasons why the Identured Service went missing during that time. I have photo copied from two of the college textbooks and will be sending these pages to Capt. Sterling in the morning.

In the mean time, to give you a brief on my findings...

"After 1660... opportunities for the "freemen" declined. In England the population spurt ended, and the great London Fire of 1666 sparked a building boom that soaked up job seekers. As the supply of English indentured servants dried up in the late seventeenth century, southern planters looking for laborers turned increasingly to black slaves."

And, after Bacon's Rebellion;

"The distant English King could scarcely imagine the depths of passion and fear that Bacon's Rebellion excited in Virginia.... The rebellion was now suppressed, but these tensions remained. The Lordly planters, surrounded by a still-seething sea of malcontents, anxiously looked about for less troublesome laborers to toil in the tobacco kingdom. Their eyes soon lit on Africa."

As Capt. Sterling noted, there are references both before and after, but the GAoP is a gap in this indentured servitude practice.

I will continue to look about because I still believe there was some of this going on during that time, even though not on as large a scale as before and after. Hope this helps.

Bo

[Cheeky Actress]

Capt. Bo! (Ya...too weird! Shakes off the chill)

The Captain and I must thank you for your help in this matter! Great information and very helpful.

We are on our way to Williamsburg and hope to dig up additional information regarding roughly 1680s to 1728 or so.

I have been most successful with my own family line (MacKinnon/McKinney), thanks to my Cousin Kevin and Uncle Ted.

If we find anything while we are out and about in Williamsburg...we shall post it here!

[Cheeky Actress]

Captain Bo,

Captain Sterling has requested that I send you his greatest thanks for your letter regarding the indentured white servants in the mail. Wonderful information!

This morning, we did a small lecture on it for the whole 5th grade classes here in VA. They were very well behaved and showed great interest, which can be very hard for a 5th grader!

We cannot thank you enough for you help in the matter.

[Dorian Lasseter]

This has been very informative, especially this last bit from Capt. Bo...

One thing though... All the info so far talks about the W.I.S. in the upper colonies... Va, etc...

What about in the Caribbean? I could assume it's all the same, but...

Just wondering where there might be statements of such from the Carib.

[Capt. Sterling]

This has been very informative, especially this last bit from Capt. Bo...

One thing though... All the info so far talks about the W.I.S. in the upper colonies... Va, etc...

What about in the Caribbean? I could assume it's all the same, but...

Just wondering where there might be statements of such from the Carib.

Haven't come across anything yet, primarily because we have been concentrating on the North American colonies... but will start looking... Also, Capt. Lasseter, have spoken to the folks at Jamestown... gave me some splendid references regarding the Native Americans. They do have evidence of them making a point of coming in to trade at port towns during the GAoP time frame, especially Williamsburg's market times. They were actually very excited about having the NAs portrayed as doing such...