From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend

by Priscilla Murolo

  Despite reports of such abuses, a great many people indentured themselves voluntarily in return for transportation to the New World and, they hoped, better opportunities than Europe offered. The volunteers signed indentures with labor contractors who paid their passage and then sold them to American employers. Because there was room to haggle, men and women indentured under this arrangement served relatively short terms. But quite a few servants had no choice in the matter. Some were English convicts sentenced to servitude in the colonies. Others were destitute children kidnapped off the streets of England’s seaports or ordered into indenture by colonial authorities. Still others were debtors bound by law to work off their obligations to creditors. Among these groups—especially convicts and children—terms of up to fourteen years were not at all uncommon.

  Indentured servants faced the hardest times during the early decades of colonial settlement. Newcomers routinely succumbed to the deadly fevers that struck the colonies every summer. And the “seasoned” servants who had survived their first summers were far from safe—especially the thousands indentured to tobacco planters in the Chesapeake region of Virginia and Maryland. Nearly two-thirds of these workers died before their indentures ended. Following an Indian attack that killed 347 Jamestown residents in March 1622, the Virginia Company back in England inquired into the fate of the 700 people in the colony as of spring 1619 and the 3,570 immigrants who had arrived since then. A head count showed that just 1,240 remained alive. Some probably envied the dead. As one of Virginia’s women servants wrote in 1623, “I thought no head had been able to hold so much water as hath and doth daily flow from mine eyes.”

  Endurance had its rewards. On fulfilling the term of service, each worker except for the convicts and debtors received “freedom dues”—a sum of money, a parcel of land in some colonies, and perhaps other things, too, such as clothing, tools, a horse or a cow. In theory, the dues would turn released servants into proprietors of American farms, craft shops, or other small businesses. In fact, such happy endings were rare. Surviving records suggest that, of all the people indentured in British North America between 1607 and 1776, just 20 percent went on to self-employment in the colonies or newborn United States. About half did not outlive their indentures; most of the rest became wage workers or paupers or returned to their countries of origin.

  In the mid-1700s, the indenture system developed a new twist as shipping merchants devised a scheme that forced many thousands of free immigrants into terms of servitude. Recruitment agents commissioned by the shippers visited European towns and depicted America as a land where no one worked hard and everyone got rich. People who signed up for transport to this paradise were promised a cheap fare and easy credit if they could not afford the full price. By the time the passengers arrived in America, nearly all were in debt to the ship’s captain, who had levied surprise charges for tariffs, duties, and provisions. Nobody could leave the ship without first clearing accounts, and no sooner was that announced than entrepreneurs came on board with offers to redeem people who signed indenture contracts for themselves and their children. Exhausted and frightened, the captives often agreed to exceptionally long terms of service. Most of these immigrants, known as “redemptioners,” came from Ireland or Germany.

  One eyewitness to their predicaments was Gottlieb Mittelberger, whose Journey to Pennsylvania (1756) publicized the miseries he had seen. In 1750 Mittelberger left his home in the Duchy of Württemberg and joined a party of fellow Germans sailing for Philadelphia. The ship was so crowded with families and so poorly stocked with food that over half the passengers died in transit, their debts to the captain devolving to their kin. Desperate to leave the vessel when it finally docked, the survivors were ready to sign virtually any indenture contract. Adults committed themselves for terms of three to six years if they were lucky, six to twelve if their spouses were too sick to work or had died at sea. Minor children were bound over by their parents, or the ship’s captain in the case of children orphaned during the voyage. Those between ten and fifteen years old were sold into service until age twenty-one. The youngest, who could not by law be sold, were given away to anyone who promised to maintain them.

  One of a handful who had paid in full for his passage, Mittelberger escaped indenture, but he saw what awaited his less fortunate shipmates. As a schoolteacher in rural Pennsylvania, he watched “soul-drivers” march lots of fifty or more redemptioners into the backcountry and sell them into labor on farms where they were “beaten like cattle.” Returning to Württemberg in 1754, he published his book in hopes that it would persuade fellow Germans to remain at home: “Let him who wants to earn his piece of bread honestly and who can only do this by manual labor in his own country, stay there rather than come to America.” Such warnings had little if any impact. As the century wore on, redemptioners arrived in Philadelphia in growing numbers—by 1770 at an average rate of twenty-four shiploads a year.

  SLAVERY

  In 1505, a Spanish ship carried a cargo of slaves from West Africa to Hispaniola, inaugurating one of the most hideous and profitable business enterprises in world history. Over the next centuries, the transatlantic trade in African slaves would grow to gigantic proportions and involve merchants and shippers from virtually every European and American seafaring power. By the time the trade ended in 1870, an estimated 15 to 20 million Africans had been forcibly transported to the Americas, about 1 million to the United States or the colonies that preceded it. Countless other captives—up to five times the number who reached American shores—died en route to the slavers’ ships or during the ocean crossing.

  Britain’s colonies in North America enslaved Africans almost from the beginning, as did the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam (which became British New York in 1664). As black indentured servants arrived in the early and mid-1600s, so did black slaves, though not yet in large numbers. The Dutch West India Company transported them to New Amsterdam as early as 1626. Others arrived in Boston in 1638 and in Connecticut the following year. Some indentured servants meanwhile became slaves in fact if not in name. Starting in the 1640s in Virginia, colonial courts sentenced black servants who fled their masters to lifelong bondage.

  The decisive turn toward slavery came in the later 1600s, with Maryland and Virginia taking the lead. In 1663, Maryland’s lawmakers declared all of its black residents slaves for life and imposed the same status on all persons henceforth born to enslaved women. In 1670, Virginia condemned all Africans entering the colony to slavery, and a 1682 law extended the sentence to all offspring of enslaved women. Thus started a juggernaut. By 1710, every colony had passed laws that enslaved Africans and their descendants as well as Indian captives. Georgia, founded in 1732 with a charter that outlawed slaveholding, reversed that stand in 1750. Between 1700 and the start of the American Revolution in 1775, the number of slaves in British North America rose from about 25,000 to 500,000, about 90 percent laboring in the southern colonies of Virginia, Maryland, Georgia, and the Carolinas.

  Slavery expanded in northern colonies too. By the mid-1700s, nearly every wealthy family in northern port cities owned household slaves, up to a third of the artisans in these cities used slave labor in their shops, and grain farmers from Pennsylvania to southern New England were replacing indentured servants with slaves. In Philadelphia and New York City, slaves constituted 20 percent of the whole labor force in artisan shops and did an even larger share of the work in maritime trades such as shipbuilding and sail making. In some grain-producing counties in northern New Jersey, the Hudson Valley, and Long Island, slaves far outnumbered free workers. The major slaveholding colony north of Maryland was New York, whose slave population rose from 9,000 in the 1740s to almost 20,000 in the 1770s. New England’s 16,000 slaves as of 1770 were concentrated in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, but some 2,000 worked in the more sparsely settled areas to the north.

  The merchants and shippers of Newport, Rhode Island, became the leading North American participants in the transatlantic
slave trade. Other cities whose ships regularly bore down on Africa included Providence, Rhode Island, Salem and Boston, Massachusetts, and Portsmouth, New Hampshire. While southern colonists dealt mostly with British slave traders, Yankees dominated the business in northern ports and shipped up to 10 percent of the slaves arriving in southern ports in 1700s.

  Africans’ experience en route to America is vividly described in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, the autobiography of a former slave published in 1791. Born in 1745 in the Essaka province of Benin, Equiano was kidnapped at age ten or eleven, passed from hand to hand, and finally sold to the Guinea coast, where in 1757 he was carried aboard an English slave ship bound for Barbados. To guard against a revolt, crewmen placed the adults in iron chains and allowed just a few captives at a time to leave the hold and breathe fresh air on deck. Then, when the ship got under way, all were put below. As Equiano later wrote,

  The stench of the hold, while we were on the coast, was so intolerably loathsome, that it was dangerous to remain there for any time; but now that the whole ship’s cargo were confined together, it became absolutely pestilential. The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, being so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died. . . . The shrieks of the women and the groans of the dying rendered it a scene of horror almost inconceivable.

  Such was the setting on every slave ship, and Equiano recounted incidents that typified the voyage. Beatings and force-feeding awaited those who refused to eat, for the same business logic that prompted slave traders to jampack their ships made them anxious to keep the cargo alive. When captives nearing death were brought on deck for resuscitation, some threw themselves overboard; two men on Equiano’s ship succeeded in drowning while a third was rescued and flogged.

  When the ship docked in Bridgetown, Barbados, merchants and planters came on board to inspect the captives, who were then taken ashore and penned into a yard. Several days later, Equiano remembered,

  we were sold after the usual manner, which is this:—On a signal given, such as the beat of a drum, the buyers rush at once into the yard where the slaves are confined, and make choice of that parcel they like best. . . . In this manner, without scruple, are relations and friends separated, most of them never to see each other again.

  The West Indies sugar planters who bought most of Equiano’s companions rejected him, just twelve years old and frail “from very much fretting.” So he and a few others in similar condition were transported to Virginia. There, he was sold to an English ship’s captain and began a twenty-year maritime career during which he managed to purchase his freedom.

  Some others enslaved in British North America gained their liberty through self-purchase, manumission, lawsuits, or flight. Until the American Revolution, however, such deliverance was rare. Of the nearly 5,000 “free colored people” in the colonies on the eve of the Revolution, the majority were freeborn descendants of indentured servants, both black and white, or noncaptive Indians. They were free by virtue of that ancestry, not soft spots in the fortress of slavery.

  Slavery’s tenacity reflected its economic value to the colonies, which exploited slaves’ minds and muscles in remarkably elaborate ways. The typical slave of the colonial era was a field hand raising tobacco, rice, or indigo on a southern plantation; this was the most common labor for the men, women, and children. But slaves worked in many other capacities too. They tilled land on the giant estates that lined New York’s Hudson Valley and on many a small farm from New Hampshire to Georgia. Their labors on southern plantations encompassed carpentry and blacksmithing, leather tanning and shoemaking, bricklaying and plastering, spinning woolen thread, weaving cloth, and sewing clothes. In northern colonies, they could be found in virtually all skilled trades, from maritime crafts to goldsmithing, printing, and cabinetmaking. Every colonial port counted slaves among its sailors and dock workers. In many white households—rural and urban, northern and southern—enslaved women fetched water, hauled firewood, cooked meals, scoured kitchens, tended infants and children, and saw to other chores.

  In addition to a wide variety of labor, slaveholders demanded deference. Nothing better illustrates this than the 1701 court case in which a Massachusetts slave identified only as Adam sued his master John Saffin for reneging on a 1694 promise to free him in seven years. Saffin’s defense was that Adam had been “intollerably insolent, quarrelsome and outrageous,” daring to work at his own pace, talk back when insulted, and resist beatings. Though the jury sided with Saffin, Adam won his freedom in 1703 by appealing the decision to the colony’s Superior Court. His appeal and indeed the original lawsuit would have been impossible outside of New England; elsewhere, slaves had no rights to sue or testify against whites.

  Against this backdrop, assault, homicide, and rape became part and parcel of slavery;and while slaves on southern plantations were the most vulnerable to abuse, others were scarcely immune. New Jersey slaves were flogged to degrees that shocked the indentured servant William Moraley. “For the least Trespass,” he wrote, “they undergo the severest Punishment . . . and if they die under the Discipline their Masters suffer no Punishment, there being no Law against murdering them.” A British visitor to colonial South Carolina recorded the following in his diary: “Mr. Hill, a dancing-master in Charleston, whipped a female slave so long that she fell down at his feet, in appearance dead; but when, by the help of a physician, she was so far recovered as to show some signs of life, he repeated the whipping with equal rigour, and concluded the punishment by dropping scalding wax upon her flesh: her only crime was overfilling a tea-cup!” A New Englander who hobnobbed with Charleston’s most prominent men was astonished to hear them speak with “no reluctance, delicacy or shame” about molesting women in the slave quarters.

  The most common forms of abuse, however, were starvation and overwork. In the 1990s, preservationists blocked the construction of a skyscraper atop the “African burial ground” in the oldest part of New York City and reburied over 400 skeletons* that testify to the grueling toll on slaves’ bodies. The majority of the dead were children twelve and under, half of them infants. The adult skeletons showed lesions on shoulder, arm, and leg bones where muscles were torn away by strain, and some showed circular fractures at the base of the skull, a sign that excessively heavy loads were carried on the head. One skeleton belonged to a boy about age six who died in the early 1700s. Though his remains indicated that he was malnourished and anemic from birth, the anchor points on his arm bones revealed that his muscles were unusually well developed from lifting, and the many healed fractures in his neck show that his head, too, bore large weights. Whatever disease or trauma ended his life, it is fair to say that he was worked to death.

  FREE LABOR

  Though bondage lay at the core of colonial labor systems, the numbers of free men and women hiring out for wages steadily increased. This work force included free immigrants, former indentured servants, Native Americans pushed off their lands, the lucky few who made their way out of slavery, and descendants of all these groups. Wage earners were a minority among free people, most of whom made a living through a family farm, a family craft shop, or some combination of the two. Almost from the start, however, the colonies were home to at least some wage workers, and by the early 1700s wage labor was a fast-rising trend in British North America, especially its coastal cities and towns.

  The largest sectors of the wage-earning labor force were sailors, journeyman artisans, women and girls employed as domestic workers or in cloth and clothing production, and men and boys who plowed fields, hauled freight, and performed other backbreaking jobs that fell under the heading of “common labor.” Except for the journeymen, whose craft skills won them higher wages than the rest, these workers belonged to the poorest
segments of free society. Though nearly all earned substantially more than their European counterparts, their lives were scarcely enviable by free Americans’ standards.

  Single women with dependent children got the worst of it, often trudging from place to place in search of a job that would pay enough to feed and shelter their families. Their chances of finding one were so slim that the overseers of Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and numerous towns in other colonies barred single mothers from settling down unless they relinquished the right to solicit help from local charities. Starting in the mid-1700s, agencies such as Boston’s Society for Encouraging Industry and Employing the Poor opened cloth and clothing “manufactories” where women and children worked for a pittance, just enough to keep them alive.

  Most women wage earners escaped such dire circumstances, as did the majority of sailors and common laborers;but very few were comfortably situated. Domestics and farmhands typically lived with their employers, working sixteen hours a day and more in return for a tiny cash wage plus room and board. Even in Philadelphia, North America’s most prosperous city in the late colonial era, sailors and common laborers almost never found steady jobs. Those who did earned about £50 per year—£10 less than a family of average size needed to survive in Philadelphia.* To make ends meet, the wives and children of male wage earners often hired out too.