I am no expert on this period but I think that one has to consider white
migration through indenture, and commutation of death sentence, in the
context of rural enclosure in the UK. (See, for instance, E.P. Thompson,
Whigs and Hunters: the Origins of the Black Act.) Extreme pressure by the
landed classes on those poorer people who made their living on the land or
in the forests caused a major economic disruption, even starvation. The
Crown's response to poaching, etc., was the death sentence for petty theft;
even a scarf for resale or a loaf of bread. Parliament, after all, only
represented freemen, those who had a minimum freehold on real property, not
free men, that is anyone who was not a slave. This had been a major debate
in the 17th century during the lengthy English Revolution, between religious
radicals like Gerard Winstanley and the Puritan notables who actually ruled
England during the Protectorate (1647-1660).
So perhaps we should not judge the thousands of indentured servants, many
earlier motivated by the chance for upward mobility through the possession
of land in the colonies, many later driven to petty crime, sentenced to
death, choosing first Virginia and Maryland, then Georgia, and after US
Independence Australia in preference of the rope. Remember, only 120
people came over on the Mayflower and 60 of them died the first winter.
Thousands of people of Anglo-Saxon or Celtic stock came over as convict
labor. The odds of being descended from the latter are far greater than the
odds of being descended from the former. This is almost as true for
African-Americans as it is for European-Americans.
Harold S. Forsythe
----- Original Message -----
From: "Sunshine49" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, February 02, 2007 3:54 PM
Subject: Re: New Online Database of Indentured Servants
> sorry if I failed to use the words "many" or "some", I did not mean to
> say that all later indentured servants were criminals, because they
> weren't. But you have to admit that an indentured servant who murdered
> someone before running away, or stole what he could from his master's
> house before burning it down, well, he may have had his good reasons for
> doing so, but many do seem to me to have been very rough sorts. Others
> were, as you say, no doubt people who just got fed up and tried to leave
> and start over elsewhere.
>
> Nancy
>
> -------
> I was never lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.
>
> --Daniel Boone
>
>
>
> On Feb 2, 2007, at 1:44 PM, Douglas Deal wrote:
>
>> Sunshine49 wrote:
>>> You may be confusing this with later indentured servants in the
>>> colonial period, who were petty crooks and troublemakers [male and
>>> female], who were sent to Virginia. From the runaway ads in the
>>> Virginia Gazette, they seemed to have been quite a troublesome lot. A
>>> good many seem to have been Irish, or Welsh, a few Scots or English; a
>>> few could not speak English, evidently they were Gaelic- speaking.
>>>
>>>>
>> Many of the 18th-century servants were convicts who chose transportation
>> to the colonies in lieu of some harsher punishment at home. Others were
>> not criminals at all, and we should hesitate to "type" them or the
>> actual "criminals" as a "troublesome" bunch in Virginia just because
>> they ran away from their employers. Would we call slave runaways
>> "troublesome" or would we use a word like "bold"? The ads are sometimes
>> the only, or nearly the only, sources we have about them (unless there
>> are also court records about their "crimes"), and in using them we
>> should keep in mind that they portray the runaways from the masters'
>> perspective. To servants trying to escape cruel treatment or other
>> indignities and hardships, thing probably looked rather different.... A
>> good many masters probably ought to be characterized as "troublesome"
>> too!
>>
>> Doug Deal
>>
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