My thanks to Jim Watkinson for his comments on bound children.  You are
absolutely right to beware of generalizing!

I was speaking specifically of the situation that obtained right after
the Civil War in the Southside tobacco counties.  There, at that time,
the records seem to show that significant numbers of black children were
scooped up and indentured even though they were not orphans and their
parents wanted to reclaim them.  In this, I followed Lynda Morgan's
research as well as my own.  (In the antebellum records in Henry County
I found records of white children being bound because their families
were poor.)  On the subject of education, I found a letter from a
wealthy white Hairston complaining about his taxes and the uselessness
of educating lower-class whites who will just be farmers anyway.

I am also specifically researching the social, legal, and racial context
of Washington's life.  I am not attempting to make general statements
about all of Virginia in the colonial period.  I want to know what
Washington and his peers were doing in their counties.  I'm taking a
"micro-climate" approach because I think that's the best way to get this
man and his milieu in focus.  It sounds like your research, if you have
gone back to the 1740s through 1770s, would be very useful to me as a
point of comparison to what was going on in Fairfax and Westmoreland.
The state indenture law, and local practice, seem to have combined to
heavily punish white women who had mixed-race children, and the children
were given, by law, 30-year indentures.  The effect of this was a
quasi-slavery of mixed-race people because the indentures were
self-perpetuating for generation after generation.  Four generations of
one family of mixed-race people ended up in servitude to Washington's
family members: indentured mother had a daughter, who was then
indentured because the mother was indentured; the indentured daughter
had a daughter, who was herself indentured, and so on.  Neat system--no
capital outlay; a 30-year contract instead of seven; and no payoff at
the end.  The other effect was to quash the development of a free
mixed-race community.
Henry Wiencek
Charlottesville

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