Don't  you think by restricting your reporting of a generalized phenomena to
a specific person, you might be warping the truth ? Who is sponsoring your
project ? Who is publishing your book ?

~malinda




----- Original Message -----
From: "Donna Lucey / Henry Wiencek" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, February 16, 2002 6:49 AM
Subject: Bound children


> 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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