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 To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe, please see the instructions at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html