White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America (13 page)

Other syndicates did the same and rich individuals followed suit. Between 1619 and 1623, forty-four individuals or groups shipped more than 100 servants each to Virginia and claimed their land rewards.

We don’t know how the Berkeley Hundred’s indentured servants were treated after they were put to work. There is little more to go on than the records of mortality rates, which were dire across the colony. Of the 1,200 newcomers in 1619, more than 800 perished in the first year. Some were killed by Native Americans, some by disease and some by infections caught in the jam-packed ships bringing them. And judging by what we know of life in the tobacco fields in subsequent years, some were worked to death.

On the Berkeley Hundred, the death rate seems to have been lower than most. A list of settlers drawn up just nine months after Coopy’s party arrived records four settlers as slain, presumably by Native Americans, one ‘gent’ killed by another ‘gent’, one drowning and nine unexplained deaths.3

Coopy survived those first months. He was made an ‘assistant’, an overseer, and was obviously a highly valued man – so much so that he felt able to press for his wife Joan and their children Elizabeth and Anthony to join him. The syndicate agreed – for a price. To compensate them for the room his little family would take on the next voyage of the
Margaret,
Coopy would have to indenture for an undetermined number of extra years in servitude or indenture his incoming family into bondage. The leading light of the syndicate instructed: ‘Such conditions are to be made such that the husband retribute to us a competent satisfaction in the augmentation of the years of his, her and their son’s and daughter’s services.’4

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In a period during which it was common for poverty-stricken families to farm out their children rather than see them go hungry, the syndicate’s terms might not have seemed as alien as they do today. At all events, an agreement of some kind was reached and Thomas Coopy’s family of three sailed to join him in America in 1620. Eighteen months later, all but one of the Coopy family were dead.

The first laws governing the treatment of servants like Coopy had been agreed four months before his arrival by a group of worthies gathered in the choir of Jamestown’s little wooden church. This was the inaugural session of the House of Burgesses, the body created by the Virginia Company to give the colony a measure of self-government. One of their priorities was how to control the hundreds of Thomas Coopys arriving in the headrights rush and the tens of thousands of other servants who would follow.

The church was the only structure in the colony large enough to accommodate all twenty-two burgesses. The institution was modelled on the English House of Commons. Flanked by guards in flowing red robes, the burgesses attempted the same solemn pomp as in Westminster. They had a speaker and sergeant-at-arms, and, like the Commons, were dominated by landed interests. A new Governor, Sir George Yeardley, had succeeded the disgraced Samuel Argall and he presided.

High on the agenda was the competitive scramble for servants. Planters or their agents were stealing servants from under each other’s noses even before they reached the colony.

Back in England, servants who had just indentured for America were being ‘enticed’ to break the contract and indenture for the colony on better terms with someone else. Other servants were being enticed to jump ship on arrival and indent with a new master.

The burgesses decided ‘most severely to punish the seducers and the seduced’ but in the event targeted the servants alone.

They were to be made to serve the full terms contracted with both masters, one after the other.5

Something of a precedent was thus established – extra time in servitude for ‘desertion’. It would be used with growing ferocity 93

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in succeeding decades by Virginia and other colonies as increasing numbers of servants fled from their masters and the authorities attempted to deter them. In the 1630s, fleeing servants would face two days’ extra service for every day away; in the 1640s, five days for every one away; and in the 1650s in Maryland, an extra ten days for every one away. A servant on the run for several weeks could face years of extra bondage. Needless to say, anyone helping them was punished, too.

At this first meeting, the burgesses underlined the masters’

absolute rights over servants. They conferred on the master the right to use ‘bodily punishment for not heeding the commands of the master’.6 That would lead to a whipping post being installed in every locality. Masters would be given the option of bringing in servants to be punished there or administering the penalty themselves on their own plantations.7

The extra-time precedent applied to disobedience, too. In addition to a whipping, resistance to a master or an overseer was also to be punished by two years’ additional servitude.8 A taste of what servants might expect was given during the meeting, when the burgesses formed themselves into a court and sentenced an errant servant. The servant had allegedly slandered his master and indulged in an open display of ‘wantonness’ with a woman servant. The burgesses empowered the master ‘to place this servant in the pillory for a period of four days, to nail his ears to the post, and to give him a public whipping on each day included in his sentence’.9

In later years, other, sometimes still harsher sentences, including the loss of an ear or both ears, would be handed out by the burgesses. Yet some of these were the same planters who had complained bitterly at how everyone was treated in the grim days of Sir Thomas Dale, calling it ‘slavery’.

A first step in restricting servants’ family rights was also taken at this inaugural meeting. It appears to have been prompted by the arrival of the first of the ‘bridal boats’, which were bringing marriageable ‘maids’ to the colony as part of Sir Edwin Sandys’s scheme to boost family life. Prospective husbands were expected to buy their brides. But Sandys was fearful that the hearts of some of 94

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these maids might be captured by handsome servants and orders went out from London to prevent that happening: ‘We would not have these maids married to servants,’ the Virginia Company instructed.10 The burgesses did their part by imposing a ban on any maid or woman servant in the colony marrying without ‘the consent of her parents or masters or master’. Later, they would bring in laws banning all servants, male and female, of whatever age, from marrying without the master’s sanction. They would also slap up to two years’ extra service on any woman servant falling pregnant – even if her master was the father. Rules controlling human behaviour were to have the greatest impact on female servants.

This was just the start. Over the next century and a half, a good deal of the time of Virginia’s House of Burgesses and of the assemblies of neighbouring colonies would be taken up with how to keep servants in check.

In London, the Virginia Company remained preoccupied with numbers. The frightening death toll of 1619 did not deter the messianic Sir Edwin Sandys. When news came through that nearly seventy per cent of those transported were dead, Sir Edwin and his assistant, John Ferrar, said they were sorry to hear it and advised planters to pray harder. They then looked for other sources of labour. Sir Edwin set up a committee to comb the whole kingdom for youths of fifteen years and over who were a ‘burden’ on their local parishes. Each parish was told that the company would take the youths to Virginia as apprentices for £5

per head. Meanwhile, the second and third batches of cockney children were sent.11

Sandys’s biographer makes clear that he was generally too lofty to get into the grubby details of who was sent and how.12 His deputy, John Ferrar, dealt with such matters. Whichever of them was responsible, they were not too fussy in their selection. Convicts from London continued to be transported while a number of girls picked up in London to be sent over as ‘apprentices’ appear to have been child prostitutes. One girl earmarked in the Bridewell records as destined for Virginia is listed as a ‘lewd vagrant’, another as leading ‘an incontinent life’ and being ‘an old guest’.

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Some of the maids dispatched on the bridal boats were probably prostitutes, too. A note from a company official complains that a few of the women were ‘out of Bridewell’ and ‘of so bad choice as made the colony afraid to desire any others’.13

What should have been more disturbing for Sir Edwyn was a mounting tide of complaints from relatives of indentured servants.

Company documents show there was uproar over indenture abuses. A company report asserted: ‘Divers old planters and others did allure and beguile divers young persons and others (ignorant and unskillful in such matters) to serve them upon intolerable and unchristian like conditions.’14 Another report lamented that ‘the ungodly that have only respect for their own profit’ were ‘enticing young people into binding themselves as servants for years to pay for their transportation’.15

Sir Edwin Sandys was as much to blame as anyone. It was on his instructions that those first shipments of women and children were marketed and sold at set prices. One can safely assume that transported convicts who were not put to work on company lands were sold to planters as servants, probably for seven years.

In this hungry market, it inevitably followed that some of these hapless individuals would be resold at a profit. It followed, too, that full-time dealers in people would soon emerge. According to Edmund S. Morgan: ‘Men staked out claims to men, stole them, lured them, fought over them and bid up their price to four, five or six times the initial cost.’16 As Ted Nace puts it, Virginians were moving toward ‘a system of labor that treated men as things’.17 Apart from anxious relatives and friends, few in England raised any objection to the traffic in servants that was developing in the colony. An exception was that ardent recorder of English America’s history, and one-time leading actor in it, Captain John Smith. He was appalled. In 1624, he wrote from London:

God forbid . . . that masters there should not have the same privilege over their servants as here, but to sell him or her for forty, fifty, or threescore pounds, whom the Company hath sent over for eight or ten pounds at the most, without 96

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regard [to] how they shall be maintained with apparel, meat, drink and lodging, is odious.

Smith warned that such a trade in people was ‘sufficient to bring a well settled Common-wealth to misery, much more Virginia’.18

Smith was writing just as the Virginia Company was collapsing and about to be wound up.

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CHAPTER SIX

‘THEY ARE NOT DOGS’

On Good Friday 1622, the English presence in Virginia came within an ace of being wiped out. It survived thanks to Chanco, an Algonquin youth who had converted to Christianity. The previous night, he warned settlers that an all-out attack was to be launched next day across the colony. The new paramount chief of the Powhatan Confederacy, Opechancanough, aimed to exterminate the invaders. Supposedly friendly tribesmen were to infiltrate settlements on the Friday morning and turn on the settlers.

News of the plan was spread to plantations along the James and Charles rivers, where devout men and women were preparing for the holiest day of the year, but it didn’t spread quickly enough.

The next morning, 347 out of a total settler population of 1,240

were killed, though the number was possibly higher since some plantations failed to record numbers of the dead.

Among the decimated plantations was the Berkeley Hundred, where Thomas Coopy’s wife and children had been allowed to join him. That Friday, the official death toll on the Berkeley Hundred was eleven. The Coopys were not among those named but Thomas, his wife Joan and their son Anthony are listed as ‘dead’ in a report to England. Only the daughter Elizabeth was recorded as alive in 1624, working as a servant. If Opechancanough’s warriors didn’t make her an orphan, disease probably did. Back in Gloucestershire, when news of the fate of Thomas and his family percolated through 99

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to Robert Coopy, perhaps he blessed whatever or whoever had persuaded him to give up his place in America to his kinsman.

Terrible tales of bloodshed that Easter were followed by terrible tales of privation as everyone, especially the servants at the bottom of the heap, struggled to survive the effects of the massacre. The most quoted example of a wretched servant in these years was 22-year-old Richard Frethorne, who reached Virginia shortly before Christmas 1622.

Young Frethorne was a servant on Martin’s Hundred, 20,000

acres of forest stretching around a bend in the James River nine or ten miles from Jamestown. This vast tract was granted to a syndicate of London merchants led by Sir Richard Martin, who we saw in an earlier chapter haranguing the House of Commons on Virginia’s behalf. Somewhere between 100 and 150 settlers were on the plantation when Opechancanough’s warriors struck. Eighty of them were killed. Twenty more, all of them women, were taken off as captives.

Richard Frethorne arrived about nine months later, when a war of attrition was being waged against the Native Americans. His letters show him to be sick, terrified and half-starved. Disease was raging all around and in his mind every cedar tree hid a waiting Indian.

He was working from dawn to midnight, carting supplies between the plantation and Jamestown, when he wrote the first of three letters describing his plight and begging his father to buy his freedom:

I your child am in a most heavy case by reason of the nature of the country, is such that it causes much sickness, as the scurvy and the bloody flux and diverse other diseases . . .

When we are sick there is nothing to comfort us . . . [We]

must work hard both early and late for a mess of water gruel and a mouthful of bread and beef. A mouthful of bread for a penny loaf must serve for four men . . . If you did know as much as I, when people cry out day and night – Oh! that they were in England without their limbs – and would not care to lose any limb to be in England again . . .