White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America (14 page)

We live in fear of the enemy every hour, yet we have had a 100

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combat with them on the Sunday before Shrovetide, and we took two alive and made slaves of them . . . and yet we are but thirty-two to fight against three thousand if they should come . . . Our plantation is very weak by reason of the death and sickness of our company . . . We came but twenty for the merchants and they are half dead just; and we look every hour when two more should go. There came four other men yet to live with us, of which there is but one alive; and our Lieutenant is dead, and his father and his brother.

. . . I have not a penny, nor a penny worth, to help me to either spice or sugar or strong waters, without the which one cannot live here . . . I am not half a quarter so strong as I was in England for I do protest to you that I have eaten more in a day at home than I have allowed me here for a week. You have given more than my day’s allowance to a beggar at the door.1

A gunsmith, Goodman Jackson, took pity on Frethorne and offered him shelter after finding him at the end of a day’s toil trying to sleep in an open boat in a rainstorm. Frethorne told his father what the gunsmith thought of his position: ‘He much marvelled that you would send me a servant to the Company; he said I had been better knocked on the head.’

Frethorne pleaded, ‘If you love me you will redeem me suddenly, for which I do entreat and beg.’

Like Thomas Coopy a year earlier, Frethorne vanishes from history at this point. It is commonly assumed that he was never redeemed by his father and died before he had been in Virginia a year.

Some leading settlers saw an opportunity being opened up by the Easter massacre. George Sandys, the brother of Sir Edwin Sandys, was one of them. He had secured the plum job of Treasurer of the colony which made him second only to the Governor. Sandys advocated mass enslavement of the native population. He argued that in the light of the massacre the tribes could ‘now most justly be compelled to servitude and drudgery’. The planter John Martin said Native Americans would make ideal slaves. They were ‘apter 101

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for work than yet our English are’ and are able ‘to work in the heat of the day’. They were even ‘fit to row in galleys’, he claimed.2

It was a widely held view and, as we have just seen from Frethorne’s letter, settlers attempted to put it into practice. But mass enslavement of the native population on their own terrain was never realistic. In later years, large numbers of men and women from a range of tribes would indeed be enslaved and terribly used. But for the moment the settlers went instead for a war of extermination. Powhatan villages were put to the fire and hundreds of Native Americans killed in an effort to clear them all from the Chesapeake or kill them.

In fact, in 1622 it was the Native Americans not the settlers who had taken slaves – the twenty women captured at John Martin’s plantation during the Good Friday attack. The pursuit and liberation of the women featured two of the most distasteful episodes of the Virginia Company period, with the colony’s surgeon, Dr John Pott, playing the villain both times.

The first episode took place during a parley with tribal leaders in May 1623 at a neutral point by the Potomac River. Captain William Tucker and a delegation of settlers arrived to be met by Opechancanough, who was backed by a throng of warriors. The meeting had been called to discuss terms for releasing the white hostages but it didn’t get that far. Tucker invited the Indians to drink from a flask of sack that Dr Pott had prepared. The Algonquin had learned not to trust the settlers and asked that the English interpreter take the first drink. He duly took a gulp but, by sleight of hand, from a different container. The Algonquin were right to be suspicious. Dr Pott had mixed a slow-acting poison in the sack.

One by one, the warriors drank. The settlers reported jubilantly that 200 later died. Opechancanough evidently did not drink, for he escaped. However, two of his chiefs were among fifty more shot down later that day in an English ambush.

The women remained hostages; freeing them was not the settlers’

top priority. The settlers were pursuing their war of extermination and their womenfolk were secondary. They weren’t finally ransomed till nine months later and once again Dr Pott played his unsavoury part. He paid two pounds’ weight of coloured beads to ransom a 102

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young widow, Jane Dickenson, and then claimed her as his bound servant. It emerged that Mrs Dickenson’s husband, whom she had seen killed in the attack, was indentured and still had three years left to serve on his contract. The good doctor insisted that the young widow serve out that time with him. In 1624, she appealed to the company for her freedom, describing the ten months she had so far served Pott as ‘differ[ing] not from her slavery with the Indians’
.
3

The records do not say whether or not the company freed her.

The doctor is reported to have been criticised for the mass poisoning but we can find no record of his peers blaming him for forcing Jane Dickenson into servitude – nor of them doing anything about it. In fact, a few years later, Dr Pott’s standing was such that by popular acclaim he briefly served as de facto Governor of Virginia.

Fear of attack by the Algonquin was a constant on the plantations.

As we shall see in the next chapter, a rain of arrows could cut a man down at any time. Yet, large numbers of servants would opt to take their chances with the Native Americans and seek refuge with them in future years rather than stick it out on the plantations. Life in the tobacco fields could be that bad.

A typical early plantation was an ever-expanding clearing on the Tidewater, the western shore of the Chesapeake where the James, Potomac, York and the Rappahannock rivers run into the bay. For servants on these holdings, life was one of unbroken labour. In the freeze of winter, they were out in the forest hacking down oak, pine and hickory to clear the ground for cultivation. For the rest of the year, they were into a relentless round of planting, nurturing, replanting, weeding and ‘worming’. A servant was responsible for thousands of vulnerable tobacco plants, each with its own tiny hillock of earth, each requiring to be watched, nursed and coddled like a child for any slip could be ruinous. And when it was too dark to work in the fields, there were other tasks. The most hated was ‘beating at the mortar’

– pounding soaked corn with a pestle to make the daily bread for everyone, beginning with master and family.

Sometimes when that a hard day’s work we’ve done Away into the mill we must be gone

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Till twelve or one o’clock a grinding corn

And must be up by daylight in the morn.4

Tobacco was ‘a culture productive of infinite wretchedness’, wrote Thomas Jefferson a century later. Those employed in it were ‘in a continued state of exertion beyond the powers of nature to support. Little food of any kind is raised by them; so that the men and animals on these farms are badly fed, and the earth is rapidly impoverished.’ Himself a hugely successful tobacco planter, the USA’s third president concluded that it was a ‘crop that wears out men and land’.5

In 1622, as the planters struggled to recover from the massacre, they were advised how best to man their fields for maximum financial return. Until then, although more and more indentured servants were being used, the Virginia Company itself relied heavily on sharecroppers – tenants – to work its plantations. So did some of the big syndicates. There were some waged labourers, too, usually skilled men. Then in 1622, the company engaged a Captain Thomas Nuce, evidently the Jacobean equivalent of our present-day management consultant, to compare labour costs on its plantations. Nuce advised that ‘a more certain profit’ would come from dropping the sharecroppers.6 The Virginia Company was told to ‘change the condition of tenants into servants’, which it proceeded to do. Owners of large plantations followed the company lead and inside six years as many as ninety per cent of the labourers shipped in to the colony were indentured servants.

One group of 100 men contracted by the company as tenants found that their status and prospects had been changed mid-ocean.

They’d been signed up as ‘tenants by halves’ – sharecroppers – only to be told on landing in the Chesapeake that fifty of them had been hired out, half of them to one of the richest planters in the colony who wanted more men to deter the Algonquin. Somehow, two of the fifty displaced tenants managed to get their cases heard in London and were given their freedom. But servants tended to be helpless and at the mercy of whoever held their indentures. One, who was supposedly a free man, wrote this of his master, a Virginia company official who was also a planter: ‘He makes us serve him 104

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whether we will or no, and how to help it we do not know, for he has all the sway.’7

Within two years of the massacre, individual cases of abused servants began to attract attention. A Virginia Company official sounded alarm bells. He reported in June 1623 that ‘divers masters in Virginia do much neglect and abuse their servants there with intolerable oppression and hard usage’.8

A year later, the first of a number of grim examples surfaced.

Two young servants died after a catalogue of brutality at a tobacco plantation on the north bank of the James River called the Neck of Land. One of them was the cockney girl Elizabeth Abbott, who, it may be remembered, was among the first street urchins picked up in the London swoops of 1618. Elizabeth ended up as a field servant and was one of a minority of the children who did not succumb to Indian attack, malaria, cholera or the intolerable heat.

She was beaten to death in October 1624.9

A spirited, wayward girl, whose morals scandalised her master and mistress, she had constantly taken time off from the toil of the tobacco fields, sometimes for days at a time, and was beaten regularly. One day, a fellow servant was ordered to punish her with a whipping for her latest absence. A witness claimed to have counted 500 strokes. Elizabeth staggered off the plantation and died on a neighbouring property. It says a lot about servitude in Virginia that even as she lay dying a neighbour who ministered to her offered to take her back so she could apologise to her master for her behaviour.

At an inquiry into her death, it emerged that another servant on the plantation, a youth called Elias Hinton, had perished the previous year after complaining that he had been hit on the head with a hoe by his master. The planter and his wife were both accused of cruelty. In their defence, it was claimed they were solicitous to their servants, that Elizabeth Abbott and Elias Hinton had to be

‘corrected’ because of their rebellious behaviour and they had ordered only ‘moderate’ punishments. From the scanty records that remain, the court appears to have backed the planters and they were exonerated.

Judging from the local court archives, similar instances of 105

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the brutalising of white servants were taking place across the Chesapeake. There are libraries of batterings and whippings or careless inhumanity. As with the deaths of Elizabeth Abbott and Elias Hinton, the cruelty tended either to go unpunished or, if there was a successful prosecution, punishment was likely to be lenient.

Two of Maryland’s most sadistic brutes got off with being branded on the hand. Professor Edmund S. Morgan, whose research dipped deeper than most into the guts of American servitude, commented that the courts ‘supported planters in severities that would not have been allowed in England’.10

An obvious explanation for the casual attitude of the courts to the excesses of planters was that the judges, or commissioners, were invariably planters themselves. Among Virginia commissioners in the 1660s was a planter whose mistreatment of his servants was a byword. Such men, sitting in judgment, had no interest in siding against their own kind and thereby fuelling the hopes of their own servants.

There is another explanation, too. This is the widespread perception that the typical indentured servant was the ‘scum’ of England – criminal, dangerous and lazy. It was a view dating from the days of Chief Justice Popham’s notorious jailbird colonists and it stemmed from a prejudice that must have been reinforced every time a batch of convicts was shipped.

A jaundiced view of servants was taken by even the most enthusiastic of colonial supporters. In the 1660s, John Hammond, once a servant himself, published the pamphlet entitled
Leah and
Rachel
that glowed with praise for the two Chesapeake colonies but described them as peopled by ‘rogues, whores, dissolute and rooking persons’. Virginia and Maryland were the product of ‘jails emptied, youth seduced, infamous women drilled in’.11 In 1670, Governor William Berkeley described Virginia as ‘an excellent school to make contumacious and disorderly wild youths hastily to repent of these wild and extravagant courses that brought them thither’.12 Another contemporary called the colony ‘the galleys of England’.

The servant whom planters saw as personifying evil was Thomas Hellier from Whitchurch in Dorset. At the age of twenty-eight, 106

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Hellier signed up to go to Virginia as an indentured servant. He was wary, having heard stories of the brutality in the colony. But over some drinks in a tavern he was persuaded. He was assured that he would be given sedentary work and never be used as a labourer.

When he landed at Newport News, he was sold to Cuthbert Williamson, who promised Hellier that he would be used to tutor his children ‘unless necessity did compel’. Williamson’s plantation was called appropriately Hard Labour Plantation and to the young servant’s dismay he found that necessity continually compelled.

There was no tutoring. Instead, Hellier was daily put to work in the tobacco fields. Initially, he didn’t complain and vowed to stick it out. He had little option. The law bound him in absolute obedience to his master until his period of indenture was served. However, Hellier could not keep his promise to himself. Williamson’s wife –