White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America (15 page)

Hellier’s ‘ill-tongued mistress’ – kept goading and humiliating him, and this he couldn’t stand. He tried running away but was caught after several weeks and returned to ‘usage worse than before’. But then early one spring morning he donned his best clothes, picked up an axe and a knife and became a murderer. He killed Cuthbert Williamson, Williamson’s wife and a servant.

His crime sent shivers down the spines of planters and their families across the English colonies. His account of the murder was given to a minister the night before his execution.13 It was graphic. He struck the sleeping Williamson a fatal blow with an axe, which woke Mrs Williamson. She jumped out of bed screaming and grabbed a chair for protection. She pleaded for her life as the crazed servant came at her. ‘But all in vain. Nothing would satisfy me but her life, she who I looked on as my greatest enemy.’ A fellow servant called Martha Clark became Hellier’s third victim when she tried to intervene.

Hellier delivered a long speech on the scaffold repenting his life and the killings but also directed at those who conducted the servant trade and at their clients. He talked bitterly of the ‘baseness and knavery’ of the merchants and traders who gulled the naive like himself into ‘great misery and utter destruction’ and then he addressed the masters:

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Also you that are masters of servants in this country, have respect to them, let them have that which is necessary for them with good words, not ‘Down you dog’ do such as this or such as that. They are not dogs.14

Of course there were villains and killers amongst the hordes of servants coming into the Chesapeake, and not just amongst the convicts. The free-willers crowding onto the ‘pestered’ migrant ships included a share of society’s sweepings. The great bulk of them were in the fifteen-to-thirty-year age group and thus a magnet for trouble. Hellier was undoubtedly one. In his confession on the eve of his execution, he described a wastrel’s life but not a criminal one. In truth, probably like the majority of servants he began his journey to America guilty of nothing more than poverty and hope.

Another perception of indentured servants was far more insidious. They came to be viewed as – and treated by colonial law as – chattels, the property of their masters or mistresses. There is a school of thought that will not accept that indenture meant chattel status. It asserts that indenturing meant mortgaging one’s labour and nothing more: that fundamental rights were unchanged and one remained essentially free. This is nonsense. In practice, autonomy and freedom existed only at the discretion of the master.

What has been called the chattelisation of the servant began when Virginia Company officials first sold children and convicts prior to 1620. By 1623, servants were appearing in documents as assets. Although legislation did not officially establish them as ‘real estate’ – as would happen with Africans at the beginning of the next century – that is what they effectively became.

Servants began to feature in planters’ wills. A search through genealogical material and other sources finds servants listed time after time as portable assets, along with the cows and the silverware, the flat irons and the bed linen:

Will of William White, linen-draper, London, 20 August
1622:

‘I give and bequeath all my lands in Virginia, with all my servants, 108

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goods, debts, chattels and whatsoever else I have unto my beloved brother, John White.’

Will of Elizabeth Causley, Virginia, 26 November 1635:

‘I Elizabeth Causley of Acchawmack being left and appointed sole and absolute executrix of my right dear and well beloved husband Henry Causley late deceased do hereby give bequeath and make over unto my children Agnes and Francis my plantation with all . . .

my servants, goods and moneys whatsoever.’

Will of Abraham Coombs, St Mry’d County, Maryland, 26

December 1684:

‘I give and bequeath to my dear & loving wife all my servants, being two boys and one woman servant together with all my stock of hogs.’

Inventory of the estate of Thomas Carter, 9 September 1673,
Isle of Wight County:

‘5 horses, 3 mares, 42 head of cattle, 22 head of hogs, tobacco in debts 5,500 lbs, 1 set of joiner’s tools worth 400 lbs tobac, 1 bill of Christopher Hollyman – 800 lbs tob, 1 bill of Mr. Cobbs – 35

lbs tob, 2 feather beds and 2 flock beds, 4 servants – 2 whereof to serve 3 years apiece, one five years, and one four years. 102 ozs. of pewter, 2 pistols, 3 iron pots.’

As with the wills, so with the account books of merchants involved in the servant trade. If servants were lost at sea en route to Virginia, they were viewed as cargo and not as people to be lamented. When a Virginia-bound craft called the
Angel
was driven by storms into Barbados in 1655, many of her goods were lost and a statement reported: ‘Amongst the goods saved were three servants valued at

£30 who were disposed of in Barbados.’ When three other servants tried to get ashore at a frozen Port St Mary in New England and vanished through the ice, the ship’s captain was sued for the price they would have fetched.

Some wills put a value on servants – often not as high as that of other livestock. Abraham Moore of Virginia valued one boy ‘having 109

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upward of three years to serve’ at 1,200 pounds of tobacco. ‘One grey mare’ was valued at 2,000 pounds. Elias Edmond’s estate in 1664 listed ‘a maid servant to serve eight months’ as worth 600

pounds of tobacco, half as much as the value put on a bed, blankets, some curtains and a few rugs.

The buying and selling of men appalled some of those who observed it. Virginia Company secretary John Pory and the explorer/historian Captain John Smith both condemned it. They were not alone. In 1626, an English sea captain called Thomas Weston refused to take a party of servants from Canada to America.

He explained that servants were ‘sold here up and down like horses’

in Virginia and he held it therefore ‘that it was not lawful to carry any’.15 A Dutch sea captain reported seeing planters playing cards using their servants as gambling counters, and he rebuked them. He told them that not even the Turks treated their own in this way.16

By the end of the 1620s, three out of four people landed in the Chesapeake were indentured servants and that would continue to be the ratio. In several fundamental ways, these servants differed from the servant in England. In England, a servant contracted for a year and there was no power to force an extension. In England, he or she couldn’t be sold. In England, the servant tended to be treated as a member of the household, not as livestock. In England, masters whipped servants but wouldn’t easily get away with whipping them to death. Nevertheless, if you would believe some of the popular American histories published in the first half of the last century, there was little difference between the treatment and status of indentured servants who came to Virginia and the servant back home in England. Mary Johnston’s take was typical of a widespread view: ‘Servitude seemed to satisfy the needs of middling sorts of Englishmen who saw in the institution a marvellous opportunity to try one’s luck in America at someone else’s expense in return for a few years of service.’ It was a temporary condition, she added, ‘which neither stripped the servant of his humanity not systematically degraded him’.17

A few decades later, in 1922, Thomas J. Wertenbaker was still more approving:

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Indenture . . . was in no sense a mark of servitude or slavery.

It simply made it obligatory for the newcomer, under pain of severe penalties, to work out his passage for money and until that was accomplished to surrender a part of the liberty so dear to every Englishman.18

The arrangement, Wertenbaker concluded, ‘proved satisfactory to all concerned’.

However, in the far-off wilds of Virginia, the estate owner with a whip and the legal right to demand unquestioning obedience could go much further than his equivalent in England. As Bernard Bailyn puts it in
Voyagers to the West
: ‘The colonists lived in exceptional circumstances . . . They lived in the outback . . . where constraints were lowered and where one had to struggle to maintain the forms of civilized existence.’19

Of course, one day the indentured period would end and the servant would be free. That is one of the fundamental differences drawn between white indentured servitude and black slavery. One was a temporary condition; the other was perpetual. Except that huge numbers of white servants didn’t live to see the day of freedom.

In the early days, the majority of servants died still in bondage.

Moreover, the bulk of those who did outlive their servitude ended up no better than when they’d arrived. They would emerge from bondage landless and poor.

As the buying and selling of people became the norm, the days of the Virginia Company were ending. The company had much to boast about but at least as much to lament. The death toll under Sir Thomas Smythe had been horrendous and under Sir Edwin Sandys it was even worse. In 1619, Sir Edwin Sandys took over a colony inhabited by 700 colonists. In the next three years a further 3,570 men, women and children joined them. That made a total of 4,270 people. In 1623, just 900 were still alive. Subtracting the 347 settlers who had been killed by Native Americans left more than 3,000 lives unaccounted for.

In the aftermath of the Good Friday massacre, the death rates came under scrutiny. James I set up an inquiry into how the colony had been run, commissioning an outsider, the Governor of the 111

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Somers Isles, Nathaniel Butler, to conduct it. Virginia Company chiefs and their supporters in the colony heaped blame on the previous regime of Sir Thomas Smythe. The great merchant was accused of corruption, incompetence and subjecting the colony to slavery. Butler swept these claims aside. He reported that ‘in government the colonists had wilfully strayed from the law and customs of England’ and blamed the terrible mortality rates on the abuses, neglect and self-seeking of company officials. He warned that unless the evils were ‘redressed with speed by some divine and supreme hand, instead of a plantation it will get the name of a slaughter-house, and so justly become both odious to ourselves and contemptible to all the world’.20

Virginia Company rule ended in 1624 when James I withdrew its charter and substituted royal government. The hard times were anything but over, however, for the successors of Thomas Coopy, Thomas Hellier and Elizabeth Abbott.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

THE PEOPLE TRADE

The tobacco boom that lasted into the 1630s saved Virginia: new plantations appeared and the demand for labour intensified.

Meanwhile, the indentured-servitude system spread as British colonisation thrust along the length of the eastern seaboard and new colonies emerged. To a greater or lesser degree, they were peopled both by men and women who had been forcibly transported and by free-willers who had voluntarily mortgaged their freedom. By the end of the century, some 200,000 men, women and children from the British Isles would have been transplanted to British America.

The vast majority of these British colonists would be indentured servants.

The first of them to put down permanent roots beyond the Chesapeake were those seekers of religious liberty, the Pilgrim Fathers. Helped by an approving Sir Edwin Sandys, they were granted a charter to set up the Plymouth colony in New England in 1620. Eight years after their arrival, still more militant Puritans secured a charter for the Massachusetts Bay Company, also in New England. Almost simultaneously, the polar opposites in the Christian spectrum, Roman Catholics, were offered a refuge of their own in America. The Catholic Lord Baltimore was made Lord Proprietor of a vast territory encircling the north and east of Chesapeake Bay, which he was to call Maryland. His co-religionists among the English gentry were urged to relocate there.

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The pace of expansion was set by the Puritans. In the 1630s, something over 20,000 of them would stream into New England and prove how wrong Sir John Popham’s colonists had been three decades earlier to give up so quickly. One in five of this first influx was an indentured servant. By and large, these free-willers were never treated as badly as the plantation servants in Virginia but they were nevertheless very much a repressed underclass. The Puritan view of them was given by the Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop in 1630:

God Almighty in His most holy and wise providence hath so disposed of the condition of mankind as in all times some must be rich, some poor; some high and eminent in power and dignity; others mean and in subjection.1

Two episodes in 1628 point to a mixture of self-righteousness and dour commercialism governing Puritan attitudes to servants. The first episode centred on a free spirit from London with a penchant for poetry, a lawyer called Thomas Morton. He took charge of a plantation and made the mistake of giving the servants there their freedom and promising to receive them as ‘partners and consociates’.2

Morton was a senior partner in a trading venture led by one Thomas Wollaston. He and Wollaston had arrived in Massachusetts Bay with around thirty indentured servants in 1624. They began trading in furs from a plantation on a hill at the south-west corner of what is now Boston Harbour. Today, it is buried under a suburb of Quincy, known to locals as the City of Presidents. Four hundred years ago, the settlers, ignoring the Native American name, called this site Mount Wollaston.

New England entranced Thomas Morton: ‘I do not think that in all the known world it could be paralleled,’ he wrote. ‘So many goodly groves of trees; dainty fine round rising hillocks . . . sweet crystal fountains, and clear running streams . . . ’twas Nature’s Masterpiece . . . if this land be not rich, then is the whole world poor.’3

He was profoundly impressed by the Algonquin. They were so 114

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