White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America (33 page)

WHITE CARGO

at finding them still incarcerated awaiting embarkation was short lived on their discovery that they were powerless to bring their children home. The spirits were in league with the local justices and parents were faced with bills for the food consumed by the children while they had been incarcerated. For poor rural crofter and urban worker alike, these bills were too much and they had to watch with horror as their children were led onto ships and taken away from them for ever. As Williamson put it:

It is absurd to imagine that any parent, tho’ in ever so necessitous a condition, would dispose of their own flesh and blood to strangers who make a prey of innocent children to accumulate their ill-gotten wealth and support their grandeur by conveying the unhappy victims to the remotest parts of the globe where they can have no redress for the injuries done to them.

In the summer of 1743, the world very nearly heard the last of young Peter Williamson when he was taken on board the ship of Captain Robert Ragg:

They conducted me between decks to some others they had kidnapped . . . I had no sense of the fate that was destined for me and spent my time in childish amusements with my fellow sufferers in the steerage, being never suffered to go up on deck while the vessel was in harbour, which was until such a time as they had got in their loading with a complement of unhappy youths for carrying on their wretched commerce.

In all, sixty-nine children were loaded onto the
Planter
, bound for Virginia. The voyage was in itself an adventure in which the ship was grounded and wrecked off the eastern coastline of America: We struck a sand bank near the Capes of Delaware but bailed out and the crew left us to perish. We were taken on shore to a sort of camp and then taken on a vessel bound to Philadelphia. The original vessel was entirely lost.

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Having survived shipwreck, young Peter’s worries were only beginning:

When we arrived and landed at Philadelphia, that captain soon had people enough who came to buy us. He made the most of his villainous loading after his disaster and sold us at about £16 a head.

Williamson was now a servant, sold for a period of seven years, but he had some luck. The man who bought him was a fellow Scot called Hugh Wilson, who, according to Williamson, was ‘a humane, worthy, honest man’. Wilson was childless and he took to Peter, looking after him and not setting him to work until he had time to recover from his journey. In return for an extra year of indenture, Wilson sent Peter to school. The bond between the two was certainly strong, for when Wilson died he left the boy

‘£200 currency’, his best horse and a saddle. Williamson, then aged seventeen, travelled around, working where he could, until he fell for the daughter of a well-established planter and settled down on land by the Delaware River given him by his new father-in-law. ‘I settled there and was happy in a good wife,’ he reports. But fate had not done with Peter Williamson. One evening at eleven o’clock in 1754, while his wife was away visiting her relations, Williamson was at home when his farm was attacked by Native Americans.

They tried to get in and I threatened them with a loaded gun. They threatened to burn me alive if I did not come out. They rushed me, disarmed me, bound me to a tree and plundered and destroyed everything and burned the whole.

The incident was indicative of the recurring campaigns by Native Americans to drive out the Europeans throughout the colonial period. Peter Williamson now found himself the object of continuing animosity from those who were there first. He became their prisoner.

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I was threatened with a tomahawk to be killed if I did not go with them, was loaded with a great pack and travelled at night. At daybreak they tied me to a tree and forced blood out of my fingernails and then lit a fire near the tree and danced round me.

Williamson continues with descriptions of the treatment meted out by the Native Americans to other planters:

They then scalped John Adams’ wife and four children before his eyes and took the old man off, sometimes stripping him naked and painting him or plucking hairs from his head . . .

[and] scorched his cheeks with hot coals.

Williamson escaped and made his way to his father-in-law’s house, only to be told that his wife had died while he was in captivity. With no home or family to tie him, Williamson joined the British Army and campaigned against the Native Americans who had deprived him of his livelihood. Finally, his regiment returned to England, where Williamson was discharged. He then began a different campaign – against those who had kidnapped him and so many other children:

We were driven through the country like cattle to a Smithfield market and exposed to sale in public fairs like so many brute beasts. If the devil had come in the shape of a man to purchase us, his money would have been as readily accepted as of the most honest and humane man in the world. These children are sometimes sold to barbarous and cruel masters from whom they often make an elopement to avoid the harsh usage they often meet with, but as there is scarce a possibility of making a total escape, they are generally taken and brought back; and for every day they have been absent they are compelled to work a week, for every week a month, and for every month a year. They are besides obliged to pay the cost of advertising and bringing them back which often protracts their slavery four or five times longer.

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From other accounts of life for indentured servants quoted in this book, we know that Williamson’s description is accurate. So bad was the treatment of many that advertisements for runaways were posted regularly (several examples will be found in the penultimate chapter). And, as we have already seen, servants did have their indentured period lengthened – often disproportionately – for misbehaviour or running away. So bad was the lot of some that they took their own lives: ‘Some of these poor deluded slaves, in order to put an end to their bondage, put a period to their lives,’

wrote Williamson in one of his most plaintive passages.

Williamson set out to shame those involved in the kidnapping business in his home town of Aberdeen. He published several books, containing different versions of his memoirs and his views on the indentured servant trade. Most important among his writings is his early indictment of those involved in his own abduction. He implicated the town’s magistrates and named names. The magistrates in turn found Williamson guilty of libel, fined him and clapped him in gaol. Although they ordered his book to be burned, it quickly gained notoriety and was widely circulated around Scotland and England. Williamson even edited and added to its various editions. He continued his campaign by launching a counter-offensive against the Aberdeen magistrates. The case was heard in the Court of Session in Edinburgh and caused a sensation when Aberdeen’s legal and mercantile elite denied all wrongdoing, while Williamson’s case was supported by the appearance of witnesses who corroborated the events he described.

The magistrates shot themselves in the foot and provided in their defence the very evidence that would damn them. In their pomposity, they claimed that while a trade in children was widespread, none under the age of ten was indentured and that only those who would benefit would be signed up for a better life abroad. For their good-natured work, they were paid up to £10

a child. The court awarded damages of £100 to Williamson and was careful to stipulate that the money should not come from the town’s funds, thus firmly putting the strain on the defendants’ own pockets.

Williamson’s odyssey was not an isolated one. Others were 241

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snatched, transported across the ocean and made it home again.

In the same year he disappeared from the dockside in Aberdeen, a strange pamphlet appeared in London entitled
Memoirs of an
unfortunate young nobleman return’d from a thirteen years slavery
in America where he had been sent by the wicked contrivances of his
cruel uncle
.5

The writer was James Annesley, who claimed to be the rightful heir to the Irish title of Lord Altham. Annesley said his tale was:

‘A story founded on truth and addresses equally to the head and the heart’. It is certainly intriguing and it illustrates how easily kidnapping and transportation could be used to get someone out of the way, either for revenge or profit. Human nature being what it is, one can imagine that many such instances must have taken place.

Annesley alleged that his uncle had him kidnapped to usurp his inheritance and steal his estates. Whatever the veracity of the memoir, Annesley’s account, like Williamson’s, opens a window into the conditions those spirited away would find themselves contending with in the colonies.

A controversy arose over whether or not Lord Altham had a son, James, born in 1715, his rightful heir. Altham’s existence was a rackety one, with large estates but a trail of debts and mortgages over his lands. He loved to drink and hunt and was famous for keeping a pack of hounds that were said to be so hungry they would eat each other.

Not long after the disputed heir was born, Lord Altham separated from his wife and took a mistress, who in turn took a disliking to the boy. Although his lordship loved his son, he loved his mistress more. Being weak, he had the child packed off to live first with servants and then at a boarding school. James ran away and earned a precarious livelihood running errands for the students of Trinity College.

Lord Altham died in 1727. If he truly had a son, then that boy should have come into his inheritance – but step forward evil Uncle Richard, Altham’s equally disreputable brother. Richard strode off in the dead man’s shoes into his estates, treating James as an impostor. But many people knew the story of young Annesley.

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From evidence given in the court case many years after the crime, the facts appear plain enough.

When Lord Altham died, his estranged son became an embarrassment. He turned up at his father’s funeral and wept a great deal. Uncle Richard – who stood to inherit the title if his awkward nephew was out of the way – was reported as saying he would have the boy transported. In April 1728, Richard hired several villains and went to the house where the child, now aged barely twelve, lodged in Dublin. James was accused of stealing a silver spoon. The child was taken to George’s Quay, rowed to King’s End, about a mile from the city, and put on board a ship named, not without irony, the
James
. The ship’s passenger list shows a James Annesley, servant, on board. One month before, one James Hennesley was indentured before the town clerk of Dublin on 28 March. It is tempting to see this as the same person. However it might be, young James sailed for the colonies, just as so many youngsters had done before.

The story of his American adventures was originally published in
The Gentleman’s Magazine
and has since been rehearsed by more modern writers. It seems that the
James
sailed to Newcastle, which is probably modern New Castle on the Delaware River. He was sold to a planter named Drummond, who was a tyrannical fellow and set his new slave to felling timber. Finding the boy’s strength unequal to the heavy work, Drummond beat him severely and the toil and brutality told upon James’s health. He found an ally in an old female servant who had also previously been kidnapped. This woman had some education and sometimes wrote short pieces of instructive history on bits of paper and passed them to James. The lad neglected his work to read them in the field, thereby incurring more of Drummond’s wrath. After four years, his old friend died and James decided to run away. He armed himself with a stolen billhook and set out. He was seventeen years of age.6

James wandered in the woods for three days until he came to a river and followed it to a town. He decided to wait for night to fall before entering the town and trying to steal some food. As he waited in the woods, two horsemen approached, one with a woman seated behind him. It appeared the party comprised a man 243

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with his wife or mistress and his servant. They dismounted and laid out a picnic. Annesley, by now distraught with hunger, betrayed himself. After nearly being run through with a sword, he managed to convince the party that he was harmless. Over supper, Annesley convinced his new friends that he was a wronged man rather than simply yet another runaway slave among many. The others told Annesley they were going to Appoquinimink to embark on a ship for Holland, and that they would buy him a passage.

The party of four had gone only a short way through the woods before they were apprehended by a group of horsemen who had been sent to track them down. They were bound and taken to Chester gaol. According to a nineteenth-century version: It appeared that the young lady was the daughter of a rich merchant, and had been compelled to marry a man who was disagreeable to her; and that, after robbing her husband, she had eloped with a previous lover who held a social position inferior to her own. All the vindictiveness of the husband had been aroused; and when the trial took place, the lady, her lover, and the servant, were condemned to death for the robbery.

Somehow, Annesley persuaded the authorities that he was not involved in the robbery or the elopement. The court was not convinced of his innocence in all things, however, and decided he should be put in the stocks in the marketplace, where he could be seen by all and identified if he had committed any offence. By now, it is obvious to the reader that Annesley was not by nature a lucky man.

After several weeks in the stocks, he was spotted by his owner Drummond, who had come to town on business. Annesley, who had two years remaining of his servitude, found his period doubled to four. Back on the plantation at New Castle, Drummond’s cruelty increased to such a pitch that the local justices ordered him to sell Annesley to another planter. The wretched Annesley toiled away for three more years until he decided again that he had had enough and took off once more. Before he could reach a ship, 244