His Man-Servants and His Maid-Servants

A New England farmhouse and a Southern plantation:—What a contrast the two presented in colonial days! In the homes of Massachusetts and Connecticut, the notable housewife was up before light, breaking the ice over the water, of a winter morning, preparing with her own hands the savory sausages and buckwheat cakes for the men’s breakfast, and setting the house in order. To her it fell to take charge of the wool from the back of the sheep till it reached the back of her boy; carding, spinning, weaving, dyeing the wool, cutting the cloth, and sewing the seams, scouring floors and washing dishes; all these duties fell to the share of the Puritan Priscillas. Yet, when evening fell, when the dishes were shelved on the dresser, these busy housewives, in their sanded kitchens, with the firelight reflected from their shining tins, were not to be pitied, even in comparison with their more luxuriously attended sisters in Maryland or Virginia.

Life at the South was at once grander and shabbier, than in New England. The Southerner’s ease-loving nature had the power to ignore detail; and it is attention to detail which brings well-being to the household and wrinkles to the housekeeper. A thousand slaves could not take the place of one woman of “faculty.” In fact, the more shiftless, lazy negroes there were, the less order and tidiness prevailed. But order and tidiness were not indispensable to happiness there and then, and the sum of human enjoyment was large on those old plantations, in spite of shiftlessness and slavery. Of that restless ambition which corrodes modern life, men had little, women had none, and servants less than none. The negro was a true child of the tropics, and with food and sunshine enough, was merry as the day is long.

A healthy negro, on a prosperous estate, under the charge of a gentleman, not under the bane of an overseer, came perhaps as near to animal cheerfulness as mortal often does. The master enjoyed that serenity and leisure which freedom from manual labor gives; his children grew up, each with a personal retainer attached to himself with the old feudal loyalty; the lady of the house was again the old Saxon hlaefdige, who gave out the bread to the tribe of servants day by day. Yet with all the brightness which can be thrown into the picture, slavery was a curse alike to slave and slave-owner, on account both of what it brought and what it took away.

It is strange to note how silently and unperceived the black cloud of slavery stole over the Colonial Cavalier. A casual entry in John Rolfe’s journal records: “About the last of August came in a dutch man of warre that sold vs twenty Negars.” Before the arrival of this fatal vessel life-servitude was unknown. The system of apprenticeship, and what would now be called contract labor, prevailed. These indented white servants were either transported convicts, sold for a season to the planters, or, like the Maryland redemptioners, poor immigrants, who contracted to serve for a period of time equivalent to the cost of their passage, which was prepaid to the master of the ship on which they came.

The work of these indented servants was not excessive. “Five dayes and a halfe in the summer,” said one who knew the situation from experience, “is the allotted time that they worke and, for two months, when the sun predominates in the highest pitch of his heat, they claim an antient and customary Priviledge, to repose themselves three hours in the day, within the house. In Winter they do little but hunt and build fires.”

The Sot-Weed Factor gives a much less rose-colored account of the life of a redemptioner. A woman-servant in the poem, looking back on her life in England, exclaims:

“Not then a slave for twice two year,
My cloathes were fashionably new,
Nor were my shifts of linnen blue.
But things are changed: Now at the Hoe
I daily work and Barefoot go,
In weeding corn, or feeding Swine
I spend my melancholy time.”

A “melancholy time” many of the redemptioners must have had in their enforced service; but if the master proved too severe, the indented servant had the privilege of selecting another, and the original employer was indemnified for his loss. Susan Frizell, who had run away from her master, was recaptured and brought before the court for punishment; but her accounts of ill-usage so moved the authorities, that they remitted the extra term of service to which running away had made her liable, and only demanded that she should earn under a new master the five hundred pounds of tobacco to be paid to her old employer. The bystanders were so touched by poor Susan’s pitiful situation that they collected six hundred pounds on the spot, and sent Susan on her way rejoicing, with a capital of one hundred pounds of tobacco to give her a new start in the world.

The law provided that the servant, when his time of service expired, should receive a portion of goods sufficient to make him an independent freeman, who might rise to be a councillor or an assemblyman. A Colonial statute directs that “at the end of said terme of service, the master or mistress of such servant shall give unto such man or maid-servant, 3 barrels, a hilling hoe and a felling axe; and to a man-servant, one new cloth suite, one new shirte, 1 new paire shoes, and a new Monmouth capp; and to a maid-servant, 1 new pettycoat and waistcoat, 1 new smock, 1 pair new shoes, 1 pair new stockings and the cloaths formerly belonging to the servant.”

The advantage of this system of indented service lay in its gradual absorption of the immigrant population, who thus had time to understand the laws and institutions of their new country before they became in their turn citizens and lawmakers. The disadvantage lay in the encouragement it gave to kidnapping. Many children and young people in the seaboard towns of England were beguiled, or carried by force, on shipboard, to be sold as servants in the colonies. The kidnappers, or “spirits,” as they were commonly called, served as bugaboos in many an English nursery to frighten naughty children into obedience under threat of being spirited away to America.

Howells’ “State-Trials” contains a pitiful account of the experiences of a young nobleman sold as a white servant in Virginia through the plot of his covetous uncle, who wanted his property. The nephew is a mere child when he begins his apprenticeship in the provinces, but, by a series of attempts to escape, he prolongs his term of service till, when he finally succeeds in getting back to England to claim his own from the treacherous uncle, he is a man grown, and as difficult of recognition as the Tichborne claimant. The great majority of the first indented servants sent over, however, were convicts ripe for the jail or the gallows, and only respited to be transported to the colonies, which long suffered from the introduction of such a class of citizens.

The records of Middlesex County, England, tell their own story:

3 April, 15 James I.

Stephen Rogers, for killing George Watkins against the form of Statute of the first year of King James, convicted of manslaughter, was sentenced to be hung, but at the instance of Sir Thomas Smith, Kn’t, was reprieved in the interest of Virginia, because he was a carpenter.

6 August, 16 James I.

On his conviction of incorrigible vagabondage Ralph Rookes was reprieved at Sheriff Johnson’s order so that he should be sent to Virginia.

28 April, 18 James I.

On her conviction by a Jury of stealing divers goods of Mary Payne, Elizabeth Handsley was reprieved for Virginia.

31 st May, 18 James I.

On his conviction of stealing Richard Atkinson’s bull, William Hill asked for the book, and was respited, for Virginia.

The records teem with such cases. Yet these were not the only representatives of indented servants. In the course of the various successive political upheavals which shook England, it chanced that many gentlemen of good birth and breeding were driven over to the colonies, to begin life there at the foot of the ladder. After Monmouth’s Rebellion several hundred citizens, some of eminent standing, were sent to Virginia. “Take care,” wrote the king, “that they continue to serve for ten years at least, and that they be not permitted in any manner to redeem themselves by money or otherwise, until that term be fully expired.” Despite the royal warning, these exiles were pardoned before the term was ended, and became most useful and valuable citizens.

Well had it been for the Cavalier colonies had they adhered to this system of apprenticeship and indented service. Their children and their children’s children might then have sung of “the nobility of labor, the long pedigree of toil.” But with the widespread introduction of negro slavery, came the degradation of labor. The negro represented a despised caste. He labored; therefore labor was contemptible. Henceforth there was established an aristocracy of ease and wealth, resting on a foundation of unpaid labor.

With the establishment of slavery there grew up a more marked distinction of classes among the whites. A wide gulf separated rich and poor. Devereux Jarratt, son of a Virginia carpenter, writes in his autobiography: “We were accustomed to look upon gentlefolks as beings of a superior order. For my part, I was quite shy of them and kept off a humble distance. A periwig in those days was a distinguishing badge of gentlefolk; and when I saw a man riding the road with a wig on, it would so alarm my fears, and give me such a disagreeable feeling, that I dare say I would run as for my life.”

Thus society became stratified: At the top, the great landholders, below them the small planters aping the manners and customs of their rich neighbors, and underneath, the population composed of poor whites and overseers. The negroes were no more part of the social system than the oxen they drove a-field.

It is a curious commentary on the Scriptural principle of turning the other cheek to the smiter, that the Indians, who resisted the encroachments of the whites and waved the tomahawk in response to the echo of the Englishman’s gun, were feared and respected, while the blacks, who yielded meekly to the yoke of servitude, met at best only a good-natured contempt.

The masters’ consciousness of the injustice of slavery made them fearful of revolt and revenge, which the slaves had neither skill nor energy to plan. The whole machinery of the law was directed to the suppression of this imaginary danger. All gatherings of slaves were strictly forbidden. If found at a distance from the plantations, any negro was subject to lashes on the bare back. It was not counted a felony to kill a slave while punishing him. Negroes, and indented servants as well, who attempted to escape were whipped and branded on the cheek with the letter R, and on a repetition of the offence they might be put to death. No punishment was too severe for this crime of running away, curiously denominated in the old statutes “stealth of one’s self.” Among the enormous offences set forth in a Maryland Act of 1638 I find, “Harboring or clokeing of another’s servant without the knowledge and consent of the Master or Mistress.”

In spite of all precautions, a slave did succeed, now and then, in gaining his freedom. It is with great satisfaction that I read an old Act of Assembly, setting forth that “Whereas a negro named Billy, slave to John Tillit, has for several years unlawfully absented himself from his master’s service, said Billy is pronounced an outlaw, and a bounty of a thousand pounds of tobacco set on his head.” The bounty does not trouble me, for I feel sure that the craft and strength which made Billy an outlaw, kept him safe from the bolts aimed against him by the colonial legislature.

The statute-books of Maryland and Virginia are records of the barbarity into which injustice may drive a kindly, liberty-loving people who are forced into cruelty by the logic of events. Having taken the wrong road, like Bunyan’s Pilgrim, the Cavaliers found the rocks ready to fall on them if they went forward, and the gulf yawning behind them if they tried to turn back.

It must never be forgotten in their behalf that they did try to turn about, when they saw their error. Their best men, over and over again, urged the prohibiting of slavery, and there is more than a probability that they would have won their cause, but for the attitude of that country whose air was afterward pronounced too pure to be breathed by a slave insomuch that his shackles fell off, when he touched the shore sacred to liberty. Yet, in 1695, this highly moral and philanthropic England declared in a statute, the opinion of its king and Parliament, that the slave-trade was highly beneficial to the kingdom and colonies. In 1712, Queen Anne boasted in her speech to Parliament, of her success in securing to England a new market for slaves in Spanish America. Jefferson testified that Virginia was constantly balked in her efforts to throw off slavery by the attitude of the home government. Carolina attempted restriction and gained a rebuke. In 1775, the Earl of Dartmouth haughtily replied to a colonial agent, “We cannot allow the colonies to check, or discourage in any degree, a traffic so beneficial to the nation.”

Yet all the blame cannot be thrown on England. Had the colonies been as firm in defence of their duties, as they were when their rights were in question, England must have yielded. Virginia was the first State to enunciate the proposition of the equality of man, yet was blind to her own inconsistency. The leading supporters of the cause of liberty were themselves slave-owners. George Washington owned negroes. John Randolph had a bunk for his slave side by side with the bed of his pet horse. Patrick Henry wrote with admirable candor: “Believe me, I shall honor the Quakers for their noble efforts to abolish slavery; they are equally calculated to promote moral and political good. Would any one believe that I am master of slaves of my own purchase? I am drawn along by the general inconvenience of living without them. I will not—I can not—justify it.” The great Southern statesman said that he trembled for his country when he remembered that God was just. Washington deplored the system, yet so closely were all commercial and political interests interwoven with it that it seemed impossible to disentangle them. Even philanthropy did not scorn its alliance. Whitefield expended the money raised by his eloquent preaching at Charleston, on a plantation with slaves to work it for the benefit of an orphan asylum.

The Church spread its surplice of protection over the institution. Baptism was permitted to the slave, but with the distinct understanding that it was to make no difference in the condition of bondage of these brothers in Christ. One South Carolina clergyman ventured to preach on the duties of masters to their servants, but his congregation said to him: “Sir, we pay you a genteel salary to read to us the prayers of the liturgy and to explain to us such parts of the Gospel as the rule of the Church directs, but we do not want you to teach us what to do with our blacks.”

The Northern colonies were freed from the curse of slaveholding as much by policy as by principle. They tried slave-owning, but, happily for them, it did not pay. The climate and the conditions of their industries forbade its spread among them. But their hands were not unstained. If they did not buy slaves, they sold them. There still exists, if Bishop Meade may be trusted, a bill of sale of a slave, bearing the signature of Jonathan Edwards.

Every year ships were fitted out from Medford, Salem, or New Bedford, which sailed away loaded with rum to be exchanged in Africa for negroes, who in turn were sold for molasses, to be made into rum again. The transactions of one of these slavers are preserved in the History of Medford, and makes interesting reading for those who would hold up the Puritan as innocent of the transgression which stains the character of the Cavalier. The deadly parallel column tells its story, so that he who runs may read:

Dr.The Natives of Annamboe.Per Contra.Cr.
1770. Gals1770Gals
Apr. 22
Apr.22.To 1 hh. of rum 110By 1 Woman Slave110
May 1.
May1.""" 130By 1 Prime Woman Slave.130
May 2.
May2.""" 105By 1 Boy Slave 4 ft. 1 in.105
May 7.
May7.""" 130By 1 Boy Slave 4 ft. 3 in.108
May 5.
May5.Cash in gold 5 oz. 21 Prime Man Slave 5 oz.2
May 5.
"5."""2 oz.}31 Old Man for a Lingister3 oz.
"5.2 doz. of snuff1 oz.

The negroes thus brought to the American colonies were not of one race. A slaver often carried men of different languages, habits, and characteristics, perhaps hereditary enemies. Some were jet black, some mahogany-colored, and others still of a tawny yellow, with flat noses and projecting jaws. This last type belonged to the low, swampy ground at the Niger’s delta, and marked the race most adapted to the cultivation of the rice in its swamps, so fatal to white laborers. All this diversity among the negroes accounts for their lack of power and energy to combine in a struggle for freedom. “The negroes that have been slaves in their own country,” Hugh Jones says, “make the best servants; for they that have been kings and great men there, are generally lazy, haughty and obstinate.” Alas, for these poor magnates from Heathendom!

The Cavaliers did not find the problem of domestic service solved by life-ownership of servants. Colonel Fitzhugh writes Mr. John Buckner in 1680: “I hope you will make an abatement for your Dumb Negro that you sold me. Had she been a new Negro, I must have blamed my fate, not you; but one that you had two years, I must conclude you knew her qualities, which is bad at work, worse at talking. You took advantage of the softness of my messenger to quit your hands of her.”

In spite of this unsuccessful experiment, we find him two years later making another venture in human live-stock, by ordering John Withers to buy “Mr. Walton’s Boy for £20, or £54 with him and 2 others, unlesse you can make a better bargain.” Poor Colonel Fitzhugh might well be discouraged, for he had tried every kind of servant, black and white, bond and free, without satisfactory results. “I would have you,” he writes in despair to a sea captain in England, “bring me in a good housewife. I do not intend or mean to be brought in, as the ordinary servants are, but to pay her passage and agree to give her fifty shillings or three pounds a year during the space of five years, upon which terms, I suppose, good servants may be had, because they have their passage clear, and as much money as they can have there. I would have a good one or none. I look upon the generality of wenches you bring in as not worth keeping.”

So the Colonial Cavaliers found trouble in their households with servants of any race or color, and the gentle nature of the blacks proving specially adaptable to servitude, and purchase money seeming so much less than wage-money, they gradually did away with other service. Every plantation had its negro-quarters, where crowds of pickaninnies swarmed in the sunshine outside the little cabins with scarcely more clothing on than their parents had worn in their African jungle. The bread of Indian corn was baked on the hoe over a smoky fire, or in the ashes. When the day’s work was done, the negroes sat, with their banjos or rude musical instruments, playing accompaniments to their strange, weird music, a mixture of reminiscences of barbarism and the hymns they caught from the “New Lights”; or they spent the evening more merrily, dancing jigs to the twanging of a broken fiddle. They were, on the whole, a careless, happy race, taking no thought for the morrow, content to accept food and clothing at the hands of “Massa and Missus,” and, for the rest, to work when they must, shirk when they could, and carry a merry heart through life. The outward circumstances of their lot were hard. Anbury, in his American travels, observed their condition closely and described it with what we must believe impartial accuracy. The life of these field-hands was much more severe than that of the household servants, both because the work itself was harder, and because it was ruled by the overseer, usually a brute. It is of these field negroes that Anbury is writing, when he says: “They are called up at daybreak, and seldom allowed to swallow a mouthful of hominy or hoecake, but are driven out into the field immediately, where they continue at hard labor without intermission till noon, when they go to their dinners and are seldom allowed an hour for that purpose. Their meals consist of hominy and salt, and if their master is a man of humanity, touched by the finer feelings of love and sensibility, he allows them twice a week a little fat, skimmed milk, rusty bacon or salt herring to relish this miserable and scanty fare.... After they have dined they return to labor in the field till dusk in the evening. Here one naturally imagines the daily labor of these poor creatures over; not so. They repair to the tobacco-houses, where each has a task of stripping allotted, which takes up some hours; or else they have such a quantity of Indian corn to husk, and if they neglect it, are tied up in the morning, and receive a number of lashes from those unfeeling monsters, the overseers. When they lay themselves down to rest, their comforts are equally miserable and limited, for they sleep on a bench, or on the ground with an old scanty blanket, which serves them at once for bed and covering. Their clothing is not less wretched, consisting of a shirt and trousers of coarse, thin, hard, hempen stuff in the Summer, with an addition of a very coarse woolen jacket, breeches, and shoes in Winter.” Yet, in spite of toil and privation, these negroes, so the traveller testifies, are jovial and contented.

It seems incomprehensible to us that the noble, sensitive, kindly Southern gentleman saw all these things in silence; that even when they had no share in the beating of the wayfarer, they still passed by on the other side with the priest or the Levite and offered no succor. Yet, do we not do the same thing every day? We know that the faces of the poor are ground while the rich prosper, that the animal world is abused and tortured, yet because we think ourselves powerless, we strive to make ourselves callous, and turn away our eyes that we may not see where we cannot help.

Many there were who had the courage as well as the impulse to protest. One of the firmest and the ablest of these was Jefferson. He had the insight to perceive not only the injustice to the slave, but the injury to the slaveholder. “There must, doubtless,” he writes, “be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submission on the other. Our children see this and learn to imitate it, for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave, he is learning to do what he sees others do. If a parent could find no motive either in his philanthropy or his self-love for restraining the intemperance of passion toward his slave, it should always be a sufficient one that his child is present. But generally it is not sufficient. The parent storms; the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to the worst of his passions; and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.”

Yet we are constantly meeting such prodigies in the history of the Cavalier. Men whose pure lives, gentle manners, and courtesy to high and low, whose unselfishness and cheerful benignity may be matched against those of the hardest-working Puritan or the most radical upholder of the equal rights of man. The old noblesse oblige principle still held sway. Governor Gouch, of Virginia, being once on a time reproached for having returned the bow of a negro, replied in the good old Cavalier spirit: “I should be much ashamed that a negro should have better manners than I.” The field hands were kept at a distance, but the house-servants were admitted to the closest intimacy, especially when acting in the capacity of maids and nurses. Many a golden head was laid for comfort on the black breast of some faithful Mammy, while the childish sorrows were poured into her listening ear, and many a gray-haired woman recalled as her truest friend, the humble slave whose life had been devoted to her service.

An entry in Washington’s journal shows how well he understood the nature of the negro, and how wisely and firmly he dealt with it. One day four of his servants were employed at carpentering, but without accomplishing anything. Instead of scolding, Washington sat himself calmly down to watch their work. Stimulated by his presence, they went on briskly. The wise master noted the work and the time, and then informed them that just so much must be done in his absence. It was owing to such management that the products of the Mount Vernon plantation ranked so high that all barrels marked with the name of George Washington passed the inspectors without examination.

Here, if anywhere, was a man who might be trusted with arbitrary power over his fellow-men, yet he was one of the most outspoken in opposition to slavery; and he, like Jefferson, realized the terrible strain on the character of the master. Woe to the man who lives constantly with inferiors! He is doomed never to hear himself contradicted, never to be told unwelcome truth, never to sharpen his wits and learn to control his temper by argument with equals. The Colonial Cavaliers were little kings, and they proved the truth of the saying of the royal sage of Rome, that the most difficult of tasks is to lead life well in a palace.