Eighteenth Century Waifs

by John Ashton

Slavery, properly so called, appears to have been from the earliest ages, and in almost every country, the condition of a large portion of the human race; the weakest had ever to serve the strong—whether the slave was a captive in battle, or an impecunious debtor unable to satisfy the claims of his creditor, save with his body. Climate made no difference. Slavery existed in Europe, Asia, and Africa, and in our own ‘right little, tight little island,’ our early annals show that a large proportion of the Anglo-Saxon population was in a state of slavery. These unfortunate bondsmen, who were called theows, thrœls, and esnes,[26] were bought and sold with land, and were classed in the inventory of their lord’s wealth, with his sheep, swine, and oxen, and were bequeathed by will, precisely as we now dispose of our money, or furniture.

The condition of the Anglo-Saxon slaves was very degraded indeed; their master might put them in bonds, might whip them, nay, might even brand them, like cattle, with his own distinguishing mark, a state of things which existed until Alfred the Great enacted some laws, whereby the time of the servitude of these unhappy people was limited to six years, and the institution of slavery received such a blow, that it speedily became a thing of the past. They were no longer slaves, but redemptioners, i.e., they had the hope of redemption from servitude, and the law gave them the power to enforce their freedom.

We have only to turn to the pages of holy writ to find slavery flourishing in rank luxuriance in the time of the patriarchs, and before the birth of Moses. Euphemistically described in Scripture history as servants, they were mostly unconditional and perpetual slaves. They were strangers, either taken prisoners in war or purchased from the neighbouring nations; but the Jews also had a class of servants who only were in compulsory bondage for a limited time, and they were men of their own nation.

These were men who, by reason of their poverty, were obliged to give their bodies in exchange for the wherewithal to support them, or they were insolvent debtors, and thus sought to liquidate their indebtedness, or men who had committed a theft, and had not the means of making the double, or fourfold, restitution that the law required. Their thraldom was not perpetual, they might be redeemed, and, if not redeemed, they became free on the completion of their seventh year of servitude.

Exodus, chap. 21, vv. 2-6. ‘If thou buy an Hebrew servant, six years shall he serve: and in the seventh he shall go out free for nothing. If he came in by himself, he shall go out by himself; if he were married, then his wife shall go out with him. If his master have given him a wife, and she have borne him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall be her master’s, and he shall go out by himself. And if the servant shall plainly say, I love my master, my wife, and my children: I will not go out free: then his master shall bring him unto the judges; he shall also bring him to the door, or unto the door-post; and his master shall bore his ear through with an awl, and he shall serve for ever.’

Here, then, we have a redemptioner, one whose servitude was not a hopeless one, and we find this limited bondage again referred to in Leviticus, chap. 25, vv. 39, 40, 41.

‘And if thy brother that dwelleth by thee be waxen poor, and be sold unto thee, thou shalt not compel him to serve as a bond servant: but as an hired servant, and as a sojourner, he shall be with thee, and shall serve thee unto the year of jubilee. And then shall he depart from thee, both he and his children with him, and shall return unto his own family, and unto the possession of his fathers shall he return.’

Here in England we are accustomed to look upon the slave from one point of view only, as an unhappy being of a different race and colour to ourselves, few of us knowing that there has been a time (and that not so very long ago) when members of our own nation, so utterly forlorn and miserable from the rude buffetings Fortune had given them in their way through the world, have been glad to sell their bodies for a time, to enable them to commence afresh the struggle for existence, in another land, and, perchance, under more favourable circumstances.

In ‘his Majesty’s plantations’ of Virginia, Maryland, and New England, and in the West Indies, these unfortunates were first called servants, and as such are officially described; but in America in later times they received the appellation of redemptioners, a name by which they were certainly called in the middle of this century, for in Dorsey’s ‘Laws of Maryland,’ published in 1840, we find an Act[27] (cap. 226) was passed in 1817 to alleviate the condition of these poor people. The preamble sets forth, ‘Whereas it has been found that German and Swiss emigrants, who for the discharge of the debt contracted for their passage to this country are often obliged to subject themselves to temporary servitude, are frequently exposed to cruel and oppressive impositions by the masters of the vessels in which they arrive, and likewise by those to whom they become servants,’ &c.