CHAPTER III
DOMESTIC SERVICE DURING THE COLONIAL PERIOD
It has been seen how great a change the inventions of the past century have made in the character of household employments. A change in the nature of household service no less important has taken place by virtue of the political revolutions of the century, acting in connection with certain economic and social forces. The subject of domestic service looms up so prominently in the foreground to-day that there is danger of forgetting that it has a past as well as a present. Yet it is impossible to understand its present condition without comprehending, in a measure, the manner in which it has been affected by its own history. It is equally impossible to forecast its future without due regard to this history.
Domestic service in America has passed through three distinct phases. The first extends from the early colonization to the time of the Revolution; the second, from the Revolution to about 1850; the third, from 1850 to the present time.
During the colonial period service of every kind was performed by transported convicts, indented white servants or “redemptioners,” “free willers,” negroes, and Indians.[11]
The first three classes—convicts, redemptioners, and free willers—were of European, at first generally of English, birth. The colonization of the new world gave opportunity for the transportation and subsequent employment in the colonies of large numbers of persons who, as a rule, belonged to a low class in the social scale.[12] The mother country looked with satisfaction on this method of disposing of those “such, as had there been no English foreign Plantation in the World, could probably never have lived at home to do service for their Country, but must have come to be hanged, or starved, or dyed untimely of some of those miserable Diseases, that proceed from want, and vice.”[13] She regarded her “plantations abroad as a good effect proceeding from many evil causes,” and congratulated herself on being freed from “such sort of people, as their crimes and debaucheries would quickly destroy at home, or whom their wants would confine in prisons or force to beg, and so render them useless, and consequently a burthen to the public.”[14]
From the very first the advantage to England of this method of disposing of her undesirable population had been urged. The author of Nova Britannia wrote in 1609: “You see it no new thing, but most profitable for our State, to rid our multitudes of such as lie at home, pestering the land with pestilence and penury, and infecting one another with vice and villanie, worse than the plague it selfe.”[15] So admirable did the plan seem in time that between the years 1661 and 1668 various proposals were made to the King and Council to constitute an office for transporting to the Plantations all vagrants, rogues, and idle persons that could give no account of themselves, felons who had the benefit of clergy, and such as were convicted of petty larceny—such persons to be transported to the nearest seaport and to serve four years if over twenty years of age, and seven years if under twenty.[16] Virginia and Maryland[17] were the colonies to which the majority of these servants were sent, though they were not unknown elsewhere.[18]
Protests were often made against this method of settlement, both by the colonists themselves[19] and by Englishmen,[20] but it was long before the English government abandoned the practice of transporting criminals to the American colonies.[21]
Of the three classes of white, or Christian servants, as they were called to distinguish them from Indians and negroes, the free willers were evidently found only in Maryland. This class was considered even more unfortunate than that of the indented servants or convicts. They were received under the condition that they be allowed a certain number of days in which to dispose of themselves to the greatest advantage. But since servants could be procured for a trifling consideration on absolute terms, there was no disposition to take a class of servants who wished to make their own terms. If they did not succeed in making terms within a certain number of days, they were sold to pay for their passage.[22] The colonists saw very little difference between the transported criminals and political prisoners, the free willers, and the redemptioners who sold themselves into slavery, and as between the two classes—redemptioners and convicted felons—they at first considered the felons the more profitable as their term of service was for seven years, while that of the indented servants was for five years only.[23]