Domestic service

by Lucy Maynard Salmon

It is impossible to state the proportion of servants belonging to the two classes of transported convicts and redemptioners, but the statement is apparently fair that the redemptioners who sold themselves into service to pay for the cost of their passage constituted by far the larger proportion. These were found in all the colonies, though more numerous in the Southern and Middle colonies than in New England. In Virginia and Maryland they outnumbered negro slaves until the latter part of the seventeenth century.[24] In Massachusetts, apprenticed servants bound for a term of years were sold from ships in Boston as late as 1730,[25] while the general trade in bound white servants lasted until the time of the Revolution,[26] and in Pennsylvania even until this century.[27]

The first redemptioners were naturally of English birth, but after a time they were supplanted by those of other nationalities, particularly by the Germans and Irish. As early as 1718 there was a complaint of the Irish immigrants in Massachusetts.[28] In Connecticut “a parcel of Irish servants, both men and women,” just imported from Dublin, was advertised to be sold cheap in 1764.[29] In 1783 large numbers of Irish and German redemptioners entered Maryland, and a society was formed to assist the Germans who could not speak English.[30]

It has been said that a great majority of the redemptioners belonged at first to a low class in the social scale. A considerable number, however, both men and women, belonged to the respectable, even to the so-called upper classes of society.[31] They were sent over to prevent disadvantageous marriages,[32] to secure inheritances to other members of a family,[33] or to further some criminal scheme.

Many of these bond servants sold themselves into servitude, others were disposed of through emigration brokers,[34] and still others were kidnapped, being enticed on shipboard by persons called “spirits.”[35]

The form of indenture was simple, and varied but little in the different colonies. Stripped of its cumbersome legal phraseology, it included the three main points of time of service, the nature of the service to be performed, although this was usually specified to be “in any such service as his employer shall employ him,” and the compensation to be given.[36]

It sometimes happened that servants came without indenture. In such cases the law expressly and definitely fixed their status, though it was found extremely difficult to decide upon a status that could be permanent. Virginia, in particular, for a long time found it impossible to pass a law free from objections, and its experience will illustrate the difficulties encountered elsewhere. An early law in Virginia provided that if a servant came without indenture, he or she was to serve four years if more than twenty years old, five years if between twelve and twenty years of age, and seven years if under twelve.[37] Subsequently it was provided that all Irish servants without indenture should serve six years if over sixteen and that all under sixteen should serve until the age of twenty-four,[38] and this was again modified into a provision requiring those above sixteen years to serve four years and those under fifteen to serve until twenty-one, the Court to be the judge of their ages.[39] It was soon found, however, that the term of six years “carried with it both rigour and inconvenience” and that thus many were discouraged from coming to the country, and “the peopling of the country retarded.” It was therefore enacted that in the future no servant of any Christian nation coming without indenture should serve longer than those of the same age born in the country.[40] But as the law was also made retroactive, it was soon ordained that all aliens without indenture could serve five years if above sixteen years of age and all under that until they were twenty-four years old, “that being the time lymitted by the laws of England.”[41] This arrangement was equally unsatisfactory, since it was found that under it “a servant if adjudged never soe little under sixteene yeares pays for that small tyme three yeares service, and if he be adjudged more the master looseth the like.” It was then resolved that if the person were adjudged nineteen years or over he or she should serve five years, and if under that age then as many years as he should lack of being twenty-four.[42] This provision was apparently satisfactory, subsequent laws varying only in minor provisions concerning the details of the Act.[43]

The condition of the redemptioners seems to have been, for the most part, an unenviable one. George Alsop, it is true, writes in glowing terms of the advantages enjoyed in Maryland:

“For know,” he says, “That the Servants here in Mary-land of all Colonies, distant or remote Plantations, have the least cause to complain, either for strictness of Servitude, want of Provisions, or need of Apparel: Five dayes and a half in the Summer weeks is the alotted time that they work in; 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, and this is undeniably granted to them that work in the Fields.