“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.