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.”