White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America (17 page)

The only settlers who didn’t get their fifty acres were, of course, the servants.

The headright scams were the tip of an iceberg of illegality.

As early as 1618, people began to vanish from around the ports of England. They were kidnapped and sold on to the American labour market. The first recorded instance was in Somerset, where illicit warrants were used to arrest women victims who were shipped out to Virginia. A second case saw a clerk called Robinson use forged warrants to ‘take up . . . yeoman’s daughters or drive them to compound to serve His Maj for breeders in Virginia’. He was hanged, drawn and quartered. The punishment wasn’t for kidnapping but for forging the great seal. As we shall shortly see, 121

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the kidnapping business became very big indeed in the following twenty years.

Officialdom, however, was more interested in controlling servants than worrying about how they were procured. Maryland not only matched the restrictions and punishments that Virginia had devised for her slave workforce but sometimes went further. In 1639, the Maryland Assembly made running away a capital offence.

The next year, it changed the sentence. Death would only be the punishment if the servant refused to agree an extension of service at the expiration of the indenture. Initially, the formula was two extra days for every one away, then four days, and then ten days.

With one exception, none of the other colonies would be anything like as dependent on servants as the Chesapeake duo and so the same motive to repress wasn’t there. Even in the Carolinas and Georgia there were relatively few white servants. The exception was Pennsylvania. In later decades, there would be as many English servants arriving in Pennsylvania as in Virginia and the servant laws there would be nearly as dehumanising as those in the Chesapeake.

The only Virginian practice Pennsylvania curbed (and then only partially) was the selling of servants.

Of course, the years of bondage may well have been considered worth it had there been a rainbow at the end. But there seldom was.

The typical indenture tied the servant tight – but not so the master.

Sometimes the only requirements laid on the master were unspecified

‘freedom dues’ payable ‘according to the custom of the country’.

Many were led to believe that this meant land, only to find out on the day of liberty all those years later that it meant next to nothing. In a dingy Wapping tavern or in the bustling office of a Bristol merchant, it was not difficult, one imagines, to have fooled a starry-eyed young illiterate hoping for a new life. It is clear from the numbers of servants who tried for redress that this was a common experience.

Timothy Paul Grady sifted through years of court records from the two Chesapeake colonies and found them filled with numerous instances of masters cheating a servant of freedom dues or holding a servant longer than his or her original term and getting away with it. Grady judged that planter control of the legal system often nullified servants’ rights.14

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It would, however, be wrong to suggest that the courts were so loaded that the servants’ cause was always doomed. There are numerous cases that went their way. Indeed, in Charles County Court, Maryland, advocates began representing servants around the 1640s and began winning. Who they were, or how many they helped, we don’t know. But the archives reveal that the local justices decided to put a stop to it by blocking these Rumpoles. A tantalising paragraph in the archives reads:

Whereas several attorneys have undertaken to manage servants’ cases against their masters and mistresses to the mistresses and masters’ great charge and damage, it is ordered that no person act as attorney for any servant hereafter except such as the court shall appoint.15

Planter-dominated courts made the following kinds of rulings:

• They backed the most successful planter of them all, Richard

‘King’ Carter and his brother Edward when they refused to free nine servants at the time specified on their indentures. The justification was that the indentures hadn’t been made before the Lord Mayor or a justice of the peace. The nine were forced back to servitude on the Carter plantations.

• They deemed Richard Chapman’s indentures valueless because they were ‘only a certificate from some office in England not signed by any person’.

• They dismissed Thomas Damer’s claim that he shouldn’t have been sold ‘according to the custom of the country’ for seven years because he’d indentured for four years before leaving London. The court found he had no documentary proof and made him serve the seven years.

• They turned down the appeal for freedom by Francis and Thomas Brooke, who served an agreed term of four years only to be sold for another four. Inexplicably, they were ordered ‘to return again’ to their master and to ‘serve him two years longer than . . . first covenanted for’.

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Eventually, enough stink was caused in Maryland by ‘custom of the country’ rulings that the provincial assembly eventually laid down specifics. Adult servants arriving without indentures were to serve four years and get a suit of clothes, linen, socks and shoes, two hoes, one axe, three barrels of corn and that treasured fifty acres of land.

Alas, this seems to have made little material difference. A study of the 5,000 indentured servants entering the colony from 1670–80

reveals that fewer than 1,300 proved their rights to freedom dues in land and just 241 ever became landowners. Of the 5,000, one in four is thought to have died still in bondage. Of the 1,300 who did prove their entitlement, some 900 sold their land immediately, many probably because they couldn’t afford the fees for surveying it.16

Of course, humanity triumphed on occasion. It did for the sons of Thomas Allen of St Michaels, Maryland. Allen was among the first servants recruited for Maryland in the early 1630s. A decade and a half later, he was a free man again with some land, three young sons and a fear that something would happen to him, leaving his children impoverished orphans. Thomas’s wife was evidently dead. In 1648, Allen wrote his will, which set out his fears. It tells how Allen, an outspoken Protestant, had fallen foul of a group of Catholic Irishmen and believed they planned to murder him. It pointed the finger at the Irishman responsible if he was killed and called on his friends to look after his two younger sons if he was murdered, as ‘I would not have them sold for slaves.’17

Four months later, Thomas Allen was indeed murdered but not by Irishmen. His body was found on the seashore at Point Lookout, St Michaels, one early August morning in 1648. There were the entry marks of three arrows in his body and he had been scalped. His two youngest sons, Thomas and Robert, were missing.

The boys had been kidnapped by the Patuxent tribe, who had slain their father. News came that they could be ransomed. The tribe wanted 900 pounds of tobacco for Thomas, the older boy, and 600 pounds of tobacco for his younger brother Robert. A court of burgesses was convened and proceeded to order an audit of the dead man’s estate. There wasn’t much. Thomas Allen evidently didn’t 124

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own land of any value, and the term of his indentured servant was nearly up. After sixteen years in the colony, his only assets of any worth were a small boat, a gun and fifteen pigs. After court costs were paid and Allen’s debts discharged, there wouldn’t be enough for the ransom. The worthy burgesses announced that the county wouldn’t foot the bill. But they had a solution. If someone would pay the ransom, they would order that the boys be bound out to the ransomer as indentured servants till they were twenty-one – in their dead father’s words, they would be ‘sold for slaves’.

Happily, the dead man had genuinely good friends. Two of them paid the ransom and took the boys – but as sons not servants. As one declared when he committed himself to paying the 900 pounds of tobacco, it was done ‘without any consideration of servitude or any other consideration whatsoever but his free love and affection’.18

How many did better than Thomas Allen and were able to build a good life and hand on a worthwhile stake in America to succeeding generations? In numerical terms, the answer must be ‘many’. But in percentage terms, the answer is ‘few’. Abbot Emerson Smith held that one in ten servants became a ‘decently prosperous’

landowner while another one became an artisan living ‘a useful and comfortable life without owning any land’. The others ‘died during their servitude, returned to England after it was over’, or became ‘poor whites’ and ‘occupied no substantial position in the colonies either as workers or as proprietors’.19 In short, even those who outlived servitude were left in no better position for all those years of unpaid toil than when they first set foot on American soil.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

SPIRITED AWAY

Economics dictates that when there is a demand for something, a market develops. The criminal mind dictates that where there is a market, there will be those willing to supply it by whatever means.

And so the insistent demand for labour in the colonies gave rise to kidnapping. As related in the previous chapter, the first kidnapper was tried in England in 1618 (the year before the first shipload of children sailed from London), accused of abducting young women for the colonies. This was no flash in the pan. A criminal industry had been born.

By the middle of the seventeenth century, kidnapping was a flourishing business. In 1649, William Bullock, who settled in both Virginia and Barbados, wrote that ‘the usual way of getting servants, hath been by a sort of men nick-named
Spirits
’.1 In other words – despite all the other categories of people flowing into the colonial labour force, including free-willers, deported criminals, street children and the rest – men, women and children had to be inveigled or enticed into slavery to take up the slack in the colonial labour force. Spirits became the colonies’ chief recruiting officers.

Bullock described how kidnappers spirited people away: All the idle, lazy simple people they can entice, such as have professed idleness and will rather beg than work; who are persuaded by these Spirits they shall go into a place where 127

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food shall drop into their mouths; and being thus deluded, they take courage and are transported.2

The numbers are unknown – crime statistics did not exist in the seventeenth century. According to the Virginian clergyman Morgan Godwin, 10,000 people were being spirited away every year by the late 1600s.3 But this figure has been described as ‘absurdly large’, inflated for the purpose of propaganda.4

Walter Blumenthal suggests that it ‘is not improbable’ that the number of ‘browbeaten indentured servants, transportees, convicts and kidnapped may have together exceeded ten thousand in certain years’.5 This was especially likely during the middle years of the 1600s, when Cromwellian excesses were at their highest in Ireland.

We know of many cases of kidnapping through court records.

Elizabeth Hamlyn became the first recorded spirit charged at Middlesex Assizes in London with ‘taking diverse little children in the street and selling them to be carried to Virginia’. She was sentenced to be whipped and to appear again at the next session.

Other spirits followed Hamlyn into the dock intermittently.

Between 1625 and 1701, seventy-three cases of kidnapping came up at the Middlesex County Court.6

This small number of cases across so many years is not a measure of the size of the problem; it is, rather, an indication of the lackadaisical manner in which law-enforcement agencies dealt with it. Among those cases that did come to trial was that of Christian Chacrett, who stood trial in 1655. He was accused of being ‘one that taketh up men and women and children and sells them on a ship to be conveyed beyond the sea’. According to witness Dorothy Perkins, Chacrett had inveigled the Furnifull family – husband, wife and infant – on board the
Planter
, bound for Virginia. In a trial of 1658, Anne Gray was accused of ‘living idly and out of service’ and of spiriting a sixteen-year-old maid onto a ship.

The scale of this shadowy trade is best estimated not by the number of cases but by the scale of criminal activity revealed through the evidence in the trials, for kidnappers often admitted to, or were accused of, very large numbers of offences. In 1671, 128

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a spirit called William Haverland was convicted of kidnapping and turned King’s Evidence. He made accusations against a large number of other spirits, sixteen in all, including a haberdasher, a seaman, two victuallers and a waterman. Haverland claimed that a man named John Stewart had practised spiriting for twelve years, kidnapping people for Barbados, Virginia and other places – ‘five hundred in a year, as he has confessed’.

If the evidence of Haverland is to be believed, Stewart accounted for 6,000 victims in just over a decade. While such a number cannot be verified, the evidence demonstrates that Stewart was considered by his peers to be admirably prolific and diligent in his trade. According to Haverland, Stewart paid twenty-five shillings to anyone who provided him with a victim. Stewart then sold them on for forty shillings apiece.

In another affidavit, Haverland accused William Thiene, a shoemaker of East Smithfield, of spiriting away 840 people, while Robert Bayley, who plied his trade from St Katherine’s and St Giles, was described as ‘an old spirit, who had no other way of livelihood’.

All these spirits required accomplices: strong-arm men and fences, or dealers in stolen goods; ships’ captains or their agents; merchants both in Britain and in the colonies; through to corrupt officials and magistrates on both sides of the Atlantic. The usual operation involved luring the innocent, the gullible and the drunk into makeshift prisons where they could be held until a ship was found for them. If the spirit and a captain already had a business arrangement, the victims could be taken directly onto ships riding at anchor in the Thames. While victims once ensnared could be forcibly held against their will, violent tactics such as those used by the navy’s pressgangs seem to have been a last resort.