Forgotten and Misplaced Ancestors

Indentured Servants: 

 America’s Forgotten Ancestors

Evelyn Smith

Masters in Library Science, University of North Texas, 2012

Shaking the Family Tree: 

A Personal Note

Since approximately 75 percent of all European immigrants to the British colonies in North America came as indentured servants, Americans of European descent whose ancestries extend back to the colonial era may find a few bondsmen in their pedigree.  Accordingly, historical research indicates that two of my ancestors were indentured servants.  In both their cases, their life stories had a happy ending, but for many indentured servants their tale ended in tragedy.

According to family tales, John Macquarrie (1710-1790), a seventh-great maternal grandfather, and a native of the Isle of Eigg, one of the Scottish Inner Hebrides, was captured shortly after fighting for Bonnie Prince Charles in Clan Randle’s regiment at the Battle of Culloden on April 16, 1746.  On March 31, 1747, one John Macquarrie was sentenced to transportation aboard the Pamela.  Family tradition holds that Macquarrie married his master’s daughter, Miranda Stout, in Lynchburg, Appomattox, Virginia.  By 1779, he  entered a claim for 100 acres in Reddies River, Wilkes, North Carolina, and in 1784, he paid a poll tax there, dying six years later in 1790.   

 

George Keesee (1680-1742), a sixth-great grandfather on my dad's side, whose last name was originally most probably La Kaze, appears on a list of Huguenot immigrants who founded the first Huguenot, or French Protestant, settlement in the New World, Manikintown, Virginia.  On June 19, 1721, Keesee served as an executor as well as legatee for the will of Suzanne Baker, a Westmoreland County, Virginia, widow, receiving a bequest of 40 acres, the standard settlement for an indentured servant upon completing his duties.  This request provides circumstantial evident that not only was Keesse an indentured servant, but a Quaker as well, since a phrase used in the will “my beloved friends” was a common address among the Society of Friends.

Resources

Munro, R. W. & Alan Macquarrie. (1996). Clan Macquarrie. A History. N. P.: Bruce Macquarrie. Retrieved from  http://albanach.org/macquarrie/ch7.html

Nord, Maurie. (2007, February).  McQuary: A Family History, p. 6.  Retrieved from http://www.maurienord.com/pdf/books/MCQUARY1.pdf

Keesee, Vincent A. The Keesee family in Pittyslvania County, Virginia.  Tiflin, Georgia: Vincent Keesee, 1980, pp. 7-11.

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Selected Secondary Sources Online

Indentured servant. (2013). North America. Factual World. Retrieved from

http://www.factualworld.com/article/Indentured_servant

Over one-half of all European immigrants to the British colonies started life in 16^th and 17^th-century colonial America as debt-bondage servants, booking passage to the New World as redemptioners, although individuals could also indenture themselves in an exchange for an apprenticeship (Factual, 2012, para. 1 & 6). Since families were broken up on the voyage, other indentured servants became their new family (Factual, 2012, para. 5).

These servants could be bought and sold, could not marry, and courts complied them to honor their contracts, which often meant enduring corporal punishment.  A high percentage of runaways and suicides among indentured servants implies that indentured service was very similar to slavery (Factual, 2012, para. 7). Indentured servitude in Massachusetts, which usually took the form of an apprenticeship that required the bond servant to live in a town and receive religious instruction, integrated him or her into the community.  Indentured servants in Virginia, however, were more likely to work in the field on isolated farms (Factual, 2012, para. 9).

Indentured servants. (n. d.).  Boundless. Retrieved from https://www.boundless.com/u-s-history/britain-and-the-settling-of-the-colonies-1600-1750/the-british-empire-in-north-america/indentured-servants/

Cash-short planters and shopkeepers in England’s American colonies often hired indentured servants, who contracted to work for the cost of their passage (Boundless, n. d., para. 1).  Parliament eventually enacted laws theoretically protecting servants from abuse as well as setting the terms and conditions of their service (Boundless, n. d., para. 2).  Displaced workers signed indentured contacts, or English courts sentenced convicts to a term as indentured servants.  In return for passage, they worked without wages, until their employers paid for their passage (Boundless, n. d., para. 3). Ordinarily, ship captains transported often cheated and abused indentured servants without charge in return for selling their legal papers.  Upon finding a buyer, a city court recorded the sale whereupon the buyer hired the right to the servant’s labor but not his or her person for a specified period of time (Boundless, n. d., para. 4--5). 

Up to 2/3rds of all settlers in the American colonies booked passage as indentured service in return for food, board, and clothing during their term of indenture.  Indeed, so many indentured servants existed that the U. S. Constitution counted them when apportioning representatives to the states (Boundless, n. d., para. 6 & 8). During their time as bond servants, they could not marry and were often subject to physical punishment until they received their “freedom dues” (Boundless, n. d., para. 6—7). Slavery of sub-Saharan Africans replaced indentured servitude of Europeans when the price of contract labor increased (Boundless, n. d., para. 9).

Indentured servants. (2003). Dictionary of American History.  Encyclopedia.com.  Retrieved from http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Indentured_servants.aspx

Indentured servants came in three varieties: 1) free-willers, or redeemers, who freely contracted to become indentured servants in return for passage to the New World; 2) those indentured because of indebtedness or who were kidnapped; 3) convicts sentenced for deportation unless upon making port they had the funds to pay for their freedom (DAH, 2003, para. 1).  Indentured servants made up from 80 to 90 percent of the European immigrants in the Chesapeake region in the 17^th century (DAH, 2003, para. 2).   After they ended their term of service, these now free men and women received a new change of clothes, a gun, and a tract of land.  Unlike slaves, no permanent stigma resulted from their service, and the law considered the children born to indentured servants as free.  Courts, however, could require runaway indentured servants to return to their masters with additional time added to their term of service (DAH, 2003, para. 3). When indentured servants started to rebel, plantation owners begin to purchase African slaves.  Indentured service ended when its source of workers dried up during the American Revolution, but  contract labor continued during labor shortages until Congress passed the Contract Labor Law of 1885 (DAH, 2003,  para. 4).. 

Indentured servants in the U. S.  (2011). History detectives.  Oregon Public Broadcasting.  Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/feature/indentured-servants-in-the-us/

Indentured servants arrived in Jamestown to work for the Virginia Company in 1607 (Oregon PBS, 2011, para. 1).  Since the Thirty Years War in Europe had left many unskilled workers unemployed, over 2/3rds of the immigrants to the British colonies came as indentured servants, who ordinarily worked for seven years in exchange for passage, room, board, and lodging (Oregon PBS, 2011, para. 2-3).  Although their masters restricted their rights, they were not slaves.  Indeed, some historians argue that their lot was better than the free settlers who came to the colonies.  Moreover, when sub-Saharan Africans were brought to Virginia, at first, they too became indentured servants, but by 1641 in Massachusetts and 1661 in Virginia, they lost their freedom as the costs to procure indentured servants grew (Oregon PBS, para. 4-6).

Indentured servants. (n.d.).  Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia.  Monticello.org. Retrieved from http://www.monticello.org/site/plantation-and-slavery/indentured-servants

Only two indentured servants worked at Monticello during their terms of indenture whine two former indentured servants worked for Thomas Jefferson after they had completed their contracts.  No indentured servants worked at Monticello after 1778, even though Jefferson suggestion that slaves guilty of insurrection be resettled in Sierra Leone after a term of indentured service (Monticello, n. d., para. 1 & 3). While serving as a bond servant, the individual was as much under the control of a master as a slave was.  In Virginia, illegitimate children of both European and African women were bond to the parish until age 31 up to 1765 and thereafter up to age 21 for males and 18 for females (Monticello, n. d., para. 2).

Lancaster, R. Kent. (1999). Almost chattel: The lives of indentured servants at Hampton-Northampton, Baltimore County, Maryland.  Maryland Historical Magazine, 94:5.  Retrieved from http://www.nps.gov/hamp/historyculture/indentured-servants.htm

Both African slaves and British indentured servants worked the Hampton farm and  Northampton Iron works, approximately 300 Europeans passing through the Ridgely family between 175 and 1800, although employers distinguished between willing indentured servants and convicts, and some bonds servant may have received preferable treatment because of their job skills (Lancaster, 1999, para. 1—2). During the 1760s, Captain Charles Ridgely bought and sold indentured servants at a profit, even though most were not resold, serving out their terms of from four to seven years.  Some servants also re-enlisted after receiving their freedom.  By 1790, however, the slavery of Africans had replaced the indentured service of working class British immigrants (Lancaster, 1999, para. 3). 

No contracts between a master and an individual indentured servant exist because Ridgely contracted with importers or agents who fixed terms of service.  Furthermore, if a buyer purchased a group of indentured servants, records do not list individual names (Lancaster, 1999, para. 4). Non-convicts usually entered into contracts to work for four years while convicts ordinarily served a term of from 7 to 14 years, even though no Ridgely bond servants worked for more than four years.  Records, however, do include a convict whose services were bought in 1775, who did not receive his freedom dues in 1783 since he had already renewed his contract in 1782, which extended his contract (Lancaster, 1999, para. 5 & 9). 

In theory, indentured servants had legal rights, but in practice, a master could physically punish them and treat them as he deemed necessary.  Neck rings of iron restrained runaways, and servants who went to court without their master’s permission to protest their poor treatment had their contracts extended to compensate the master for their lost labor (Lancaster, 1999, para. 8 & 25).  Those bonds servants put to work in the forge and furnace endured the most intensive labor; however, all workers worked from sunup to sundown (Lancaster 1999, para. 10 & 13).

Most indentured servants were males about 26-years-old while only a few women contacted to be indentured servants.  This contrasts with the slaves, who were allowed to live in family units (Lancaster, 1999, para. 26).

Indentured servants wore identical clothing made of rough flax, cotton, or wool that came in batches without any attempt at sizing, although on the plantation, women worked full time as weavers and sewing.  Shoes, however, varied in quality depending upon the servant’s position.  Clothes were adequate for the summer months, but clothing allowance were definitely “skimpy” for the winter ones (Lancaster, 1999, para. 17—20). 

Indentured servants ate in a communal kitchen, and meals consisted primarily of fresh or salted pork and beef with occasional servings of fish, gruel, cornmeal and flour.  Dried vegetables were uncommon while fresh vegetables remained completely absent from the diet. Servants, however, insisted on grog as part of their pay (Lancaster, 1999, para. 23—24). 

National Women’s History Museum. (2007). Women as indentured servants.   Building the New World:  The Women of the Jamestown Settlement.  Retrieved from http://www.nwhm.org/online-exhibits/jamestownwomen/10.htm

During the first 20 years of the Jamestown settlement, women arrived as indentured servants, signing contracts to work as bonds women for from four to seven years in return for the Virginia Company’s paying their passage (NWHM, 2007, para. 1).  Since married couples rarely contracted themselves out to serve as servants, Bondswomen or Bound women specified whether they were “single women”, “spinsters”, or “widows” (NWHM, 2007, para. 2).  Bondswomen who became pregnant had their terms of service extended to reimburse their masters for the loss of their work.  Sometimes, a woman used pregnancy to pressure the father of her child to buy out her contract (NWHM, 2007, para. 2).

Sansone, Tina. (2006). Indentured servants.  Encyclopedia of Genealogy.  Retrieved from http://www.eogen.com/IndenturedServants

Sansone notes an instant where an indentured servant, Richard Mynatt, Jr. of London (1728-1824), an indentured cook for the Thomas Lee family, successfully sued his master, who refused to release him from his contract.  Some bondsmen, like Mynatt, became good citizens and patriots while others without any apparent means to support themselves ended up roaming the frontier (Sansone, 2006, para. 1—3). Convicts sentenced to indentured service often had received sentences for petty larceny or religious or political beliefs (Sansone, 2006, para. 4). 

From ½ to 2/3rds of all immigrants came to the British colonies as indentured servants, serving terms of from four to seven years. Eventually mandated identity cards made it more  difficult to escape, and  planters dealt with labor shortages by buying slaves rather than making contracts with indentured servants (Sansone, 2006, para. 5—8).

Shifflett, Crandall. (2000, summer).  Indentured servants and the pursuit of happiness.  Texts of Imagination and Empire.  Retrieved from http://www.folger.edu/html/folger_institute/jamestown/c_shifflet.htm

Indentured servants continued to work until the early 19^th-century, immigrants  making a written promise to work for the person who paid for their passage and their food, clothing, and shelter usually for a term of from four to seven years. Approximately, 3/4ths of the early European immigrants to the British colonies were indentured, but many sailed without a contract in hand.  In colonial Virginia a “bullish tobacco market” and a demand for labor drove up immigration rates to almost 2,000 emigrants per year (Shifflett, 2000, 2 & 4). Documentation for 15,000 of the 120,000 indentured servants who came to Maryland and Virginia in the 17^th century exists: Most were single males, aged 15 to 24, who worked as laborers, artisans, husbandmen, yeomen, and occasionally identified themselves as “gentlemen”. Englishmen from London, the southeastern England, counties along the Thames River, the West Country, and Bristol made up 10,000 of these documented bondsmen (Shifflett, 2000, para. 5).

Laws prohibited “barbarous” treatment by masters as well as the indentured servants engaging in fornication and unapproved marriages. Distinctions evolved between aborigines, African slaves, and English indentured servants, and Christians and heathens, but during the early colonial period, slaves and servants ran away together.  For most of the 17^th century, indentured servants and slaves worked, ate and slept together until after Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676.  But after 1662, slavery in perpetuity carried the condition of inheritance (Shifflett, 2000, para. 6 & 7).

While indenture was contractual and slavery forced and involuntary, in practice owners treated indentured servants like slaves, abusing women and providing the bare minimum of food, clothing and shelter in return for their 50-acred head right for each settler.  Masters could also strike runaway bond servants with 20, 30, or 40 lashes on the bare shoulders as well as add twice the original number of years of servitude to their original contracts (Shifflett, 2000, para. 7--9). 

Spinder, Donna J. (2006).  Indentured servants. NCpedia.  Retrieved from http://ncpedia.org/indentured-servants

The population of indentured servants living in North Carolina grew enough in the 18th century that the North Carolina Assembly had to enact regulatory laws for both servants and masters (Spinder, 2006, para. 2).

Sullivan, Martin. (n. d.).  Servants and slaves.  Historic St. Mary’s City. Reprinted from River Gazette.  St. Mary’s College of Maryland.  Retrieved from https://www.stmaryscity.org/history/Servants%20&%20Slaves.html

Although some Africans also served as bondservants, indentured servants from the British Isles made up most of the workforce in St. Mary’s, Maryland, during the 17^th century (Sullivan, n. d., para. 1).  Indentured servants in the Chesapeake Bay area performed most of the labor on tobacco plantations until the turn of the 18^th century, the African workers contracted with the same indenture terms and conditions as English workers.  However, by 1700, 75 percent of the African bond laborers had become slaves (Sullivan, n. d. para. 3—5). 

Understanding Maryland records: Indentured servants. (2008). Maryland State Archives. Guide to Government Records.  Retrieved from  
http://guide.mdsa.net/viewer.cfm?page=indenturedservants

Indentured servants accompanied their masters to Maryland or signed papers with a sea captain who sold their contract upon reaching shore in return for passage as well as in exchange for food, clothing, and lodging during their term or service usually from four to five years, although a skilled worker might contract for a shortened term.  Bond servants could be sold to different masters while still under contract and could not marry while serving out their term.  County courts could also place illegitimate children into indentured servitude (Maryland, 2008, para. 1--3).  In 1717, Parliament passed a law banishing convicts to the colonies to serve a term of indentured service for seven years (Maryland, 2008, para. 3). 

Primary Sources & 

Immigration Databases

Shifflett, Crandall. (2000). Search the registers of servants sent to foreign plantations, 1654-1688.  Virtual Jamestown.  Retrieved from 

http://www.virtualjamestown.org/indentures/search_indentures.html

Users can search Bristol, Middlesex, and London databases for last and first names, places of origin, occupation, destination, ship, and date.

Hanson, Joyce A. (2005).  Indentured servants.  Servants, Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation.  Retrieved from http://score.rims.k12.ca.us/score_lessons/slavery/pages/indentured.html

Primary sources---

·         Rules for Indentured Servants (March 1642)

·         Rules for Masters (October 1670)

·         Richard Frethorne Letter to His Parents (1623)

---provide evidence of the treatment of indentured servants during the early colonial period.

 Millard Fillmore and Andrew Johnson were both originally indentured servants who became U.S. Presidents.

Bibliography

Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission. (2013). Indentured servants in Pennsylvania: A bibliography.  Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.  Retrieved from http://www.portal.state.pa.us/portal/server.pt/community/genealogy/3183/indentured_servants/387337

The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission furnishes an annotated bibliography of archival and secondary sources on indentured servant in colonial Pennsylvania.

Selected Books on Indentured Servitude

First-person Narratives

The indentured servants in the Outlander series are based on fact.

Franklin, Benjamin. (1868). The autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Ed. John Bigelow.   Part One, 1^st and 2^nd sections. Dover ed. 1996.  [Mineola, New York]:  Dover.

Franklin’s autobiography illustrates that youths often worked as indentured servants while they learned a trade:  At age 12, Franklin’s father apprenticed him to his brother James for eight years, thus Franklin started out as an indentured servant.  Ben read Bunyan, Mather, and Defoe while working as an apprentice and published his own articles anonymously.  He even managed the paper when James was briefly jailed for political reasons.  After a quarrel, Ben broke his contract and left Boston for Philadelphia.

Harrower, John. (1963). The Journal of John Harrower: An indentured servant in the colony of Virginia, 1773-1776.  Ed. Edward Miles Riles.  Williamsburg, Virginia:  Colonial Williamsburg.

A formally educated, out-of-work native of the Shetland Islands in London, Harrower kept a journal of his time in Virginia working as an indentured servant.

Moraley, William. (1743). The infortunate: The voyage of William Moraley, an indentured servant. Ed. By Susan Klepp and Billy Gordon Smith.  2^nd ed. 2005. University Park, Pennsylvania:  Pennsylvania State University.

Moraley’s often humorous autobiography gives the reader a first-hand glimpse of life among the lowly in colonial New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York. Although university instructors often assign this text in conjunction with Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, the text reads like a travelogue.

Social History

Jordan, Don and Michael Walsh. (2008). White cargo: The forgotten history of Britain’s white slaves in America.  New York: New York University Press. 

 

British journalists document the practice of indenture service in the American colonies.  Although the New England colonies practiced a milder form of indentured service than Virginia and Maryland did, most European immigrants to the British colonies came to the New World as indentured servants and endured  a grizzly term of indentured servitude as either of their own free will, through kidnapping, or as a convict.

Historical Fiction

Grissom, Kathleen. (2010). The Kitchen House.  New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc. (Waco-McLennan County Public Library)

A library book club favorite, Grissom’s first-person narrative alternates chapters between an Irish orphan, Lavonia, who comes as an indentured servant to a Tidewater Virginia Plantation and like Cinderella is allowed to live in the kitchen, and Belle, the illegitimate, mulatto daughter of the plantation owner, who is a kitchen slave. Isolation, incest, opium addiction, brutal beatings, and murder envelop the lives of all the characters as Lavonia must choose between Belle, who has befriended her, and the son of the plantation owner.

 

Gunning, Sally.  (2009). Bound: A novel.  New York: Harper Publishers.

When London-native Alice Cole’s mother and brothers die during the transatlantic passage between England and the Atlantic seaboard, her dad sells her to a Boston master to pay his debts.  Although Alice works hard, her life is relatively pleasant until the master’s daughter marries, and Alice is given to the daughter’s husband, who repeatedly molests her.  Stowing away to Cape Cod, Alice finds help through an independent widow whose boarder is an attorney.  He must speak for Alice at her trial since women could not represent themselves in 18^th-century Massachusetts. 

Stevenson, Robert Louis. (1969). Kidnapped.  Chicago:  Children’s Press.

Stevenson wrote this swash-buckling tale as a serial publication for Young Folk’s Magazine in 1886.  The hero, David Balfour, is kidnapped and forced to serve as a ship’s cabin boy, the captain planning to sell him as an indentured servant in the Carolinas.  Critics recently have discovered this novel once read only by adolescent boys.