JAMESTOWN: CONVICT WIVES.
A
female convict, transported from an English prison to Jamestown,
Virginia, as an indentured servant, sold for a wife to a male settler
for 100 pounds of tobacco. Wood engraving, 19th century.
Sarah Jones wrote yesterday
about Victoria Secret model Cameron Russell and white privilege. This
is a significant issue because the repugican cabal’s entire political
orientation is as much about imposing heterodoxy in religion as it is in
gender and, especially, ethnicity. White privilege is as old as the
United States (and older) after all, and its impending loss has
shattered the heart of conservative thinking.
All their thought is bent upon it, as Gandalf once said about the
ring of the dark lord Sauron. And like Sauron, they will stop at nothing
to get it back. Without white privilege, they cannot bind all the
pluralistic threads of America into a nation ruled by white male
Evangelicals – a reproduction of the nation they imagine once existed
before that nasty revolution ruined everything for the rich white guys
who owned other guys, gals, and kids.
And this white privilege goes beyond mere color to include
socioeconomic status. A little known fact about Colonial America relates
to how white privilege also created a class of white slaves: indentured
servants as they were called. Indentured servitude was a cruel
institution, one that originated on these shores in Virginia in 1620. It
was not abolished until 1917 and “continued to exist in mainland North
America at least until the fourth decade of the nineteenth century.”
[1]
As one author put it, “For the first two centuries of the history of
British North America, one word best characterizes the status of the
vast majority of immigrants – servitude.” He goes on to say that “from
the founding of Jamestown until the Revolution, nearly three-fourths of
all immigrants to the thirteen colonies arrived in some condition of
unfreedom.”
[2]
These days we tend to associate America with freedom, but that was far
from the case. As Aaron S. Fogleman writes, “Before 1776, for most
arrivals, coming to America meant a curtailment of freedom.”
[3]
The Revolution meant freedom, first and foremost, to wealthy
landowners, and also to merchants, craftsmen, and shopkeepers. Only
grudgingly has it meant freedom for others.
And when we think about unfreedom, we generally think about black
slavery, America’s “peculiar institution.” But in our history books as
in our imaginations, indentured servitude gets short shrift, as do the
economic underpinnings of both types of servitude. The economics still
work against freedom, with some modern innovations. If the original tea
party, cheered on by merchants, dumped British tea into Boston Harbor,
the modern version, funded by rich corporations, throws American rights –
your rights - under the bus. The result is that while corporations
become people, people do not.
Everyone has heard about Australia and its convicts, but the same is
true of America. Author Kevin Philips, in his book 1775 (2012) points
out that Dr. Samuel Johnson, “a high Tory, famously called Americas ‘a
race of convicts.’” According to Philips, some 50,000 British convicts
were transported to America, but “during the first three quarters of the
eighteenth century, roughly 307,400 white immigrants arrived in the
thirteen colonies.” Just 49.3 percent of these were free. A staggering
33.7 percent were indentured servants.
[4] George Washington owned twelve white people, along with his black slaves. He was worried about both running off to the British.
[5]
In Philadelphia, where Thomas Jefferson and others talked about the
inalienable rights of man, an indentured servant market thrived.
[6]
What was indentured servitude like? Bad. “Indentured servants were
rarely well treated. They could go to court in most colonies, but
sometimes their effort only wound up extending the term of their
indenture.” Philips cites author Gordon S. Wood:”in the colonies,
servitude was a much harsher, more brutal and more humiliating status
than it was in England.” One British officer, Phillips relates,
estimated that half of convict servants were dead within seven years.
In Virginia, there was no real distinction between how convicts and
indentured servants were treated. “In practical terms,” we are told,
“purchasers often treated white indentured servants and convicts more or
less similarly.”
[7]
It was bad enough for adults, but children could be indentured for
periods of 15 years and kidnapping children was not a felony in England
until 1814.
[8] Thus some of the early settlers of the New World were children stolen from their parents in the Old.
[9]
As one scholar has observed, “the English Government allowed the crime of kidnapping to flourish without serious restraint”
[10]
Indentured
servants were essentially slaves for the duration of their terms of
servitude and could be bought and sold at their “owner’s” whim.
[11] Their sale has been compared to that of horses and cows at a market or fair.
[12]
One scholar notes “a newspaper advertisement for ‘an estate to be sold
in the province of Maryland’ in 1660 which described it as ‘stocked with
servants, cattle, horses, and mares, sheep and swine.”
[13]
The legal status of indentured servants in the colonies was “chattel” – literally property.
[14] “Servants could be bought and sold and this was not just the transfer of labour rights but of alienable property.”
[15]
As Phillips relates, “even their unexpired terms were property,
willable to heirs” and “this definition persisted during the Revolution,
because most courts tried to keep a ‘property’ label on enlisted
servants, to uphold owners’ rights to reimbursement for loss of
service.”
[16]
Indentured servitude has been called “proto-slavery”
[17] and a form of feudalism.
[18]
“Ironically,” says Phillips, “black slaves, selling for roughly three
times as much, often got better treatment because they were a lifetime
investment. With indentured servants, an employer’s optimal return lay
in obtaining as much sweat and output as possible over four, five, or
seven years.”
[19]
None of this downplays the reality or cruelty of black slavery. It
is, rather, another example of privileged attitudes that reduce classes
of people, whether based on skin color, socioeconomic status, gender, or
sexual preference, to second-class status. We can’t even add “citizen”
since they lacked the right to own property or to vote. Government run
by the rich, who lack no concern for the welfare of those beneath them,
is never to be desired.
Though today we focus mostly on slavery, it is forgotten that in the
early days of colonial America, it was indentured servants who provided
the needed agriculture labor, only to be replaced later by black slaves.
“This transition from servants to slaves…occurred at different times in
these regions [West Indies, the Chesapeake, South Carolina, and
Georgia], and at different rates.”
[20]
There is every reason to believe that modern conservatism is not
greatly disturbed by the idea of returning to a master/servant paradigm,
which, after all, has its English roots in economic disparity. The
abolition rather than the broadening of rights is everywhere in evidence
in right-wing rhetoric. Hand in hand with the shrinking Republican tent
is a shrinking concept of equality and rights. These are accompanied by
a corresponding shrinkage of white numbers as a percentage of the
population.
In the end, we would see a return to debtor’s prisons and
pre-Revolution social conditions with a broad underclass ruled by a
predominantly white Christian upper-class. Women
would lose the voting franchise (along with their reproductive rights) and would be beat on a whim by
any male; children would be put back to work, and immigrants would be
laborers, slaving nearly without rights for their white masters in a
sort of American apartheid. The repugican dream would undo the very liberal American Revolution,
which was never the dream of wingnuts in the first place. It is no
wonder they hate the Constitution, the Revolution’s shining symbol, so
very much.
A
couple of years ago, we
told you about a Pastafarian from Austria who convinced his government
to let him wear a colander hat on religious grounds for his driver's
license.
