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.
_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."
In spite of all precautions, a slave did succeed, now and then, in gaining
his freedom. It is with great satisfaction that I read an old Act of
Assembly, setting forth that "Whereas a negro named Billy, slave to John
Tillit, has for several years unlawfully absented himself from his
master's service, said Billy is pronounced an outlaw, and a bounty of a
thousand pounds of tobacco set on his head." The bounty does not trouble
me, for I feel sure that the craft and strength which made Billy an
outlaw, kept him safe from the bolts aimed against him by the colonial
legislature.
The statute-books of Maryland and Virginia are records of the barbarity
into which injustice may drive a kindly, liberty-loving people who are
forced into cruelty by the logic of events. Having taken the wrong road,
like Bunyan's Pilgrim, the Cavaliers found the rocks ready to fall on them
if they went forward, and the gulf yawning behind them if they tried to
turn back.
It must never be forgotten in their behalf that they did try to turn
about, when they saw their error. Their best men, over and over again,
urged the prohibiting of slavery, and there is more than a probability
that they would have won their cause, but for the attitude of that country
whose air was afterward pronounced too pure to be breathed by a slave
insomuch that his shackles fell off, when he touched the shore sacred to
liberty. Yet, in 1695, this highly moral and philanthropic England
declared in a statute, the opinion of its king and Parliament, that the
slave-trade was highly beneficial to the kingdom and colonies. In 1712,
Queen Anne boasted in her speech to Parliament, of her success in securing
to England a new market for slaves in Spanish America. Jefferson testified
that Virginia was constantly balked in her efforts to throw off slavery by
the attitude of the home government. Carolina attempted restriction and
gained a rebuke. In 1775, the Earl of Dartmouth haughtily replied to a
colonial agent, "We cannot allow the colonies to check, or discourage in
any degree, a traffic so beneficial to the nation."
Yet all the blame cannot be thrown on England. Had the colonies been as
firm in defence of their duties, as they were when their rights were in
question, England must have yielded. Virginia was the first State to
enunciate the proposition of the equality of man, yet was blind to her own
inconsistency. The leading supporters of the cause of liberty were
themselves slave-owners. George Washington owned negroes. John Randolph
had a bunk for his slave side by side with the bed of his pet horse.
Patrick Henry wrote with admirable candor: "Believe me, I shall honor the
Quakers for their noble efforts to abolish slavery; they are equally
calculated to promote moral and political good. Would any one believe that
I am master of slaves of my own purchase? I am drawn along by the general
inconvenience of living without them. I will not--I _can_ not--justify
it." The great Southern statesman said that he trembled for his country
when he remembered that God was just. Washington deplored the system, yet
so closely were all commercial and political interests interwoven with it
that it seemed impossible to disentangle them. Even philanthropy did not
scorn its alliance. Whitefield expended the money raised by his eloquent
preaching at Charleston, on a plantation with slaves to work it for the
benefit of an orphan asylum.
The Church spread its surplice of protection over the institution. Baptism
was permitted to the slave, but with the distinct understanding that it
was to make no difference in the condition of bondage of these brothers in
Christ. One South Carolina clergyman ventured to preach on the duties of
masters to their servants, but his congregation said to him: "Sir, we pay
you a genteel salary to read to us the prayers of the liturgy and to
explain to us such parts of the Gospel as the rule of the Church directs,
but we do not want you to teach us what to do with our blacks."
The Northern colonies were freed from the curse of slaveholding as much by
policy as by principle. They tried slave-owning, but, happily for them, it
did not pay. The climate and the conditions of their industries forbade
its spread among them. But their hands were not unstained. If they did not
buy slaves, they sold them. There still exists, if Bishop Meade may be
trusted, a bill of sale of a slave, bearing the signature of Jonathan
Edwards.
Every year ships were fitted out from Medford, Salem, or New Bedford,
which sailed away loaded with rum to be exchanged in Africa for negroes,
who in turn were sold for molasses, to be made into rum again. The
transactions of one of these slavers are preserved in the History of
Medford, and makes interesting reading for those who would hold up the
Puritan as innocent of the transgression which stains the character of the
Cavalier. The deadly parallel column tells its story, so that he who runs
may read:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. The Natives of Annamboe. | Per Contra. Cr.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
1770. Gals|1770 Gals
|Apr. 22
Apr. 22. To 1 hh. of rum 110 | By 1 Woman Slave 110
|May 1.
May 1. " " " 130 | By 1 Prime Woman Slave. 130
|May 2.
May 2. " " " 105 | By 1 Boy Slave 4 ft. 1 in. 105
|May 7.
May 7. " " " 130 | By 1 Boy Slave 4 ft. 3 in. 108
|May 5.
May 5. Cash in gold 5 oz. 2 | 1 Prime Man Slave 5 oz. 2
|May 5.
" 5. " " " 2 oz. } 3 | 1 Old Man for a Lingister 3 oz.
" 5. 2 doz. of snuff 1 oz. } |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
The negroes thus brought to the American colonies were not of one race. A
slaver often carried men of different languages, habits, and
characteristics, perhaps hereditary enemies. Some were jet black, some
mahogany-colored, and others still of a tawny yellow, with flat noses and
projecting jaws. This last type belonged to the low, swampy ground at the
Niger's delta, and marked the race most adapted to the cultivation of the
rice in its swamps, so fatal to white laborers. All this diversity among
the negroes accounts for their lack of power and energy to combine in a
struggle for freedom. "The negroes that have been slaves in their own
country," Hugh Jones says, "make the best servants; for they that have
been kings and great men there, are generally lazy, haughty and
obstinate." Alas, for these poor magnates from Heathendom!
The Cavaliers did not find the problem of domestic service solved by
life-ownership of servants. Colonel Fitzhugh writes Mr. John Buckner in
1680: "I hope you will make an abatement for your Dumb Negro that you sold
me. Had she been a new Negro, I must have blamed my fate, not you; but one
that you had two years, I must conclude you knew her qualities, which is
_bad at work, worse at talking_. You took advantage of the softness of my
messenger to quit your hands of her."
In spite of this unsuccessful experiment, we find him two years later
making another venture in human live-stock, by ordering John Withers to
buy "Mr. Walton's Boy for £20, or £54 with him and 2 others, unlesse you
can make a better bargain." Poor Colonel Fitzhugh might well be
discouraged, for he had tried every kind of servant, black and white, bond
and free, without satisfactory results. "I would have you," he writes in
despair to a sea captain in England, "bring me in a good housewife. I do
not intend or mean to be brought in, as the ordinary servants are, but to
pay her passage and agree to give her fifty shillings or three pounds a
year during the space of five years, upon which terms, I suppose, good
servants may be had, because they have their passage clear, and as much
money as they can have there. _I would have a good one or none._ I look
upon the generality of wenches you bring in as not worth keeping."
So the Colonial Cavaliers found trouble in their households with servants
of any race or color, and the gentle nature of the blacks proving
specially adaptable to servitude, and purchase money seeming so much less
than wage-money, they gradually did away with other service. Every
plantation had its negro-quarters, where crowds of pickaninnies swarmed in
the sunshine outside the little cabins with scarcely more clothing on than
their parents had worn in their African jungle. The bread of Indian corn
was baked on the hoe over a smoky fire, or in the ashes. When the day's
work was done, the negroes sat, with their banjos or rude musical
instruments, playing accompaniments to their strange, weird music, a
mixture of reminiscences of barbarism and the hymns they caught from the
"New Lights"; or they spent the evening more merrily, dancing jigs to the
twanging of a broken fiddle. They were, on the whole, a careless, happy
race, taking no thought for the morrow, content to accept food and
clothing at the hands of "Massa and Missus," and, for the rest, to work
when they must, shirk when they could, and carry a merry heart through
life. The outward circumstances of their lot were hard. Anbury, in his
American travels, observed their condition closely and described it with
what we must believe impartial accuracy. The life of these field-hands was
much more severe than that of the household servants, both because the
work itself was harder, and because it was ruled by the overseer, usually
a brute. It is of these field negroes that Anbury is writing, when he
says: "They are called up at daybreak, and seldom allowed to swallow a
mouthful of hominy or hoecake, but are driven out into the field
immediately, where they continue at hard labor without intermission till
noon, when they go to their dinners and are seldom allowed an hour for
that purpose. Their meals consist of hominy and salt, and if their master
is a man of humanity, touched by the finer feelings of love and
sensibility, he allows them twice a week a little fat, skimmed milk, rusty
bacon or salt herring to relish this miserable and scanty fare.... After
they have dined they return to labor in the field till dusk in the
evening. Here one naturally imagines the daily labor of these poor
creatures over; not so. They repair to the tobacco-houses, where each has
a task of _stripping_ allotted, which takes up some hours; or else they
have such a quantity of Indian corn to husk, and if they neglect it, are
tied up in the morning, and receive a number of lashes from those
unfeeling monsters, the overseers. When they lay themselves down to rest,
their comforts are equally miserable and limited, for they sleep on a
bench, or on the ground with an old scanty blanket, which serves them at
once for bed and covering. Their clothing is not less wretched, consisting
of a shirt and trousers of coarse, thin, hard, hempen stuff in the Summer,
with an addition of a very coarse woolen jacket, breeches, and shoes in
Winter." Yet, in spite of toil and privation, these negroes, so the
traveller testifies, are jovial and contented.
It seems incomprehensible to us that the noble, sensitive, kindly Southern
gentleman saw all these things in silence; that even when they had no
share in the beating of the wayfarer, they still passed by on the other
side with the priest or the Levite and offered no succor. Yet, do we not
do the same thing every day? We know that the faces of the poor are ground
while the rich prosper, that the animal world is abused and tortured, yet
because we think ourselves powerless, we strive to make ourselves callous,
and turn away our eyes that we may not see where we cannot help.
Many there were who had the courage as well as the impulse to protest. One
of the firmest and the ablest of these was Jefferson. He had the insight
to perceive not only the injustice to the slave, but the injury to the
slaveholder. "There must, doubtless," he writes, "be an unhappy influence
on the manners of our people by the existence of slavery among us. The
whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the
most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part,
and degrading submission on the other. Our children see this and learn to
imitate it, for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of
all education in him. From his cradle to his grave, he is learning to do
what he sees others do. If a parent could find no motive either in his
philanthropy or his self-love for restraining the intemperance of passion
toward his slave, it should always be a sufficient one that his child is
present. But generally it is not sufficient. The parent storms; the child
looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the
circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to the worst of his passions; and
thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be
stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can
retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances."
Yet we are constantly meeting such prodigies in the history of the
Cavalier. Men whose pure lives, gentle manners, and courtesy to high and
low, whose unselfishness and cheerful benignity may be matched against
those of the hardest-working Puritan or the most radical upholder of the
equal rights of man. The old _noblesse oblige_ principle still held sway.
Governor Gouch, of Virginia, being once on a time reproached for having
returned the bow of a negro, replied in the good old Cavalier spirit: "I
should be much ashamed that a negro should have better manners than I."
The field hands were kept at a distance, but the house-servants were
admitted to the closest intimacy, especially when acting in the capacity
of maids and nurses. Many a golden head was laid for comfort on the black
breast of some faithful Mammy, while the childish sorrows were poured into
her listening ear, and many a gray-haired woman recalled as her truest
friend, the humble slave whose life had been devoted to her service.
An entry in Washington's journal shows how well he understood the nature
of the negro, and how wisely and firmly he dealt with it. One day four of
his servants were employed at carpentering, but without accomplishing
anything. Instead of scolding, Washington sat himself calmly down to watch
their work. Stimulated by his presence, they went on briskly. The wise
master noted the work and the time, and then informed them that just so
much must be done in his absence. It was owing to such management that the
products of the Mount Vernon plantation ranked so high that all barrels
marked with the name of George Washington passed the inspectors without
examination.
Here, if anywhere, was a man who might be trusted with arbitrary power
over his fellow-men, yet he was one of the most outspoken in opposition to
slavery; and he, like Jefferson, realized the terrible strain on the
character of the master. Woe to the man who lives constantly with
inferiors! He is doomed never to hear himself contradicted, never to be
told unwelcome truth, never to sharpen his wits and learn to control his
temper by argument with equals. The Colonial Cavaliers were little kings,
and they proved the truth of the saying of the royal sage of Rome, that
the most difficult of tasks is to lead life well in a palace.
His Church
[Illustration: His Church.
Williamsburg Church BRUTON PARISH.]
"_Mixe not holy thinges with profane!_" so runs the inscription on the
quaint old silver chalice used in the communion service of the Jamestown
church.
Had the advice been heeded, the history of the Colonial Church of England
would not have been the sorry story it is. In point of fact, holy and
profane things are so mixed in its chronicles that it is hard to write of
it without seeming levity and flippancy. To call the differences between
the parsons and their parishes in the Southern Colonies a struggle, would
be to dignify it beyond the warrant of truth. It was simply a series of
squabbles without ennobling principle on either side. Yet, in the
beginning, better things promised. Great attention was paid to religious
forms and observances, and the earliest laws are devoted to the regulation
of church affairs.
In the year after the landing of the settlers, Edward Maria Wingfield,
first president of the council in Virginia, was brought to trial accused
of various high crimes and misdemeanors. Among the charges against him was
one of atheism. The most damaging evidence against him was the absence of
a Bible from his belongings. He himself felt that this was a point needing
explanation, which he made by saying that he had "sorted" many books to
take with him to Virginia, and was sure that a Bible was among them, but
that in the course of his journey he had found "the truncke" somehow
broken open, and the Bible "ymbeasiled."
In rebuttal of evidence showing general godlessness and lack of respect
for the Sabbath, he explained that on the Sunday in question, Indian
allarums had detained every one at the palisade "till the daie was farre
spent." Then, he goes on to say: "the preacher, Master Hunt, did aske me
if it weare my pleasure to have a sermon. He said he was prepared for it.
I made answer that our men were weary and hungry, and that if it pleased
him wee would spare him till some other tyme."
The tact of this reply should certainly have scored a point in Wingfield's
defence, especially as he adds: "I never failed to take such noates by
wrighting out of his doctrine as my capacity could comprehend, _unless
some raynie day hindered my endeavour_."