“Our principal wealth … consists in
servants”[1]:
The Contributions of Indentured Servants
to the Survival of the
by
Jinny Wooddall-Gainey
The first permanent English
settlement in the
There is little doubt that the
cultivation of tobacco contributed greatly to the endurance of the
By
the 1680s hundreds of ships left
for American waters carrying manufactured goods and foodstuffs
to be exchanged for colonial commodities worth thousands of pounds
sterling,
of which the “king of sweets,” sugar, and leaf from
and
By the 1620s, the colony was shipping more tobacco to
Clearly, tobacco had succeeded where
the discovery of gold, silver or a
Evidence of the importance of
laborers in the
Two things are
especially required herein, people to make the plantation, and money to furnish
our present provisions and shipping now in hand: For the first wee neede not doubt, our land abounding with swarmes of idle persons, which having no meanes of labour to reléeve their misery, doe likewise swarme
in lewd and naughtie practises,
so that if we seeke not some waies
for their forreine employment, wee must provide shortly
more prisons and corrections for their bad conditions, for it fares with
populous common weales, as with plants and trees that
bee too frolicke, which not able to sustaine and feede their
multitude of branches, doe admit an engrafting of their buds and sciences into
some other soile, accounting it a benefite
for preservation of their kind, and a disburdening their stocke
of those superfluous twigs that suck away their nourishment. And we shall find
that hence it was, the Gothes and Vandalles
with other barbarous nations, séeing an overflowing
of their multitudes at home, did therefore send their Armies out as raging
floods at sundrie times, to cover the faces of Spain,
Italy and other Provinces, to free their owne from
pestering: so that you see it no new thing, but most profitable for our State,
to rid our multitudes of such as lie at home, pestering the land with
pestilence and penury, and infecting one another with vice and villanie, worse then the plague it selfe…”[4]
John Rolfe
had argued in 1616 that the greatest need of the colony was… “good and sufficient men…(who could serve) as
artificers, Labourers and husbondmen:
with whom were the Collony
well provided; then might triall be made, what lieth hidden in the wombe of the
Land….”[5] In
1619, John Pory the Secretary of the colony, wrote a
letter to Sir Dudley Carleton. In the letter, he clearly illustrates the
importance of servants in the “gentleman’s” ability to take this “land as God
made it” and create wealth.
Our principal wealth … consists in servants: All our riches for the present do consist in Tobacco, wherein one man by his own labor hath in one year raised to himself to the value of 200l sterling; and another by the means of six servants has cleared at one crop a thousand pound English. [6]
Further, in his essay entitled “Who
Built Virginia?” Thomas Costa argues that: “Servants were vital to the growing
of the colony's staple tobacco during the seventeenth century, so much that a
runaway servant might mean the loss of an entire crop.”[7] In the 1620s, nearly 95 percent of settlers
arriving from
Who were
these servants and what drew them to the colony? Many of
them were the poor in
Poverty was reflected by the rapid rise in
the numbers of poor in town and country alike, the spreading slums of cities,
spiraling mortality rates, the massive increase in vagrancy, and the steady
tramp of the young and out of work from one part of the country to another in
search of subsistence.[9]
Undoubtedly,
there were pull factors which drew these servants to the colony as well. As we
can see from this excerpt of an indentured servant's contract, the servant had to work for
four years, but in return…
But alsoe at the expiration of the said terme shall and will graunt assign and allott unto him the said Richard Lowther the quantety of Fifty acres of Land in Virginia aforesaid to hold to him his heires and assignes for ever as in such Cases usuall without fraud or Coven In witnes whereof the said parties to theis presente wryteings indented Enterchangeably have sett their hands and seales geaven the day and year first above written[10]
For one faced with starvation, the prospect of food and
clothing in return for labor must have been an enticing one. But when coupled
with the hope of owning land at the end of service, the destitute were surely
persuaded that the hardships and uncertainty of the journey were small prices
to pay. And for some it paid well. Because of tobacco and its demand
for labor, John Pory wrote, once the “veriest beggers in the worlde,” now “our Cowe-keeper
here of James citty on Sundayes
goes acowterd (dressed) all in freshe
flaming silkes and a wife of one that in England had
professed the black arte not of a scholler but of a
collier of Croydeon, wears her rough bever hat with a faire perle hatband
and a silken suite.”[11] Besides producing this type of personal
wealth, the result of the influx of laborers and the tremendous cultivation of
tobacco saved
According
to Horn, the majority of the migrants who journeyed from
[1] Letter
of John Pory, 1619. Found at Virtual
[2] James
Horn, A Land as God Made It:
[3] Ibid.,247.
[4] "Nova
Britannia," by R.I., 1609. Found at Virtual
[5] Horn, A Land as God Made It, 236.
[6] Letter of
John Pory, 1619 Found at Virtual
[8] Horn, A Land as God Made It, 247.
[9] James Horn, “Leaving
[10]
“Richard Lowther, Servant Indenture,” 1627. From
Virtual
[11] John Pory, 1619.