Early American Musings

I can’t help feeling a little anxious about the trip. I woke up this morning almost wishing that I didn’t have to go. I often get that feeling on the eve of a big trip. As I went into town I felt a wave of nostalgia, thinking this is the last time I will see this place for over five weeks. How then must emigrants from Scotland have felt in the eighteenth century knowing that they would almost certainly never return and would be lucky to hear any news of friends and family ever again?

Scotland has always been a huge source of emigrants: the Highlands were not always empty, but people were moved out of their crofts and homes in the name of ‘improvement’ in the Highland Clearances. The idea was that these poor crofters were not using the land effectively, and it was much more efficient to turn the land over to sheep farming. The people were in some cases rounded up and placed on ships bound for North America. Many had little choice, and particularly in the eighteenth century many found themselves bound out as indentured servants for several years of labour.  The labour could be hard and back-breaking and many faced punishments for taking time off, or for pregnancy. This has led some modern commentators to talk about the ‘white slaves‘ of early America.

Nothing could really be further from the truth. Indentured servants still had legal rights. Their master could punish them, as any master of a household could punish his servants in Scotland. But as master couldn’t maim or injure a servant, he couldn’t rape or castrate a servant as he could an enslaved individual. If you were enslaved, you were property; you had no legal existence. A master simply owned the labour of an indentured servant. An indenture was simply a form of credit agreement: an individual could not affort to pay for their passage to North America so the merchant loaned them the money. The security for the loan was the servants labour, and their labour paid off the loan. This meant that a servant with skills, such as a cooper, could expect a much shorter contract than a man or women who had no skills at all and was simply a labourer.

Because they had full legal rights, unliked enslaved people who were simply property, a servant could take their master to court and often won the case. In the eighteenth-century, courts that I have examined in Frederick County, Virginia, and Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, there were several cases of servants taking masters to court demanding changes to their conditions.

In 1752 a Scottish woman named Lilley Scott petitioned the Frederick County Court:

The Humble Petition of Lilley Scott now Servant to William Wood of opeackin beggeth Leave to acquaint The Honourale Bench of Justys in and for the County of Fredrick that I Lilley Scott was indented in the City of Edenbourgh in Scotland for four years to come to this Colliney and after my arrival hear I being young and not able to read righting I due suppose with an intent to put some more money in there pockets they have trumpt up and nother indentire for seven years and I have bin allmost five years in this Colliney already witch them is a Girl Livieth att William Cochran publican in this town that was indented in Edenborough at the same time. [Frederick County Court, Ended Causes, Box 15. Library of Virginia.]

Scott won her case and her freedom. It is impossible to imagine an enslaved African bringing, let alone winning, such a case before the court.  While indentured servants may have struggled and suffered, they were certainly not ‘white slaves.’  Sharon Salinger’s ‘classic’ book, To Serve Well and Faithfully has an excellent discussion of indentured servitude in the eighteenth century.