Servants and Servitude in Colonial America

by Russell M. Lawson

Overview

The dispossessed people of Colonial America included thousands of servants who either voluntarily or involuntarily ended up serving as agricultural, domestic, skilled, and unskilled laborers in the northern, middle, and southern British American colonies as well as British Caribbean colonies.

Thousands of people arrived in the British-American colonies as indentured servants, transported felons, and kidnapped children forced into bound labor. Others already in America, such as Indians, freedmen, and poor whites, placed themselves into the service of others for food, clothing, shelter, and security; poverty in colonial America was relentless, and servitude was the voluntary and involuntary means by which the poor adapted, or tried to adapt, to miserable conditions. From the 1600s to the 1700s, Blacks, Indians, Europeans, Englishmen, children, and adults alike were indentured, apprenticed, transported as felons, kidnapped, or served as redemptioners.

Though servitude was more multiracial and multicultural than slavery, involving people from numerous racial and ethnic backgrounds, far fewer books have been written about it. This fascinating new study of servitude in colonial America provides the first complete overview of the varied lives of the dispossessed in 17th- and 18th-century America, examining colonial American servitude in all of its forms.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781440841798
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	01/25/2018
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.56(d)

About the Author

Russell M. Lawson, PhD, is professor of history at Bacone College, Muskogee, OK. His published works include ABC-CLIO's Poverty in America: An Encyclopedia, cowritten with Benjamin A. Lawson, and Science in the Ancient World: An Encyclopedia.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Human Bondage xi

Acknowledgments xvii

Chapter 1 The Children of Jamestown 1

Chapter 2 Indian Bondage 19

Chapter 3 The Captives of New France 31

Chapter 4 English Town by the Sea 41

Chapter 5 The Dutch Servants of New Netherland and New York 55

Chapter 6 Daniel Defoe's London 67

Chapter 7 The Voyage of the Free-Willers 81

Chapter 8 Infortunate Servants 93

Chapter 9 Oglethorpe's Dream 103

Chapter 10 The Prisoners of Culloden 113

Chapter 11 John Harrower and Servitude in the Colonial South 123

Chapter 12 New England Apprentices 135

Chapter 13 Servants and the American Revolution 145

Afterword 157

Appendix: Documents in the History of Colonial American Servitude 159

Sources Consulted 185

Index 199

What People are Saying About This

James E. Seelye Jr.

"Russell M. Lawson’s Servants and Servitude in Colonial America provides an impressive introduction to the multifaceted world of unfree labor in colonial America. This well-written and thoroughly-researched book serves as a resource for students and scholars alike, and Lawson’s comprehensive coverage of servitude involving groups that are oftentimes themselves marginalized in other studies—children, women, and Indians—are judiciously treated in this book, making it one of the better single-volume treatments of the unfree to appear in many years."

James E. Seelye

"Russell M. Lawson's Servants and Servitude in Colonial America provides an impressive introduction to the multifaceted world of unfree labor in Colonial America. This well-written and thoroughly-researched book serves as a resource for students and scholars alike, and Lawson's comprehensive coverage of servitude involving groups that are oftentimes themselves marginalized in other studies—children, women, and Indians—are judiciously treated appropriately in this book, making it one of the better single-volume treatments of the unfree to appear in many years."

Keith Krawczynski

“Russell M. Lawson has performed a valuable public service by shattering some popular myths of America’s origins as a 'Land of the Free.' More so than any other work on the subject, Servants and Servitude in Early America details the many forms of servitude that were tightly and broadly woven into the fabric of early American economy and society. In vibrant and elegant prose, Lawson brings to life the myriad and various servant experiences, allowing readers to feel their desperation, their hope, their exploitation, their abuse, their hunger, their sickness, their failures, and their successes. Lawson’s compelling study will reward readers with its edifying insights into the social values that supported and defended the commodification and often times cruel exploitation of human beings, many of them children, in early America.”