1619 - 1623: Labor Hierarchies in the "New" World
“This is to lett yow vnderstand that I am in a most miserable and pittiful Case both for want of meat and want of cloathes” (Dahlberg, 2012, p. 31).
One half of an indenture document dated 24 June 1723, the ninth year of the reign of King George I of Great Britain.
Source: Wikipedia, Creative Commons License.
So wrote indentured servant, Richard Frethorne, from the Virginia colony to those who held his labor contract in England. Frethorne’s letter reveals the difficulties indentured laborers faced in 1623 Virginia. Considering this was his third letter, it also reveals the challenges one faced in convincing family and friends to redeem – or buy out – an indentured contract (Dahlberg, 2012).
From the beginning of the English colonies in the New World, the division between free and unfree labor was clear. The use of indentured servitude, while not a new practice, became a popular source of labor. Indentured servitude existed as a source of unfree labor that contractually bound an individual to work for another for a specific amount of time—usually to pay off debts or as punishment for breaking the law. It provided predictable service and manual labor in a harsh climate and also expanded the English population, which helped the English exert greater control over Virginia and Maryland (Musselwhite, Mancall, & Horn, 2019, p. 14). Frethorne represented one of 132,100 persons (67 percent of the English population) who came as indentured servants in the seventeenth century (Dahlberg, 2012, p. 1).
This drawing, entitled ‘Landing Negroes at Jamestown from Dutch man-of-war, 1619,’ chronicles the first 20 African slaves arriving in Jameston, Virginia. The illustration was printed in Harper’s Monthly Magazine in January 1901.
Source: Library of Congress
A few years before Mr. Frethorne’s arrival, in 1619, John Smith recorded the entry of another labor source to the New World. “About the last of August,” he wrote, “came in a dutch man of ware that sold us twenty Negars” (Sluiter, 1997, p. 395). Kidnapped from their homes in West Africa they arrived, ironically enough, in place called Point Comfort, Virginia (p. 395).
Together with white and Black indentured servants, enslaved Africans labored to support the growing agricultural economy in Maryland, Virginia, and up and down the eastern seaboard (Roberts, 2016). The agricultural model proved lucrative, but its success became dependent on the enslavement of Africans. With the success of the plantation model, Black lives became tied to slavery and to the economic achievement of the planter class. As historian Ira Berlin (1998) noted, “The triumph of the planter class began the transformation of [B]lack life in the Chesapeake” (p. 109). This transformation meant that by the end of the seventeenth century, the Chesapeake region had undergone an economic shift that changed the region from “[a] society with slaves … to a slave society” (Berlin, 1998, p. 109).
From the earliest days of the English colonization efforts, a labor hierarchy existed. Poor white Englishmen and women (even those convicted of a crime) were held in labor contracts that eventually allowed them to regain their freedom. As Englishmen and women, they also operated under the legal protections afforded all citizens under the British Crown. Black Africans, on the other hand, arrived as kidnapped slaves. Unable to speak the language, often sick and completely disoriented after weeks at sea, Black Africans faced a radically different future. Not considered English citizens, Africans had no rights. Very few had the good fortune to be considered indentured servants, and so the vast majority became one of thousands that now made up the Maryland and Virginia “slave societies.”