Levelers and Fugitives

Pennsylvania History, 2011

Eighteenth-century Pennsylvania and Massachusetts had different labor systems in regard to White servants, who were the bulk of the runaways in both colonies.

Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, 2011

Amherst n the early nineteenth century colonial Pennsylvania and Massachusetts had sharply different political economies and labor systems that were only partly blended with violence. These two political economies are reflected in various stories about Benjamin Franklin, who encountered a markedly different labor system when he moved from Boston to Pennsylvania. Seventeen-year-old Franklin slipped out of Boston easily in 1723 by getting a friend to tell a sea captain that he impregnated a girl and wanted to leave quietly. The mariner thought it was more credible that young Franklin was running from a woman and her family than from a master. Few sought white servant runaways in eighteenth-century Boston. In the year Franklin ran only six runaway-inspired advertisements appeared in the Boston papers. Five masters sought three men of color and three white men. 1 In Boston, Franklin did not arouse suspicion. Upon arriving in the Delaware Valley, though less than three hundred miles away, Franklin encountered a watchful society

The William and Mary Quarterly, 1991

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The Journal of Transport History, 2018

Despite John Wareing's focus on the servant trade in London and the unsavoury foundation upon which it was built, scholars of transport and mobility can still find value in Indentured Migration and the Servant Trade from London to America, 1618-1718. For some, Wareing's discussions of servant origins and their destinations in British North America might be new. Further, they could benefit from reading this book alongside David Galenson's White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis (1981) and Bernard Bailyn's Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (1986) to gain a fuller understanding of the movement of peoples in and out of London during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For others, Wareing's work can offer insight into the ways in which men with means regulated and controlled the mobility and transportation of temporarily unfree labourers from London to British North America between 1618 and 1718. Focusing more on criminality and recruitment than on migration or transport, Wareing divides his study into three parts. He first retells the well-known story of seventeenth-century England and the country's late arrival to the competition for empire and expansion. In part 2, Wareing argues for a more complicated and nuanced system of recruitment than previously understood. Using over 2000 contracts from both London and Middlesex as evidence, he suggests 'four different methods of recruitment characterized by varying levels of free will, persuasion, deception, or force'. Servants, then, arrived in the colonies as either Consigned, Exchanged, Redemptioner, or Customary servants, depending on the 'contractual arrangement' they made-or were forced to make-in England (p. 46). Here, Wareing also revisits earlier scholarly discussions of servant origins and destinations and the transition to enslaved labour. Moreover, he provides insight into the lives of two servant traders. The book concludes with an examination of the attempts made by London's courts to regulate the servant trade and to eliminate the criminal aspects of the practice through the creation of a series of servant registries between 1640 and 1718.

Configurações, 2020

The subject of indentured servants who were urged to abandon their masters by the Royal Governor, John Murray, the Earl of Dunmore, has been overlooked by scholars. Since 1775, his incendiary Proclamation begs a series of questions historians have yet to answer. Why, for instance, did the Governor include servants? What circumstances prompted him to make such an invitation to bound persons? How did the elites in the colony respond? These, and other questions, are the focus of this essay that explores indentured servitude in Virginia during the age of the American Revolution. Besides enslaved African Americans, indentured servants influenced Dunmore's Proclamation that, in turn, encouraged the gentry in Virginia to break with England.

Archaeologies of Mobility and Movement, 2013

This chapter explores the social and historical processes that allowed the small piece of land at a place called “the Parting Ways” in Plymouth, Massachusetts, to become a haven for several transient families and later several free African-American families. Using the theoretical concept of liminality to guide my analysis, I examine both the practice of “warning out” poor individuals and families and the communal landholding practices of colonial Massachusetts. “Warning out” created a class of economically disadvantaged people who never fit into the rigid cultural, social, and legal boundaries of eighteenth-century Massachusetts society. And the landholding practices allowed for shifting ways to use, own, and live on land within the law. I argue here that the ability of the Parting Ways site to function as a refuge for members of society’s unfortunate was directly related to the liminal status of the property and its eventual inhabitants. The “betwixt and between” status of people and place afforded social, political, and legal flexibility and mobility that enabled the transient families to settle at Parting Ways while they remained unwanted elsewhere.

Journal of Early American History, 2016

Historians have commonly portrayed the Pennsylvania backcountry as a lawless, violent region. Many have attributed this these levels of violence to the influx of Scots Irish migrants to the province after the 1720. Examining several eighteenth-century Pennsylvania counties, this article demonstrates that earlier scholars have consistently overestimated levels of crime on the frontier. Moreover, court records shows that Scots-Irish individuals were no more likely to be prosecuted or convicted of crime than other ethnic groups. Overall, frontier settlers embraced the legal system, even as they insisted it be applied in ways that accorded with local conditions.

Pennsylvania History, 1997

Boy." Adams plannedto work the pre-adolescent hard:" I cannot spare him the time to attend School." 2 In Hardwick, Massachusetts, Paul Mandell, a local revolutionaryhero who served as selectman, militia captain, and del egateto the First and Second Provincial Congress, ...

Journal of American History, 2012

The Journal of Economic History, 1985

Indentured servitude is modeled as a trans-Atlantic market in forward-labor contracts. The model is applied to servant-auction evidence in Philadelphia, and the determinants of contract prices are used to test the efficient-market hypothesis. While competing for servants in Europe, most of the expected price differences across servants were lost through arbitrage by recruiters.