The Anglesea Peerage Trial brings out the facts that the redemptioners
fared ill, worked hard, lived on a coarse diet, and drank only water
sweetened with a little molasses and flavored with ginger.[47] Eddis says
the redemptioners were treated worse than the negroes, since the loss of
a negro fell on his master; inflexible severity was exercised over the
European servants who “groaned beneath a worse than Egyptian bondage.”[48]
Richard Frethorne, writing from Martin’s Hundred, gives a pitiful tale of
the sufferings of the indented servants. “Oh! that you did see my daily
and hourly sighs, groans, tears and thumps that I afford my own breast,
and rue and curse the time of my birth with holy Job. I thought no head
had been able to hold so much water as hath, and doth daily flow from
mine eyes.”[49]
The maid who waited on the Sot-Weed Factor says:
“In better Times, e’re to this Land,
I was unhappily Trapann’d;
Perchance as well I did appear,
As any Lord or Lady here,
Not then a slave for twice two Year.
My Cloaths were fashionably new,
Nor were my Shifts of Linnen Blue;
But things are changed, now at the Hoe,
I daily work, and Bare-foot go,
In weeding Corn or feeding Swine,
I spend my melancholy Time.”[50]
Undoubtedly, in time, servants of all kinds received more consideration
than had at first been given them;[51] in 1704 Madame Knight even
complained of what she considered too great indulgence on the part of the
Connecticut farmers towards their slaves.[52] Yet, even at the North, the
lot of a servant was not an enviable one, though much was done by the
laws of all the colonies to mitigate the condition of the redemptioners,
as will be seen later in discussing the legal relations of masters and
servants.
The wages paid were, as a rule, small, though some complaints are found,
especially in New England, of high wages and poor service.[53] More
often the wages were a mere pittance. Elizabeth Evans came from Ireland
to serve John Wheelwright for three years. Her wages were to be three
pounds a year and passage paid.[54] Margery Batman, after five years of
service in Charlestown, was to receive a she-goat to help her in starting
life.[55] Mary Polly, according to the terms of her indenture, was to
serve ten years and then receive “three barrells of corn and one suit of
penistone and one suit of good serge with one black hood, two shifts of
dowlas and shoes and hose convenient.”[56]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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