The employment of Indians as servants grew up naturally in New England and was continued for at least a hundred years.[144] Their presence was regarded as almost providential by the New Englanders, hard pressed for assistance in house and field. When the question of the right and wrong of the matter was suggested by the troubled conscience, an easy answer was found: was it not sin to suffer them longer to maintain the worship of the devil when they were needed so sorely as slaves?[145] But like the redemptioners, their service so eagerly sought often proved unsatisfactory. Hugh Peter wrote to John Winthrop, September 4, 1639, “My wife desires my daughter to send to Hanna that was her mayd, now at Charltowne, to know if shee would dwell with vs, for truly wee are so destitute (hauing now but an Indian) that wee know not what to doe.”[146] More unfortunate still was the young clergyman, the Rev. Peter Thatcher. He records in his diary at Barnstable, May 7, 1679, “I bought an Indian of Mr. Checkley and was to pay 5£ a month after I received her and five pound more in a quarter of a year.” A week later he writes, “Came home and found my Indian girl had liked to have knocked my Theodora on head by letting her fall, whereupon I took a good walnut stick and beat the Indian to purpose till she promised to do so no more.”[147] In every section negro slavery grew up side by side with white and Indian slavery,[148] though its hold even upon the South was far from strong until the end of the seventeenth century. It is both unnecessary and impossible to discuss in this place the question of slavery[149] and its relation to the larger subject of service. The close of the colonial period saw it firmly established at the South, where it supplanted the system of white servitude, while at the North both black and white slavery gave place to free labor.