-5- for transportation of servants to their new destinations and signed contracts in which they promised intentured workers, at the expiration of their terms, a tract of land, a new suit of clothes, a heifer, two pigs, fire-arms and the simpler farm implements. These were basic conditions upon which the majority of white people became citizens of the North American colonies from Maine to Georgia. Nor can these people be regarded as poor ne'er-do-wells, as so many historians have seemed to think (1). With these guarentees in black and white, the would-be manor lords of Virginia and Maryland were sure to meet with difficulties. Indentured servants were crowded into little cabins on their masters' estates; but with vast stretches of Indian lands not far away, these workers were not disposed to become submissive serfs. If treatment was rough, pressure too great, and marriage among the servants punished too severely, they ran away to the frontier where they could hunt and fish for a living and buy lands 1. Clark, G. N.: The Later Stuarts , 1660-1714, p. 35, shows that in a population of 5,500,520 there were 1,400,000 with incomes of 6 pounds to nothing a year. From other evidence I am of the opinion that there was nearly a million unemployed after 1661, except in war time. |