Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution by Bailyn Bernard

Author:Bailyn, Bernard [Bailyn, Bernard]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780307798527
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-08-02T16:00:00+00:00

1Etherington’s York Chronicle, Jan. 27, 1775; “Extract of a letter from an officer in the 64th regiment, Boston, Aug. 5, 1773, to his father in Dublin,” Lloyd’s Evening Post, Oct. 4–6, 1773; Harry Piper to John Dixon, Alexandria, Va., Sept. 12, 1768, Piper Letterbook; William Eddis, Letters from America, ed. Aubrey C. Land (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), pp. 37-38; Matthew Ridley to Duncan Campbell, Baltimore, July 9, 1775 (referring to a shipload of convicts as “servants”), Ridley Letterbook; James Cheston to Thomas Ringgold, Baltimore, Dec. 30, 1773 (“Immediately after that is done and I have got rid of all my children, 25 of whom are still on hand …”), Cheston Letterbooks; Ringgold to Cheston, Chester Town, Dec. 16, 1773, Cheston Incoming Letters; various separate sales accounts of shiploads of indentured servants and convicts among the bills and receipts, box 19, all in Cheston-Galloway Papers; Williams’s ad for the servants arriving on the Star and Garter in Maryland Gazette (Annapolis), July 20, 1775—the identification of the servants as convicts is in T47/10 between folios 71 and 72.

2Cheston to Stevenson, Randolph, & Cheston, Baltimore, June 30, 1774, Cheston Letterbooks; Piper to Dixon and Littledale, Alexandria, Oct. 24, 1767, Piper Letterbook; Frederick H. Schmidt, “British Convict Servant Labor in Colonial Virginia” (Ph.D. diss., College of William and Mary, 1976), pp. 156, 123-124; John M. Jennings, ed., “The Poor Unhappy Transported Felon’s Sorrowful Account of his Fourteen Years Transportation at Virginia in America,’ ” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 56 (1948), 190. The authorship and dating of Revel’s “Sorrowful Account” are conjectural. It may have been written by a hack writer turning out popular tracts. But the author, whoever he was, was well acquainted with the details of the marketing of bondsmen in America.

3Ibid., p. 190. For a similar account by a German redemptioner—“We had to strip naked, so that the prospective purchasers could see that we had perfectly developed and healthy bodies. After the purchaser had made a selection, he asked: ‘How much is this boy or this girl?’ ”—see Narrative of Jobann Carl Buettner in the American Revolution ([1828], New York, 1971), pp. 26-27.

4The Journal of John Harrower: An Indentured Servant in the Colony of Virginia, 1773–1776, ed. Edward M. Riley (Williamsburg, Va., 1963), p. 35.

5William Carr to James Russell, Dumfries, March 30, 1774, Feb. 22, 1775, Russell Papers; Piper to Dixon and Littledale, Alexandria, Nov. 25, 1767, Sept. 6, 1769, Piper Letterbook; Ridley to Campbell, Baltimore, Oct. 5, 1772, Ridley Letterbook; Thomas Ewing to Richard Neave & Son, Baltimore, July 12, 1775, Emmet Collection, MS 5686, Special Collections, New York Public Library, New York City.

6Cheston to Stevenson, Randolph, & Cheston, Oct. 11, March 12, Jan. 5, 1774, Cheston Letterbooks; John Page to Cheston, “Rockhall,” March 24, 1774 (returning a servant “utterly averse to goe by water … he would by no means suit me”), Cheston Incoming Letters.

7Piper to Dixon and Littledale, Alexandria, April 15, 1769, Piper Letterbook; Ridley to Campbell, July 29, 1775, Ridley Letterbook. On the “warehousing” of German redemptioners, see note 21, below.

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