SERVANTS

IN 1642, William Bradford worried that New England attracted particularly sinful people. Amidst news from Massachusetts of a sudden spate of cases of sexual “uncleanness,” Plymouth uncovered its own act of “buggery.” Thomas Granger (a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old servant in the Plymouth town of Duxbury) came before the court charged with having sex with animals. Magistrates in neighboring Massachusetts as well as Plymouth agreed that this act constituted a crime that deserved death. Although they were inspired by the Old Testament prohibition in Exodus 22:19 and Leviticus 20:15, they followed an elaborate ritual not described there, one that apparently had deep roots in European practice. The first phase of this punishment involved making Granger watch the slaughter of the animals in question.¹ The authorities, finding that “some of the sheep could not so well be known by his description of them,” asked Granger to identify the specific animals. Once killed, the sheep were not consumed but were thrown into a pit—“no use made of any part of them.” This ritual having been followed, the Plymouth executioner then hanged Granger. Afterward, Bradford and others wondered how it happened that Plymouth came to house such a dissolute individual. Considering Granger’s case and that of another man who had previously made “some sodomitical attempts upon another,” Bradford debated whether such sinful inclinations originated in England or had been picked up in New England. The answer appeared to be both, and Bradford dedicated a long passage to analyzing the problem.

He thought servants represented a special danger. Planters, overwhelmed by work and desperate for help, hired anyone they could. The plantation was thereby inundated with “many untoward servants.” Those in England who supplied servants for the transatlantic trade cared little for the character of individual recruits. By the time Bradford wrote, a vigorous market in servants existed, as some of England’s many unemployed put themselves forward as prospective servants. Others filed onto American-bound vessels in English ports straight from jails, where they had been held for vagrancy, theft, and other minor crimes. The rising demand for servants throughout the English Americas even led to a practice of kidnapping potential servants; plied with alcohol in port cities, they awoke from their stupor onboard ships sailing west. “And by this means the country became pestered with many unworthy persons who, being come over, crept into one place or other.” Bradford strongly urged masters to take special care in determining “what servants they bring into their families.”² Servants, in other words, were both essential and potentially dangerous.

Service was part of life in England as well as New England, but the institution of service altered as a result of the journey to American shores. In England, more people sought positions than there were places to fill. As a result, contracts were renewed yearly, which allowed masters latitude to replace unsatisfactory servants. Although some people spent many years—indeed in some cases their entire working lives—as servants unable to marry, the annual contract renewal allowed an escape to anyone who did not want to continue in service. Servants in England worked for wages as well as room and board. On rare occasions Plymouth servants signed similar, short-term contracts, for which they received wages. William Baker signed a contract with Richard Church, promising to work for seven months sawing boards. In payment, Church committed to give Baker fourteen bushels of corn and twelve shillings as well as to continue feeding him for one month after the contract expired. This contract bore some resemblance to the English practice of annual hiring, but it was the only one of its kind recorded in Plymouth in that decade.³

Far more common were longer terms, which made sense in a context of labor scarcity. Labor practices attempted to bind workers to masters, using the need to pay off the debt owed for the cost of the transatlantic passage. As Edward Winslow explained in his 1624 publication, Good Newes from New England, a difference between living in London and in Plymouth Plantation was the work needed to sustain life in the latter. While the ready availability of land and of wood for fuel made New England appear a paradise, this bounty nonetheless required labor to reap its benefits. Winslow observed of the prospective settler “as he shall have no rent to pay, so he must build his house before he have it, and peradventure may with more ease pay for this fuel here [in England], then cut and fetch it home, if he have not cattle to draw it there; though there is no scarcity, but rather too great plenty.”⁴ Winslow did not address the connection in this passage, but his description implied the need for servants who could be made to do that work of cutting and fetching home. Servants, whatever drawbacks they introduced, meant masters could escape or at least share the more grueling work.

With servants in Plymouth fewer and harder to get, masters generally sought to bind them with longer contracts, a desire often gratified by servants whose transatlantic travel left them in debt. Masters got laborers, and migrants worked off the cost of their transport. The migrant servant left England, where he (or more rarely she) had been unable to find employment, and came into a labor-poor environment where masters eagerly sought their services. In England, only apprentices signed long indentures, with the understanding that their masters would teach them a skill over the term of their service. A few Plymouth contracts—especially those signed with people already resident in the colony—worked like English apprentice indentures, promising skills training. For instance, Robert Barker “bound himself” to John Thorpe in order to learn the trade of carpenter. Unfortunately, Thorpe died before the contract was completed, and his widow turned over Barker’s time to William Palmer, who worked as a “nailer” (that is, a maker of nails). Under the new agreement, Barker would learn that trade instead, and at the end of his time, in April 1637, Palmer owed him only two suits of apparel.⁵

Many other contracts make no mention of skills, promising the servant only something in payment at the end of the term, as well as bed and board during it. John Harmon, son of Edmund Harmon, a London tailor, contracted to work for Francis Cooke of New Plymouth for seven years; at the end of that period, he got apparel and corn.⁶ William Snow traveled to Plymouth in 1637 in the company of his master, Richard Derby. In Plymouth, Snow agreed that his contract would be sold to Edward Dotey and extended from five to seven years. At the close of that time, Dotey owed Snow more than the usual freedom dues, as he was to receive “one lively cow calf of two months old, and eight bushels of Indian corn, and a sow pig of 2 or 3 months old, with two suits of apparel.” The agreement also spelled out that Dotey was responsible for Snow’s “meat, drink, & apparel during his term.”⁷ William Shetle agreed to work for Thomas Clarke for eleven years in exchange for two suits of clothes and eight bushels of corn.⁸ One particularly odd case bound Mary Moorecock (with consent of her father-in-law—which might in this case mean stepfather) for nine years to husband and wife Richard and Pandora Sparrow. If the couple died before the nine years expired, Mary would be free. If she desired to marry before her term ended, two men with no stake in the agreement would arbitrate the terms of payment for her freedom.⁹ This language of freedom revealed the difference between an annual servant contract and the sort of indentured servitude that many accepted in Plymouth. In Mary’s case, it offered her a way to enter a household where she would be supported until she married, but the fact that she was to work nine years and needed to negotiate her freedom suggested a debt as well.

Masters and the magistrates held responsibility for regulating servants and the trade in them. No one was to take a person into service unless they knew that person was free to enter into such a contract. Especially after other colonies had been launched in the neighborhood, the potential for runaways’ success grew. Trying to forestall the practice of fleeing in search of a new place in a different colony, Massachusetts and Plymouth created policies to ensure the return of absent servants.¹⁰ In 1636, a man listed only as “Whitney” sat in the stocks for detaining another man’s servant.¹¹ Stephen Hopkins and other men who had licenses to retail alcohol from their homes were ordered to keep local children and servants from lingering. When Hopkins nevertheless allowed a group of servants and others to drink and play shuffleboard on the Sabbath, the grand jury charged him.¹² The leaders of Plymouth loathed Thomas Morton, who founded a nearby trading post, for many reasons, but his transgressions began with tempting servants away from their masters. As Bradford and others worried, no master would ever be able to keep a servant if Morton entertained them without question, providing alcohol and other diversions. The long-time Plymouth governor flatly referred to the Morton affair as a servants’ revolt.¹³

Unfortunately, we have no specific information about how servants for Plymouth were recruited. In the very early years, the investor group fitted out the ships and presumably collected servants from the pool of London laborers. Once the team of investors fell apart and only a few London merchants remained in partnership with Plymouth, those men may have carried on with finding prospective servants to dispatch to the settlement. Once Massachusetts Bay Colony was founded, many more ships and people traversed the Atlantic to New England, which brought more servants but also created competition for those who came. Complaints about the lack of servants could be heard throughout New England by 1640. Such was even the case in Massachusetts and Connecticut, where colonists had divided the Pequot War captives, distributing enslaved Native women and children into English households. (The men were generally sold to other colonies.)

Thomas Morton gathered other men’s servants to live and work at his trading station, dubbed Merrymount. His feud with others in New England was partly behind his publication of this work, New English Canaan. Interestingly, despite the fact that he wanted to garner the support of the archbishop of Canterbury in England, his tract was published in Amsterdam. It is unclear whether his targets who lived in New England ever read the work.

Not a party to that military engagement and therefore not included in the distribution of slaves, Plymouth continued to look to Europe for servants to solve its recruitment problems. Plymouth masters did not in this period turn to the other option for fulfilling their labor needs, African slaves. Their failure to tap the burgeoning transatlantic slave trade arose from lack of opportunity rather than principled opposition to slavery. Later Plymouth households would include a smattering of Africans purchased through that trade as well as a far greater number of Native slaves, the latter drawn from the vanquished in King Philip’s War. In the first decades of the plantation, however, residents relied solely on English servants.

In the first years, many male servants received land at the end of their terms, giving them a foothold for establishing their own households. The plantation government itself—or rather the Undertakers, who undertook the debt to the Adventurers and controlled land distribution until the debt was paid—initially provided land rights, parceling out unclaimed territory within Plymouth’s bounds to freed male servants. In 1636, they limited the amount the central authority would give to each former servant to just five acres. In theory, masters could offer more, but they would need to provide any additional acreage themselves. Finally, in 1639 the plantation stopped giving land to ex-servants in payment of their dues, transferring responsibility for the necessary arrangements to masters themselves. After 1639, masters had to hand over a portion of their own property in payment, the government declaring itself “free from any such Covenant.”¹⁴ By this time, much of Plymouth’s land had been distributed, and the Undertakers were nearing the end of their term of responsibility; soon, the debt to the Adventurers would be paid, and they would no longer manage the plantation’s land.

Although centralized land distribution took the burden of funding servants partially off the shoulders of individual masters, the practice also led to some controversy. Undertakers increasingly gave away unclaimed lands in clusters to recently freed servants. These lands were usually in outlying locations newly opened to settlement. In 1633, the court ordered that ex-servants would get allotments in the new town of Scituate in the northern reaches of Plymouth’s territory, or otherwise in “some other convenient place where it may be useful.” Quite possibly, the magistrates’ new focus on distributing Scituate land had been prompted by fears that Massachusetts Bay, recently founded to the north, would encroach on Plymouth’s claim. If so, the magistrates’ concerns were well founded, since the two governments would soon debate their respective boundaries. Having Plymouth people in Scituate supported the southern settlement’s claim that the land there fell within its jurisdiction. Duxbury was also a site for these land distributions. Duxbury men complained that their town land was being given too often to unattached young men and former servants. Rather than the poor and the young, they wanted men able to settle—by which they meant those in a position to begin a household.

Servants posed no end of trouble to the masters and magistrates of Plymouth. Held to labor for a period of years, they occasionally absconded. In 1633, Thomas Brian ran from Samuel Eedy. Trying to escape his servitude, he became lost in the woods, where an unnamed “Indian” found him and returned him to Plymouth. The court ordered Brian whipped.¹⁵ In another case that summer, William Mendloue fled, apparently to escape punishment for his attempted “uncleaness” with his master’s maidservant. Penwatechet, identified as a Manomet Indian, returned him to his master, William Palmer, and the court ordered Mendloue whipped as well. Possibly to separate Mendloue from the maid, Palmer sold his contract to Richard Church. Late in the same decade, James Bishop absented himself from his master Thomas Farrell for over a year. Once he was caught, the court extended Bishop’s term of service. With ready access to his masters’ property, James Till had been “purloining” corn as well as a shirt from two different men who had held his contract. He had to repay one of them, John Emerson, “in service, corn, or otherwise,” according to the court’s order. Widow Warren reported trouble with her servant Thomas Williams. The court declared him guilty of “profane & blasphemous speeches against the majesty of God” made in an argument with “his dame” who called on him to fear God. To their shock and hers, “he answered, he neither feared God, nor the devil.” Although Governor Bradford urged “a bodily punishment” for these offenses—whether branding or whipping, the record does not state—the court only gave Williams a “reproof.”¹⁶

Sex proved a particularly fraught issue with servants, who were expected to avoid it. Although later commentary has accused New Englanders of being sexually repressed and repressive, they in fact enjoyed sex and thought it a generally positive and healthy aspect of life. They did, however, aim to limit sexual activity to married, heterosexual couples. Sex before marriage, as long as the couple married prior to any resulting child’s birth, was punished, but only moderately. Sex in other circumstances was forbidden: certainly when it involved animals, as in the case of Thomas Granger, but also if it occurred between unmarried people, those of the same sex, or those who were already married to other individuals. All of these forms of sexual activity were punished, and in all save the case of premarital sex, death was a possible penalty. Unable to marry, servants were forbidden to have sex. Marriage required having a household and resources of one’s own, which servants lacked. The prohibition meant that servants were expected to endure an extended period of abstinence. Servant contracts lasted as long as eleven years in some cases, while seven years was common. Hence Plymouth housed many teenagers and young adults who were expected to be chaste, potentially over a term of service that could last years.

As a result, servants frequently courted trouble by indulging anyway. Thomas Morton recruited runaway servants with offers of freedom and alcohol, but also—Bradford and others thought—the opportunity to have sex with Native women. In August 1637, two men—John Alexander and Thomas Roberts—came before the court guilty of “lewd behavior and unclean carriage,” not with each other but instead toward a serving woman. One of them, deemed the more culpable, was whipped, branded, and banished. The other—a servant—was ordered whipped and returned to his master to finish his time. He, however, was disqualified from receiving land in Plymouth after his term expired, unless he proved deserving based on subsequent good behavior.¹⁷ The woman went unpunished, since the court apparently saw her as a victim rather than a willing participant. Servant Dorothy Temple and Arthur Peach, who was not a servant, had sex that may have been consensual. His execution for another crime left Dorothy, then pregnant, to deal with the consequences alone.¹⁸ Servants, whether sexually active themselves or unwillingly targeted by others, often came before the court over sex.

In Plymouth, service underwent a process of degradation, a fact that put Plymouth in company with other Atlantic locations. In contrast to England, where servants worked for wages on annual contracts or else signed for a longer period with masters who committed to train them in a skilled trade, in the Plymouth setting individuals worked for long periods without respite and with nominal instruction. People who went into service overwhelmingly used that option to pay off a debt, usually one they incurred getting to Plymouth in the first place. Having already gained the benefit of their transportation, they received less and served long terms. Many people who crossed the Atlantic from Europe did so with financial obligations hanging over them, and they had to work for another before they could begin a life for themselves. Their circumstances—especially in a place like Plymouth—were vastly better than those of enslaved people from Africa, who had no say in their transportation and no promise of freedom. But, at least for a time, Plymouth servants too were not free. Their penchant for running away indicated as much.

Sir William Alexander bemoaned the idea that planters would be beholden to investors for the funds to journey to New England. In An Encouragement to Colonies, he decried an English financing practice that forced the planters to work as servants to their investors rather than as “Fathers providing for their Family and Posterity.”¹⁹ In his view, Plymouth leaders Bradford, Winslow, and the rest—the Undertakers—also suffered under a sort of servitude, laboring for over two decades to pay off the obligation to investors. Those same men also held the position of master and of magistrate, commanding labor, controlling land distribution, and deciding the fates of others. Had planters taken Alexander’s observations to heart and compared their difficulties to those of their servants, they might have understood the resentment of servants who ran away and entered into forbidden sexual liaisons.

Although enslaved laborers would eventually work in the plantation, servants remained an important source of labor in Plymouth and many other locations. In 1620, the transatlantic slave trade was already exactly a century old, but ships carrying enslaved Africans did not visit such small, poor ports as Plymouth. Slave ships followed demand (of which there was plenty in Plymouth) but also potential for profit (which Plymouth decidedly could not provide). Native peoples entered the ranks of the enslaved too, usually after wars that periodically rocked the region. Plymouth did not receive any of the captives taken in the first war, the Pequot War in the 1630s, but it did after King Philip’s War in the 1670s. On one occasion late in the history of Plymouth Plantation, the court sentenced Thomas Wappatucke to perpetual servitude after he was found guilty of burglary; this extreme penalty was never meted out to an English thief.²⁰ Service for English transplants could be onerous, but none of them faced perpetual service. In the absence of a sufficient supply of potential slaves, Plymouth largely continued to rely on servants with temporary terms. Like slavery, these indenture contracts, as they played out in America, represented a new variation on older practices for organizing and even coercing labor.