(see Chapter 7, note 197)
Some scholars are convinced that the bond-labor system, despite acknowledged abuses, represented an improvement for the laborers over the prospects they would have had in Europe. Bruce1 and Ballagh2 believe that, except for the axemen noted by Bruce, the work was easier than that of the English wage-laborer. McCormac, lowering his sights a few degrees, says merely that at any rate the lot of the limited-term bond-laborer was “better than languishing in a debtor’s cell in England.”3
Attention is also given to the condition of the European-American bond-laborers in the eighteenth century, when African-Americans came to constitute the majority of the plantation bond-labor force. Gray asserts that in the eighteenth century the conditions of the European bond-laborers were alleviated.4 On the other hand, Richard B. Morris found that the increased employment of Africans did not bring “any material improvement in the treatment” of immigrant European bond-laborers.5 McCormac seems to agree on this point with Morris, at least so far as Maryland was concerned. There, he says, the life of the European bond-laborer was better prior to the large-scale arrival of African laborers beginning at the end of the seventeenth century.6 Despite the high mortality rate of the first years, and although the burdens of the poor were increased if they emigrated to the colonies as bond-laborers, still, says A. E. Smith, both masters and bond-laborers endured “the hardships of pioneer life,” and in the end “America presented to the average man a far better chance of attaining decent independence than did Europe.”7 If the bond-laborers’ plight was difficult, he declares, the difficulties should not be ascribed to bondage as such, nor to the evil disposition of the masters, but to the general difficulties of the earliest colonial years that made inevitable a harsh regime, in which little allowance could be made for “shiftless or weak servants.” Within such limits, he found that the degree of oppressive treatment suffered by the bond-laborers depended largely upon the luck of the draw in the matter of masters to whom they were disposed. There were, Smith says, two basic sources of the sufferings of limited-term bond-laborers, and neither involved any disposition on the part of the plantation bourgeoisie to take advantage of the chattel bond-labor relation of production to exploit their workers in ways which they could not have done free tenants and wage laborers. These two fundamental causes of hardship were, he says: (1) the climate of the plantation colonies; and (2) the non-adaptability of non-farm laborers such as constituted a large part, if not the majority, of the bond-laborers drawn from England.8 Russell R. Menard’s study of early colonial Maryland led him to essentially the same conclusion as that drawn by Smith regarding the general state of master–servant relations. In the course of challenging Edmund S. Morgan’s assertion that limited-term bond-servitude prepared the way for the lifetime bond-servitude eventually imposed on African-Americans, Menard is at pains to contrast the two cases. “Indentured servitude … was not degrading,” says Menard. True, their mortality rate was shockingly high, “nor were all servants well treated”; but Menard dismisses the notorious cases such as those of Henry Smith, John Dandy, and other monstrously cruel owners as “not typical.” Menard stresses that “master–servant relationships were often friendly and sometimes affectionate and that servitude offered poor men a chance to gain entry into a society that offered great opportunities for advancement.”9
These apologies for the chattel bond-labor system have not gone unchallenged. As for the contention that the life of the bond-laborers was better than it would have been if they had remained in England, that the work was not so hard in the tobacco plantations as that performed by agricultural laborers in England, there is more of assumption than substance in it. Edmund S. Morgan, on the basis of well-known English works on economic history, effectively maintains that the relatively easy regime of the farm worker in England utterly unsuited the English laborer for the unremitting round of heavy toil on the tobacco plantations.10 Even McCormac’s extreme analogy to the English debtors’ prison loses much of its force when it is considered that the situation of the plantation bond-laborers was like a debtors’ prison where the inmates of any age were regarded as minors, so far as their rights were concerned.
The more instructive comparison, that between the laborers in New England and those in the tobacco colonies in the seventeenth century, is almost totally ignored by apologists for the chattel bond-labor system.11 But the late Richard B. Morris, in his exhaustively documented study Government and Labor in Early America, found that the treatment of bond-laborers was much more rigorous in the tobacco colonies than in New England. The contrast of the all-or-nothing dependence on the tobacco monoculture of the Chesapeake plantation economy, and the small independent farms of the varied, largely self-sufficient, New England economy was fundamental to the difference in day-to-day social relationships.12 In the New England and Middle colonies, said Morris, the limited-term bond-laborers, who were relatively few in number, enjoyed close personal relationships with their masters, relationships that were normal to their occupations in crafts and household service; but in the plantation colonies, where the bond-laborers were “employed primarily in field work under the supervision of exacting overseers,” master–servant relations were harsh.13
Without wanting to indict the entire planter class, Morris concluded: “Maltreatment of servants was most flagrant in the tobacco colonies.” Not only did a large number of drunken and dissolute owners treat their bond-laborers with sadistic brutality, members of the Colony Council and county courts “set a poor example to their own communities in ruling with a rod of iron.… Such masters preferred to discipline their servants themselves rather than to bring them into court,” says Morris. While only the most serious cases of maltreatment came to court, they serve to reveal the “fairly typical” life of the plantation bond laborer.14
My own study of the record affords more support to the views of Morris and Morgan cited here than to the apologists of the bond-labor system.