Small Stories

Introduction

Hello, and thank you for exploring Dangerous Harbors with us. Today, we will be talking about John Punch, the first African man in Virginia to be sentenced to slavery for life in the 13 colonies. 

Europeans practiced slavery before colonization in North America, and slavery was part of European colonization in North America and the Caribbean since its earliest years. In seventeenth-century Virginia, punishments meted out to free people of African descent and enslaved Africans were frequently based on skin color. This was not always the case, in fact John Punch’s case in 1640 may be the first time slavery was used as a race-based punishment. Seen nearly 150 years after colonization in America started, John Punch’s case marked the beginning of race-based court precedent in Virginia. 

Content

John Punch, along with James Gregory and Victor, two white men who were also indentured servants to a Virginia planter named Hugh Gwyn, ran away from Gwyn’s plantation on the Middle Peninsula in hopes of escaping their contracts. The three men fled to Maryland, but unfortunately were found within a few days and returned to the General Court in Jamestown for trials. 

Although the three men escaped and fled in the same way, the punishments given to John Punch were different from the punishments of James and Victor. All three men were sentenced to whippings, but John Punch’s punishment was extremely harsh compared to James and Victor’s. James and Victor, two white men, had four years each added to their terms of indenture. On the contrary, John Punch, a black man, was sentenced to lifelong servitude. 

Laws eventually made in the coming years seemed to have a purpose of keeping African in bondage. In 1662, Virginia law ensured that “partus sequitur ventrum” or “offspring follows belly” meaning the status of a child’s freedom would be determined by the enslavement of their mother. 

Conclusion

In conclusion, the case of John Punch represents a pivotal moment in the early history of American slavery. His sentencing to servitude in 1640 marked a turning point when race based punishments began to emerge in the American colonies. Even though indentured servants like James and Victor faced consequences for their escape, their sentences were less severe than John Punch’s, showing the deepening racial disparities in how individuals were treated.

Understanding this history is very important for acknowledging the legacy of racial injustice in the U.S and the long struggle for equality and freedom that followed. John Punch’s story is a clear reminder of the impact of slavery and the desperate need for reflection in society today, and most importantly the progress towards a more just future.

Introduction:

Hello, and thank you for exploring Dangerous Harbors with us. Today we’ll learn about an English indentured servant named William Collins. Collins was indentured to Robert Pyland in the early 1660’s. Soon after his arrival, Robert Pyland had William Collins indentured in Warwick County.

Content:

Later on, Pyland married Caroline Bell and inherited about ⅓ of the Bell family estate, which equated to 221 acres. In order to farm this parcel of land, Pyland required labor from indentured servants like Collins, especially given Pyland would encounter illness, death, and inability to manage the land down the road. Although Pyland had a good deal of political, economic, and judicial influence within the county, he could not prevent the ambitious Collins from escaping inland to Lancaster County, Virginia, where he took up residence with another planter along the Rappahannock River, Nicholas Hale. Pyland sued for the return of Collins, who had been “long absent from mee,” and sent a lawyer, a surgeon, to bring Collins back south. The trial in a Lancaster County court on September 6, 1666 revealed that William Collins confessed to escaping for two whole years, adding four additional years to his servitude. He was freed in 1672. 

Conclusion:

This runaway case reveals that escaping servitude might happen in the open and in community with other colonists. The development of cash crops in the Chesapeake colonies, plus a surge in the population in England, brought about opportunities for large landowners to purchase indentures of newcomers, and to get to know them. William Collins shows independent thinking and craftiness in response to this exploitative situation.

Hello and thanks for exploring Dangerous Harbors with us. Today, we’ll be talking about the story of three ambitious indentured servants who tried to run away in 1673. 

Context: 

Phillip Streete, John Baber with the alias Hill, and John Nessiter attempted escape from indentured servitude in Lancaster County. In order to make their escape they stole a 17-foot long boat. They escaped from the holder of their indenture, Robert Beckenham. Robert Beckenham owned a plantation in Lancaster, and had approximately twenty bonded laborers, both indentured and enslaved (as of 1677). Because of this, it’s probably safe to say, based on his stature and the ownership of both slaves and indentured servants, that he had a large amount of land for these servants and his family, and that he was wealthy.

Richard Taylor, a landowner on Fleet’s Bay on the Rappahannock River, caught them about fifty miles away in Accomack County. Richard Taylor may have been a neighbor to Robert Beckenham. This could help explain why Richard knew who to return the three men to upon capture. To capture these men was a big feat: Lancaster and Accomack are separated by the Chesapeake Bay. Something as big as a boat was extra risky, since theft of property would add on to the sentence imposed if someone was caught. Not to mention that operating a boat takes teamwork, sailing a large watercraft by yourself is difficult. Based on the fact that they stole a boat and used it to successfully make it to the other side, we can deduce that these men had an understanding of how to navigate the bay. 

They were gone for 35 days. 

The punishment for running away, decided at the court in Lancaster County, was 15 months added to their time. 

Conclusion:

This was one case of several where enslaved people or indentured servants ran away from the plantations they worked on. Some ran away as individuals, and some ran away in groups like our three musketeers, stealing things from the plantations they escaped if they found it necessary. Working with this data is important because it helps us paint a more complete and unexpected picture of these three men’s comeradery in a time where cell phones and cameras weren’t around to give us a picture. 

Hello, and thank you for taking the time to talk with us about indigenous servitude and slavery in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake. Today we will be exploring how it originated, where & when it took place, and resistance from the Native people.

While indigenous servitude is often overlooked in the broader history of slavery, historians show English political and ideological views changed due to the impact that indigenous bonded labor had on the colonies.

Before beginning, we wish to take this time to clarify what it actually meant to be an indigenous bonded laborer. Depending on the nation and time, many of those enslaved people recorded as Indigenous were captured natives in conflict with the colonists, enslaving them for the remainder of their lives. Their enslavement allowed colonists to take their land or ignore their important political role in the region as members of sovereign nations.  

Servants or bonded laborers have come from many different backgrounds involving themselves into labor situations ranging from consensual to exploitative. Indentured servants were often those seeking to come to the North American colonies from Europe, to escape economical conditions, without the money to do so. Therefore, they would sign a contract to serve under someone for a certain number of years. Some Indigenous people in the colonial Chesapeake were enslaved, some worked as hired people, as guides or hunters. For example, some worked as servants on plantations, while others had an uncertain status between servitude and slavery.

With that being said, let’s take a closer look at the beginnings of indigenous slavery in Virginia. In the early 17th century shortly after the founding of Jamestown in 1607 is when historians believe indigenous servitude in the Chesapeake began. 

So when Europeans first encountered Indigenous people they thought of them to be cannibals and basically barbarians. BUT, some historians argue that there is a new perspective that has been found. While colonists had a racialized view of indigenous people, it wasn’t just yet a “doctrine” or full blown ideology. Therefore, some Europeans noticed that Indigenous nations they encountered maintained what they deemed different levels of civility and intelligence, like hereditary rule. This in turn brought up debates about, should they actually be enslaved? and do they have power over their land?

In 1622, Opechancanough and other members of the Powhatan Chiefdom launched a planned attack on the colonists in response to the English wanting to take over their land. One third of the colony was taken out from this attack. This was the start of an accelerated anti-Indian sentiment.

After this attack by the Opechancanough, the colonists launched their own retaliation for a decade and resorted to massacring the indigenous Powhatans while capturing some into slavery. This occurred again during a conflict in 1644.  

In 1655, the colony’s elite decided that if any Indians were to bring children to English homes, they would not use them as slaves but rather bring them up in Christianity. They believed that by doing this, the next generation would become more civil and their knowledge of different English trades would increase. The assembly also made it illegal to steal and enslave Native children, but enslavement continued anyway. 

During Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, rebel Nathaniel Bacon used anti-Native sentiment and colonial interest in the slave trade  to reinterpret the law and get colonists on his side. This law basically stated that indigenous people were not considered part of any nation at all. This then resulted in the removal of whatever sovereignty they had over their land and therefore, allowed them to be enslaved at will.

Nathaniel Bacon is often portrayed in popular culture as a “revolutionary hero.”   However, historians are now noticing that it’s actually indigenous people who changed thinking and practice about Indigenous slavery and law following rebellion. More specifically,  Indigenous women, in this case, Cock-a-coe-ske, who was the leader of a native nation, the Pa-munkey, fought for sovereignty and against her people’s enslavement by Bacon’s army to be able to protect her people, land and themselves. 

During Bacon’s Rebellion, colonists did not respect leaders like Cockacoeske, so to extend their control of those indigenous women and profit from their enslavement, they decided to capture them. Cockacoeske survived Bacon’s attack and reaffirmed her people’s freedom and sovereignty following the rebellion, with the treaty of middle plantation in 1680. This then ambiguous state of indigenous sovereignty in relation to the English, created a new type of relationship between the European empire and those indigenous people. 

Meanwhile, Native nations across the Southeast would sell enslaved people from other nations to the colonists for their guns, thus the Indian enslavement market into Virginia grew. The majority of the people traded into the Chesapeake from elsewhere in the Southeast were women and children.Nations that did not partake in this found themselves becoming targets to the colonists. 

In 1705 the House Of Burgesses passed a comprehensive slave code reflecting a shift in the colonial economy from one based on indentured servitude to enslaved labor. This declared all slaves, African or Indian as “Real Estate”.

Indigenous slavery lasted just as long as other forms of slavery but some scholars believe that specifically indigenous slavery declined because of disease and escape.

Overall, indigenous servitude affected many aspects of the Virginia colony through political and ideological ways, more than some might make it out to be. 

Thank you for taking time today to talk with us about indigenous servitude and slavery. 

Hello, and thank you for exploring Dangerous Harbors with us. Today we will talk about the briefcase of Mary Simpson, one of the rare women who ran away from servitude in the seventeenth century. 

According to some historians, the ratio of African men to African women in the lower Chesapeake was relatively even. Because of the nature of the trade in Indigenous people in the Southeastern interior, many of the enslaved Indigenous people who labored on Virginia’s seventeenth-century plantations were women and children from hundreds of miles away.  

Mary Simpson was an indentured servant to Richard Robinson, an English-born man who migrated Virginia and served as Sheriff of Middlesex County in the mid 1600s. In an unspecified year between 1673 and 1678, Mary attempted to escape the servitude under Robinson, only to be caught and ordered to to serve fifty more days, twice the length of her escape, on top of her indenture. Not only this, but Mary was to be whipped twenty one times as punishment for stealing clothes. This is the only information of Mary Simpson that is known from the county court documentation. 

While stories about women who ran away are more rare than court cases involving men who attempted escape, her story serves as a prime example of indentured servants who would be caught and punished for similar crimes. For instance, John Beard and William Powel were issued 40 days onto their servitude for running away for twenty days. Robert Thomas, another servant to Richard Robinson, was forced to serve 50 days on top of his servitude for running away for 25 days. In all of the cases above, runaways were caught and punished with more time added onto their servitude, physical punishment like whippings, or large payments of goods like tobacco. Women were not excepted from this rule, or from public corporal punishments.

While women might help other escaped servants by stealing goods, women who themselves escaped were relatively rare. Mary Simpson’s case shows us that against the odds, some women did plan for and attempt escape on their own. 

Hello, and thank you for exploring Dangerous Harbors with us. Today, we’ll talk about what faced women in bonded labor in the seventeenth century, with a close look at how poor women might find themselves in court for sexual misconduct. 

The challenges that faced Black, white, and Indigenous women in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake were different from one another and from those facing men. 

Black and Indigenous women faced nebulous and changing legal and labor arrangements which often forced them into a lifetime of servitude and slavery. In March of 1643, the Virginia General Assembly passed a law stating that all enslaved and indentured Black women were deemed tithable, a sign that their work in the fields alongside men was deemed different than the labor of white women, supposedly spent on domestic tasks.

This shows us that the work of women on plantations was used to legislate racial differences in the seventeenth century, alongside other laws also making enslavement of nonwhite people easier. One of the most important laws to do this was the 1662 law that Black “womens children to serve according to the condition of the mother,” which guaranteed that a child would be enslaved if their mother is enslaved.

While poor white women might benefit from this system–they had a better chance of finding a marriage partner in Virginia than they had in England, and they had a better shot at social mobility–they were often also subject to exploitation on Chesapeake plantations and gender-specific punishments based on laws like those surrounding bastardy and fornication. 

In England, sections in the Poor Laws of 1576 were enacted that would seek to have the parents of children born out of wedlock be the primary caregivers of their children as opposed to the parish. Oftentimes, parents would not raise their kids born out of wedlock. In turn, with these laws, the parents would have to reimburse the parish for costs of raising the child, as well as paying for the rest of the child’s financial needs. This system can be seen as a precursor to Virginia Bastardy laws.

Laws surrounding Bastardy in Virginia sought to place the burden of raising the child primarily on the parents, rather than the parish. Raising the child was expensive and seen as a burden to the colony of VA, much like it was in England. 

The Virginia Assembly, in an attempt to appease taxpayers and the parish, enacted a law in the 1650s that would target servants who had children outside of wedlock. The law required the father to pay 1500 lbs of tobacco, along with a year’s work for whoever owned the service of the mother. 

However, lawmakers wanted to make the mothers equally responsible with the father for the child, and in the 1660s solely responsible. The mothers had to pay 2000 lbs of tobacco and two years’ work to whoever held their indenture. 

The committee in charge of these laws, consisting completely of enslavers and masters of indentured servants, morphed these laws by having the tobacco fine would be paid to the parish instead of planters, while the mother’s labor would be for another planter, rather than her own so-called master. 

If the courts did not get the answers they wanted they would often turn to coercion often using psychological and physical abuse against these women as they often received whippings or time in the corrections housing sometimes going as far as questioning these women while they were in labor. These indentured servants were subject to any form of torture from the courts in order to pry the answer of who the bastards childs father was.

Overall, Bastard laws in VA, specifically towards indentured servants, sought to take advantage of the vulnerabilities these women were facing as a result of the un-fathered child from these bastard laws. Laws about race and sexuality that targeted women and their children in the seventeenth century, like the bastardy laws, were part of maintaining and deepening social and economic inequality in the English Chesapeake.