Held in the state archives of Virginia, North Carolina, and Maryland, seventeenth-century court documents report escapes and escape attempts of unfree laborers of Indigenous, European, and African descent. This documentation provides rich source material chronicling the evolution of legal bondage and racial slavery, and the attempts to resist it.
The stories of indentured servants and enslaved people who sought freedom during the early colonial era, underrepresented in public discussion and in other source material, help us understand how bonded laborers experienced the early South and responded to the evolution of race. This team is making accessible seventeenth-century county court records documenting escape attempts of the Chesapeake Bay’s unfree people through digitization, guiding documents, transcripts, and a database.
This year, we are creating a preliminary database from a rich sample consisting of three contiguous counties–(Old) Rappahannock, Westmoreland, and Lancaster Counties–among the most complete in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Through a project unique in its early time period and geographical range, we can make accessible and visible the role of escapees in bonded labor’s early development in the Chesapeake, a key moment in the evolution of American identity.
