This dataset was created to document the people involved in the testimony, punishment, frequency, timing, and strategy of bonded labor escape attempts in seventeenth-century Virginia.
This project was funded by a planning grant from the Humanities Collections and Reference Resources program of the National Endowment for the Humanities as part of the A More Perfect Union initiative. Other contributions include a grant from the General Education Office at Virginia Tech and internship work from undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Maryland and Virginia Tech. The data for the planning grant was collected by teams of students in a Fall 2023 U.S. History survey course at Virginia Tech, and Jessica Taylor in Summer and Fall of 2023.
The Data
This data is compiled from order books from geographically contiguous Lancaster, Westmoreland, and (Old) Rappahannock Counties in Virginia (a total of eleven reels of microfilm), three geographically connected counties with records that suffered relatively little damage during the Civil War. These records were chosen because they were at times politically synonymous as counties formed from one another during the seventeenth century and are relatively complete. In Summer 2023, additional funding became available through the General Education Office at Virginia Tech to digitize seventeenth-century Stafford County order books. The following reels were digitized by Library of Virginia through their preferred independent contractor, Backstage Library Works.
Stafford 7, 7A
Lancaster County reels 24, 25, 26, 311, 312
(Old) Rappahannock 13, 22
Westmoreland 1, 51, 52, 53
This corresponds to the following order books:
Stafford County:
Court Records [Orders], 1664 – 1668, c 94 p.
Court Records [Orders], 1689 – 1693, c 381 p. unpaged index
Record Book, 1686-1693/4, 552 p., no index
Lancaster County:
[Note: does not include Reel 1, 1652-1657]
Orders, Etc., 1655 – 1666 c, Unpaged index (incomplete), 388 p.
Orders, No. 1, 1666 – 1680 c, 539 p.
Orders, No. 2, 1680 – 1686 c, [1], 272 p.
Orders, No. 3, 1686 – 1696 c, 183(a) fo.
Orders, No. 4, 1696 – 1702 c, Unpaged index, [2] p., 177 fo.
Orders, No. 5, 1702 – 1713 c, 1-137 p., 138-302 fo., [6] p.
Court Papers, 1653-1850, No index.
Court Papers, 1653-1850, No index.
(Old) Rappahannock County:
Orders, [no. 1], 1683 – 1686 c, 125. Film of Original.
Orders, 1686 – 1692 c, 355 p. Film of Original.
Orders, 1692-1695, 270 p. (Essex County)
Westmoreland County:
Deeds, Wills, Patents, 1653 – 1659 c, 139 fo. (Contains a few Orders) Not indexed in General Index to Deeds or Gen. Index to Wills
Deeds, Wills, Etc., 1661 – 1662 c, 79 fo. (Contains a few Orders) Not indexed in General Index to Deeds or in Gen. Index to Wills
Deeds, Patents, Etc., 1665 – 1677 c, 17-368 [2] fo. (Contains Wills) Not indexed in General Index to Deeds or Gen. Index to Wills
Orders, 1662 – 1664 c, 43 fo.
Orders, 1675 – 1689 c, p. 41-706
Order Book, 1690 – 1698 c, [xix] index, 263 fo.
Order Book, 1698 – 1705 c, [x] index, 273 fo.
Additionally, Chreston Miller generated OCR copies of transcripts of the following court books to assist in verification of student and faculty transcripts. Additional OCR copies of transcripts related to Northumberland, Accomack, and Northampton Counties below were generated in the initial exploratory stages (for example, to gauge differences between counties and time periods as the team developed metadata standards). The Accomack and Northampton County transcripts, published by Susie Ames, are considered appropriate replacements for the original court records. All other court records should be verified with the original digitized scan.
Lancaster County Orders, 1656-1661
Accomack-Northampton County 1632-1640
Lancaster County Orders, 1662-1666
Lancaster County Orders, 1666-1669
Lancaster County Orders, 1670-1674
Middlesex County Orders, 1673-1678
Middlesex County Orders, 1677-1680
Middlesex County Orders, 1680-1686
Middlesex County Orders, 1686-1690
Northumberland County Orders, 1661-1665
Northumberland County Orders, 1674-1677
Northumberland County Orders, 1677-1679
Northumberland County Orders, 1680-1683
The data will be shared as linked open data with Harvard Dataverse, MEAD, and Enslaved.org. A backup package of high-resolution TIFFs of the digitized microfilm reels will be made accessible on VTechWorks, a storage platform at VT, and lastly available to download through Archivematica, an open-source platform for cloud storage.
The Enslaved.org controlled vocabulary (v3) and Recommended Practices document (v1) were used to create the metadata fields and controlled vocabulary.
Caveats
Users should note that court records reflect changing colonial law governing indentured servitude, slavery, movements of bonded laborers, recapture, and bondage, and changing implementation of law at the local level. For example, years of service were codified as punishment for running away in 1643; white servants caught running away with Black servants were punished with additional time beginning in 1661; and rewards for catchers were added in 1669 and 1670. These laws changed the reasons for and nature of court cases surrounding escape cases.
The race of individuals is often not mentioned. Assumptions about race (for example, that someone not explicitly labeled “Negro” is white) should be made with care.
This data should not be used to represent the actual number of people who attempted escape. People who succeeded in attempting escape were, of course, not brought to court. It is probable that enslaved people who were caught after running away are underrepresented in this data, since additional time could not be added to their presumed lifetime of servitude. Finally, due to the fragmentary nature of many seventeenth-century county and colony records, many court order books in particular areas of the Chesapeake are lost to time and will be underrepresented in this dataset. See Library of Virginia for more on “burned counties.”
Redundancies between cases may occur if a person’s escape is reported in multiple locations (for example, escaped from Virginia but caught in Maryland) or if a person’s escape is referenced in multiple court orders (for example, testimony taken in one session, reward paid to catcher in another session). People may also play a secondary role in one case (for example, as a witness or a referenced person) and serve as the primary escapee in another case.
For unknown values, fields are left blank unless the “Unknown” refers to an individual. In this case, the individual is provided a unique identifier (i.e., “Unknown-001”).
Partial data will be common for many reasons (i.e., legibility of records, torn documents). Torn documents and illegibility are noted in the “Notes” section for an event where applicable.
Dates
Some dates may be more generally noted than others, especially if the date of a court record is unclear or missing. Users should also note in the seventeenth-century from English colonists, the “legal” calendar began on March 25, leading to dates that appear in records as “March 23, 1661/2” or “March, 23, 1661,” when the date referenced was actually for modern purposes “March 23, 1662.” All dates here are updated to the later year (in this case, 1662).
