A Good Master Well Served

Masters and Servants in Colonial Massachusetts, 1620-1750

Lawrence William Towner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781317731863
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1998. Early American historians are finding connections between the bonded status of African American slaves, European indentured servants, convicts, and sailors. An excellent starting point for this inquiry is this neglected classic by Lawrence Towner, former head of the Newberry Library in Chicago and editor of the William and Mary Quarterly. This comprehensive study of the lives and experiences of bonded laborers in colonial Massachusetts demonstrates the full sweep of their work and aspirations. Towner analyzes the legal status of all varieties of black and white bonded laborers. He explores their living and working conditions and discusses the cultural significance of work in their lives. The book also address gender issues in bonded labor. The author's approach provides a new understanding of the experiences of black and white workers in early America, and corrects a long-standing neglect of blacks in previous research. This edition makes this important work available in print for the first time, and includes an introductory essay by Alfred F. Young, "Dissertations and Gatekeepers: Why it took45 Years for a Ph.D. Thesis to be Published."
(Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University; 1954)

1. Factors Influencing Conditions of Labor and the Institution of Servitude

The servant class which emerged in the present area of Massachusetts before 1750 included whites, Indians and Negroes. The social structure within the servant class ran from the highly mobile “voluntary” apprentices at the top to an ethnically determined caste of red and black servants and slaves at the bottom. Between the extremes, one grouping shaded off almost imperceptibly into the next: so that, in a social scale each varied little from its nearest neighbors. All servants had one thing in common: each was bound to serve a master in his lawful commands regardless of the servant’s own particular desires or inclinations, for the sanctions of custom, religion, and the law held him subservient to his master’s wishes.

Being servants, at the beck and call of a kindly, stern, or tyrannical master, their lives tended to be very much alike, regardless of the status they held within their class. For example, the apprentice frequently did menial tasks for his master unconnected with his training in a craft, while the Negro or Indian slave not infrequently became a skilled artisan. Moreover, the servants not only spent their working hours under supervision, but were responsible to their masters for their actions at all times. They ate, slept, played, and worshipped under their masters’ roof, or at least under their masters’ jurisdiction. Hence, distinctions within the class were blurred even though in the end an apprentice or other white servant became a free man, while the Negro and his offspring remained in bondage.

There were five major factors which influenced the conditions of labor in the period prior to 1750, and which shaped the institution of servitude as it emerged in Massachusetts: an economic need for labor, the land system, custom, a desire to maintain a homogeneous population, and religion. These forces may be isolated for the purpose of analysis, but they were essentially interrelated, and they varied in their degree of influence as the colonial scene changed.

Of the above factors, the economic need for labor was of signal importance. The passage from the Old World to the New was accompanied by a profound change in the relationship of man to land: the New World was a vast area of unexploited land—raw, rich, almost unpopulated land. This was the great economic fact of colonial America.¹ Without an ever increasing labor force to apply to that land, the returns would be limited to what a man alone could do; and generations would pass without perceptibly raising the standard of living, or indeed without equaling that which the immigrants had been accustomed to in the home country. A man’s hands, and his children’s hands, could not do the work alone, and yet there was no reliable labor pool from which he could draw the help he needed. Land was cheap, opportunity was great, and men were few. The corollary to the great expanse of undeveloped land was a chronic labor shortage throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

This chronic labor shortage can be demonstrated in several ways. First, there were laws designed, in part at least, to assure the would-be employer that those laborers on the scene would be available and at a “reasonable” wage. It was recognized that a free man would take up land for himself at the first opportunity, and not a little seventeenth-century legislation was designed to keep the landless laborer landless. Furthermore, even if the free man were prohibited from taking up land when and where he chose, thus keeping him available in a labor pool, if he were left uncontrolled, he would demand wages in excess of what seemed reasonable to the transplanted Englishman from the relatively crowded motherland. Seventeenth-century laws and institutions attempted to limit these demands with specific wage scales, suits at law, and other social pressures.²

Secondly, the existence of a labor shortage is demonstrated by the complaints of those who lived in the period. There is the almost apocryphal story by John Winthrop where a servant offered to hire his master so the latter could earn back the wages in cattle that his servant proposed to charge him. In the same chronicle, Winthrop relates that a servant, having completed his term of service, charged such extortionate prices that he would not work “but for ready money.” Soon having saved twenty-five pounds, he retired to England. When his savings were squandered, the former servant returned once more to this Eldorado, where gold could not be picked up off the streets, but where it could be earned by the sweat of one’s brow much more quickly than in England.³

Other evidence of a shortage of labor is abundant. Seventeenth-century correspondence is filled with requests for servants.⁴ And in the eighteenth century, newspaper help-wanted notices indicate a persistent demand, Just as other advertisements show the existence of a brisk market by their offerings of blacks, whites and reds for sale.⁵ The shortage of workers was such that the children of the poor were sought avidly, and by the 1740s specially printed blanks were made not only for the recording of their contracts but for requests made to the overseers as well.⁶

The shortage of labor was not only general in terms of a demand for muscle-power, but particular, in that skilled workers were needed. Artisans, such as shipwrights, were occasionally excused from military duty so that they might carry on in their occupations.⁷ Plymouth Colony at one time even forbade the employment of skilled labor by foreigners and strangers until the wants of the colony had been supplied.⁸ Town and colony governments offered inducements in the form of houses, land, and monopoly, to millers, blacksmiths and others.⁹ Servants, of whatever type were permitted over all opposition to practice skilled trades.¹⁰ Apprentices were not infrequently enticed to leave their masters,¹¹ and unless servants were securely bound, masters might find the pressures of the community forcing them to relinquish their hold upon their laboring men.¹² Newspaper advertisements asked for skilled servants of all types, farmers, blocksmiths, boys to keep accounts;¹³ and men scoured the countryside looking for able mechanics and tradesmen. “I haue at last met with a miller,” wrote Wait Winthrop from Boston, “which I hope will proue [sic] extraordinary for that and anything else about the house . .

he must be treated not as an ordinary servant, [he went on to say] but as one that deserues well, which, if I mistake not, he will do, if you be not rash and angry on every little occation, but overlook little mistakes, if any.¹⁴

This dearth of workingmen gave considerable advantage in bargaining power to the unbound American worker. As the economy became more free, that is as the society moved away from restrictive medieval and mercantilist price-wage legislation, the would-be employer was forced to offer higher wages, better working conditions, or better apprenticeship terms. He could not expect domestic labor to bind itself out save under exceptional circumstances once a free market existed. If he wanted cheap labor, unquestionably under his control, he was forced to turn more and more to other races, or foreign whites, or social deviants from his own community who lost their bargaining power as a consequence of their deviations. The term “servant” could be applied to fewer native workers as the decades passed on: the term “laborer” took its place.¹⁵

This shortage of skilled and unskilled labor—labor needed for such simple tasks as cutting wood on up the scale to the more complex crafts—accounts to a very great extent for the existence of a bound labor system in the Massachusetts area. It accounts for the early importation of Negroes, for the use of Indian war captives as slaves, and for the trading of captive Indians for the more tractable blacks. It accounts too, for the growth of a trade in servants, sporadic and unorganized in the seventeenth century, more systematic and commercial in the eighteenth century.

The same shortage of labor, combined with the economic necessity of avoiding high institutional costs for prisons and poor houses, accounts for the practice of binding out domestic criminals, debtors, poor children, and other persons considered social liabilities. In this way, criminals and debtors reimbursed society and the individuals whom they had wronged, while poor children and others were transformed from social liabilities to social assets as they worked, learned trades, or at least did not appear as burdens on the tax rolls.¹⁶

The second major factor influencing the conditions of labor and the institution of servitude was the land system adopted in the early history of the Massachusetts and Plymouth colonies—a system kept more or less intact throughout the period of this study. Simply stated, this system provided that the land should be settled by communities, not individuals, and that the dwelling units should be gathered into a town while the farm 1 ands were scattered about the periphery of the settled area. This mode of settlement was admirably suited to the climate and terrain in which the New Englanders lived, and it conformed to the needs of protection against the Indians, on the one hand, and the protection of the essentially community-minded culture and religion on the other.¹⁷

The land system affected the institution of servitude in three ways. In the first place, most farms were too small and infertile for the employment of large numbers of workers in the production of a staple crop.¹⁸ As a consequence, there was a tendency for servants to work with their masters in groups of two or three at the most—more of a family-farm and family-relationship than obtained in the large plantation with many servants or slaves. In turn, of course, this limited the demand for labor as compared with the South. Secondly, the land system, in its emphasis on community rather than individual settlement, limited the use of free land as a reward for the importer of servants or as an inducement for prospective servants. Originally the practice of the Pilgrims and Puritans had been similar to that of other local governments along the seacoast. A man paying his own passage, or that of others, was allowed a certain acreage, or head right, to be disposed of as he chose.¹⁹ Early in the 1630’s, however, both Plymouth and Massachusetts curtailed this policy.

Plymouth was the first to modify its head right system. It began by segregating its grants to ex-servants at Scituate or some other place “where it may be usefull” to the colony.²⁰ In 1636, the Pilgrims reduced the acreage provided by the government for discharged servants to five acres, granted only if the person was found “fit” to occupy it.²¹ On the same day Governor and Council gathered into their own hands the right to approve or disapprove all who wanted to be housekeepers or build cottages.²² Shortly thereafter, prospective masters were warned that if they covenanted with servants to give them land at the end of service, it would be at their own expense. The colony was to be free of any such agreements.²³

Massachusetts showed even less liberality with regard to land grants for service than Plymouth. The Bay colony never made statutory provision for ex-servants to have land except indirectly, when it ruled in 1634 that no one was to have land allotted in any plantation unless he proved faithful to his master during his time of service.²⁴ Later, in 1636, the General Court added a penalty for turning a man loose or giving him a lot until his time was served out as covenanted.²⁵

Both colonies, then, failed to recognize the need for laborers (who might be induced to migrate under the promise of free land at the end of service) as paramount to the religious and social structure of the communities they were creating. It is indeed significant that after 1640, only two cases of servants having land promised to them by indenture could be found in Plymouth or Massachusetts.²⁶

In this failure to use free land as a magnet to attract servants, the colonists refused to recognize fully the need for labor. On the other hand, they could not ignore the labor shortage. Once the servant in the colony ha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• “Dissertations and Gatekeepers: Why it Took Forty-Five Years for a Ph.D. Thesis to Be Published
• Abbreviations
• 1. Factors Influencing Conditions of Labor and the Institution of Servitude
• 2. The Servant Elite: Apprentices and Indentured Servants
• 3. The Poor as a Source of Bound Labor
• 4. The Servant Lower Classes: Debtors, War Prisoners, Criminals, Indians and Negroes
• 5. The Servant at Work
• 6. The Servant’s Leisure Time
• 7. The Servant Protests
• 8. The Runaway Servant
• 9. Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index