Dangerous Harbor: Escape Attempts from Servitude and Slavery in Virginia Court Order Books, 1649-1699

Dataset CreatorsHannah Schetselaar, Virginia TechKara Long, Virginia TechWilliam Harper, Virginia TechJessica Taylor, Virginia TechSabrina Harris, Virginia TechZahra Modarres Vahid, Virginia TechJolene Smith, Virginia Department of Historic ResourcesCooper Billings, Virginia TechGrace Kostrzebski, Virginia TechDiego Vega-Nazario, Virginia TechChris Urben, Virginia TechContributorsChreston Miller, Virginia TechPete Smith, University of MarylandSeventeenth-century Virginia court books, viewable to the public on microfilm in the Library of Virginia, record escapes and escape attempts of unfree laborers of Indigenous, European, and African descent. These county-level documents provide rich source material chronicling the evolution of legal bondage and attempts to resist it. Funded by a National Endowment for the Humanities Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant, this dataset draws from order books and deed and will books created between 1649 and 1699 from geographically contiguous Lancaster, Westmoreland, and (Old) Rappahannock Counties in Virginia. It covers recorded strategies and details of self-emancipation sometimes discussed in records, including modes of transportation, co-conspirators, and destinations, as well as the legal proceedings following such attempts, including judgment and punishment. Finally, the dataset includes a transcript of the text itself, enabling analysis of change over time in the language surrounding court orders and testimony. It documents a total of 745 people involved in 276 events as indentured servants, enslaved people, jury members, court members, abettors, and more.Indentured servitude and slavery shaped understandings of race, the economy, politics, and demographics in the Chesapeake throughout the seventeenth century. Alongside slavery, indentured servitude as it functioned in the Chesapeake was a unique institution shaped by the plantation colony and racialized notions about who was included in the body politic.1 Indentured servitude, with its guarantees of (eventual) freedom and limited legal protections accompanying contract and custom, developed in tandem with and influenced Chesapeake colonies’ law about slavery, which was defined by its lack of freedom and legal recourse.2 As documented in county court records, the colonial government and local courts responded to bonded laborers’ acts of self-emancipation by tightening legal restrictions on enslaved and Black people and by allowing courts and enslavers to mete out harsher punishments on these populations. At a time when race was still a developing construct, not as immutable and concrete as it would become in later centuries, these shifts suggest how ideas of whiteness and Blackness developed alongside colonial labor systems.Indentured servants comprised the primary labor force on the tobacco plantations that made the Virginia colony profitable during most of its first century. Although the vast majority of indentured servants came from England, Ireland, and the Netherlands, bonded people of Indigenous and African descent were either similarly bound to servitude for a contracted or customary amount of time, or enslaved or bound in other liminal labor relationships with planters. (In court records, people of Indigenous and African descent are identified in these capacities, or as enslaved people who attempted to self-emancipate as co-conspirators with indentured servants.) Beginning in the 1610s, planters could gain fifty acres of land per individual whose voyage to Virginia they financed, including indentured servants and, later, enslaved Africans. While not all bonded workers had contracts, indentured servants were generally obligated to work between four and seven years. A variety of factors contributed to the procurement and use of indentured servants especially by the Chesapeake’s small and middling planters, including a lack of access to the slave trade and the high cost of accessing purchase of enslaved African peoples.3 Indentured servitude in the southern English colonies including Maryland and what is now North Carolina increased drastically throughout the seventeenth century; in one estimate, indentured servants accounted for somewhere around three quarters of seventy-five thousand European colonizers who arrived in the Chesapeake.4 The increase reflects a broader trend across the English colonies in North America, where perhaps half of European immigrants who arrived in the colonies in the seventeenth century arrived as servants; in historian Aaron Fogleman’s estimate, the English shipped 96,600 indentured servants, 2,300 convicts and prisoners, and 33,200 enslaved people to the thirteen colonies between 1607 and 1699.5 Demographically, a majority of the indentured servants who arrived in the Chesapeake were primarily young single males (during the 1630s, men outnumbered women 6 to 1, though this ultimately declined to 3:1-2:1 by 1680) rather than families, which hindered the ability of the white Chesapeake population to sustain itself as a result of delayed marriages, shortened life expectancies, and smaller families.6The origin and reasons for the conversion to racialized slavery–in historian Paul Clemens’s words, “the elusive connection between behavior and belief”—has been contested by historians for more than half a century. In the 1970s, Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom pointed to the instability caused by Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 as a hinge point, whereas historian Russell Menard noted the decline in migrating indentured servants as a key demographic factor that pushed planters towards slavery. Since then, generations of historians have chipped away at both theses, notably John C. Coombs, who has argued for both an early adoption of the acceptability of Black slavery and the intentional strategies by which elite planters harnessed their political connections and resources to access the slave trade. Some combination of factors–among them improvement of conditions in England that had previously pushed migration of poor young people, colonizers’ demand for bonded labor, accumulation of wealth on the part of certain tobacco planters that made purchase of African enslaved people possible, the expansion of the slave trade, and racial prejudice– tipped the composition of the labor force in the Chesapeake towards slavery.7 The population of enslaved peoples in the Chesapeake colonies only grew from 100 to 900 from 1630 to 1660, but exploded following these decades, ultimately reaching 12,900 by the end of the seventeenth century.8 Across the Chesapeake, enslaved Africans made up “less than 10 per cent of the population in 1690,” and “nearly a quarter by 1730.”9 This marked increase is also evident in the ratio of servants to enslaved people in specific locales in colonial Virginia. For example, three indentured servants to every two enslaved people comprised York County’s labor force in the 1640s; by the end of the century, 25 enslaved people lived in York County for every three indentured servants.10Following the forced arrival of the first Africans to the colony, famously documented as “20. And Odd Negroes” to Virginia in 1619 from Angola, the trade in enslaved Africans played an essential part in the development of the colony.11 Beginning in the 1630s and 1640s, Chesapeake elites purchased enslaved people rather than indentured servants given the lifetime tenure of enslavement rather than the temporary contract provided by indenture.12 At the same time, planters purchased Indigenous peoples trafficked or abducted throughout Carolina and Virginia.13 Records offering details about escaped African and Indigenous bonded laborers are few; this dataset contains fewer than ten such records. This scarcity of records highlights the significant marginalization of African and Indigenous individuals in the legal and historical documentation of the period. As trade in enslaved peoples expanded throughout the middle of the century, planters attempted to consolidate control over the enslaved through the enactment of laws which, as historian Lorena Walsh describes, “defined the status of most blacks as slaves and closed off legal loopholes some enslaved blacks had been using to sue for freedom,” enshrining a formalized racial-legal regime of ownership.14Customs and language surrounding indentured servitude and slavery in the Chesapeake developed in relation to one another over the course of the seventeenth century, and this dynamic parallels the emergence of race as an indication of legal status. Virginia’s process of codifying racialized slavery and the status of bonded laborers spanned decades. Historians have recently argued that the association between race and legal status was built on longstanding colonial imaginaries that preordained Black peoples as natural property, predicated on early European encounters with Africans in the late sixteenth century.15 After forced arrival in the colonies, enslaved Africans sometimes used the law as a means to pursue freedom, sometimes through the auspices of their Christian faith as a respite from permanent servitude.16 Virginia laws shifted from identifying “Negroes'' as a distinct class of subjects in the 1640s to finally demarcating the boundaries of slavery as permanent servitude, applicable to unfree “Negroes, Moors, Molattoes, or Indians,” between the 1660s and 1680s.17 Among these, the 1662 law that “all children borne in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the slave or free condition of the mother,” the explicit removal of the exemption of baptized people from enslavement, and the criminalization of interracial marriage and the birth of mixed-race children to white women were all designed to keep people in bondage and ensure that enslaved Black women would reproduce a bonded labor force. Simultaneously, laws prohibiting enslaved people from carrying weapons and from freely travelling and congregating joined with other laws decriminalizing assault or murder of a resisting enslaved person or a runaway enslaved person resisting capture- attempts to avoid insurrection and the loss of property through escape.18 As with indentured servants and enslaved people of all races, county court records reveal Native servants caught in the legal system for running away and other transgressions.19 Beginning in the 1640s, legal records illustrate that the sale and transfer of Native bonded labor in particular were regulated through indentures and licenses to oversee and manage labor. This ostensibly ensured protections for Indigenous servants, but instead offered much greater control to colonial masters frequently resulting in blatant abuse, including violating the agreed-upon length of their service.20African people, Indigenous people from multiple Nations, and Europeans often lived and worked as bonded laborers in intimate proximity to one another, and they developed strategies for conceptualizing and resisting their bondage together. Although servants and enslaved people of different racial classifications faced the same county courts, the legal ramifications for running away from bondage grew harsher over time for indentured servants and especially for enslaved Africans, pointing to anxieties about cross-racial alliances and criminal movements of bonded laborers. The infamous 1640 John Punch case, in which a Black man named John Punch was enslaved for life as punishment for escaping servitude, while the white men with whom he escaped were punished but not enslaved, is only one illustrative moment. Though they could not sue under common law, indentured servants were entitled to court hearings, which were often convened to address allegations of mistreatment, and maintained access to due process.21 Coombs found that “not a single example of a ‘Negro’ bringing a complaint of mistreatment before the county courts can be found in the extant order books of the county courts, and in two of the three known instances where one sued for being unjustly detained beyond their term of service, the master involved countered by claiming his accuser was bound for life.”22 The greater ability for white indentured servants to access the legal system helped crystallize boundaries around race and legal status, reinforcing the exclusion of many Indigenous peoples (enslaved and free), Black servants, and enslaved Africans from these processes.“Runaway” court cases detailed here comprise one corner of the much broader system of legal processes involving labor and demonstrate the extent to which small, close networks of planters and enslavers were influential in shaping legal outcomes to maintain labor relations and racial regimes. A small group of prominent court members, local elite white men, appeared in multiple cases as both the master or enslaver of a “runaway” and a court member in their own case, underscoring their pivotal role in reinforcing and benefiting from these systems. For instance, figures such as Thomas Youell, who had fifty-one roles throughout the cases, primarily as a court member, also held roles as both an enslaver and court member in three cases. While some justices might “exit” or recuse themselves, other prominent seventeenth-century planters, including John Carter, who presided over dozens of cases as members of the court and as a plaintiff against servants in a few additional cases, also occasionally held roles as plaintiffs on in which they were in court as roles them to legal that their and and records in this dataset illustrate another how the punishment of indentured servants, a to additional labor in relation to the time they grew over Since at the 1640s, Virginia colonial law that escaped servants the time of the length of their this was in the 1660s to for an increased to servitude at the of the court in the additional or were by a including of an enslaved labor an enslaved person joined an indentured person in an escape the seventeenth century, the of these punishments due to to bonded laborers for or in the and often for the of by a master or For instance, in County in a to escaped for with a and other The court punished with an additional four of service, to and a half the of his two later, in a to Harris, escaped for seven and The court to an additional seven over the of to for time the and the of and In a to was for ten The court not only to additional as per the but also to and of servitude beyond his term his master that he significant of to These were and to escape attempts, maintain the and and keep indentured servants in of to additional time in servitude also racial in the legal The limited of cases involving escaped people identified as or different outcomes to their white In County in an Indigenous named faced punishment he escaped for and with The record not the of his escape to a punishment of additional time in The court to an additional four of servitude beyond his term for his escape and the of which was not a from the more in and often by the court to white cases. case, from in similarly in while an African bonded faced punishment for his white co-conspirators were to servitude and with John and John had away from their plantations over the course of with The court the and the of the to of As a the white servants were to an additional for the time they were for the and ten for the by their masters for them and bringing them In who was enslaved and could not additional time as a was to on his a public of the of interracial to escape the plantation system for enslaved and public punishments not only the racial but also to of bonded court cases about and racialized legal processes and also a escape and networks developed by enslaved and indentured In the records escape attempts, could to strategies for as the who in the cases transportation, involved the use of their as a and perhaps means of across the that the The use of in these escapes the and that these acts of as the offered as away as across the that land could involving the of a and of many escape attempts were sometimes involving multiple from different might both men and women and people of different racial as in a in which four men and two their to by or the in which escaped alongside white indentured These cases how these in their of freedom, when the were not about people who built the and which the English colonies’ first The in this dataset access to the of bonded and of the of race as a key factor in The provided will be to and and that also the work of the Chesapeake to who to to Rappahannock or County of Virginia County and Library of Virginia, County of Virginia County and Library of Virginia, County of Virginia County and Library of Virginia, County of Virginia County and Library of Virginia, County of Virginia County and Library of Virginia, County (Old) of Virginia County and Library of Virginia, County (Old) of Virginia County and Library of Virginia, County (Old) of Virginia County and Library of Virginia, County of Virginia County and Library of Virginia, County of Virginia County and Library of Virginia, County of Virginia County and Library of Virginia, County of Virginia County and Library of Virginia, Rappahannock dataset draws from order books and deed and will books created between 1649 and 1699 from geographically contiguous Lancaster, Westmoreland, and (Old) Rappahannock Counties in Virginia, some of the most court records in the The people and events in this dataset are in order books record legal them the and orders in the a bonded is to court for runaway court and of later of and to bonded laborers in this early are As a result of these on a primarily in the of time to their the vast majority of escape attempts in the records are that were in which a person is to court for the of running away as in the comprise the vast majority of in the a of the dataset is from of of and other records found in court While are much documents beyond legal of provide more detailed of the escaped For this the also to court orders that are not but provide for an escape For example, enslaver from whom bonded laborers escaped between and was also 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