Quote:
Originally Posted by JazzyTallGuy
The reality is by the 18th century indentured servants and white slaves were pretty rare. By the nineteenth century they were virtually non-existent. This doesn't take away from what they experienced but it pales in comparison to the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade in it's magnitude and duration.
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True, the duration of the practice was limited past the 1700's by the United States, but not in other areas where the same ships who shipped slaves continued to ship convicts and immigrants who had to enter an indenture. And the conditions were not that different for the majoriity of those who came in the 1700's as convicts, the major group. They were transported on ships normally and sometimes interchangeably used to transport slaves. By 1800's cheaper slaves had reduced the 'servant trade' to a trickle, usually willing takers. However the British were busily populating Australia by then with their convicts and poor and unwanted.
Actually, the 1700's was a time of transititon. The price of Africans had dropped, but not enough to replace all the needed labor force, especially along the Chesapeake area. The plantations had begun to prefer them but they were still in need of 'servants'. However the 'free willers had pretty much dried up, especially since word had gotten home about what awaited them. Some who were desperate came in small amounts but the 'servant' trade was drying up.
However, English gaols were way past full. Convicts had been shipped before in small amounts, but they had a better idea. In 1718 the Transportation act was passed. Those convicted of 'minor' crimes, which essencially amounted to small thefts to survive, were to be sentenced to become 'His magisty's Seven year passangers'. It did not require their permission or even a bogus mark on an indentrue. the first shipment left in 1718 with fifteen men and thirteen women convicted of minor property crimes. Major property crimes (thefts over a certain value, very carefully defined) were subject to hanging. The ships recieved five pounds a head for transporting them so they could be sold cheap, as they already had a profit. They were to fill in the gap. Sentences were seven years, fourteen years, or life. Many capital sentences were negotiated down to one of the last two.
There company who shipped them shipped slaves, and used the same ship and the same methods. As they came pre-paid, it was highly profitable. For some of the companies who shipped both, they made much more on the 'servant' trade.
They poured into the ports, were taken to the square and publically sold just as slaves were. As convicts eventually they were permenantly made into second class citizens, denying them the right to vote even if they had property. They were not used with other 'servants' but in mixed labor gangs with African slaves and shared the work, the accomidations and the punishment. The survival rate of convict slaves was about fifty percent. In a period where the transition was turning to prefering Africans but the price was often too high, white covicts were dirt cheap and easily replaced.
The trip was as horrendous as with black slaves, and under identical conditions and ships. There were notable uprisings on convict ships, so they were heavily staffed. Early on about a third never made it to port. At the time of boarding official propery rights to the convicts were transfered to the ship's captain. They died they still got the five pounds a head.
The primary buyers were along the coast where large labor gangs were used, and they joined African slaves as equals in all but name. Maryland and Virginia were the primary takers, Pennsulvania a more distant third. More northen factories also used them. Runaways were frequent and frequently mixed groups of black and white slaves. G. Washington published one two days after having become commander of the new revolution's army for two black and 8 whites who had run. The race card did not work well for convicts, especially as while conditions improved for non-convicts, they didn't for them.
The practice of shipping convicts who legally could NOT refuse is far closer to that of sometimed duped free willers and desperatly poor. They were guarenteed even if they survived the scorn of the citizenry. The standard method of punishment, besides whipping, was addition of time, double or more for the amount of time from escape to capture. A method of charging the prisoner for all cost in capturing was further converted into time. The object was to hold them as long as possible.
One of the first recorded life slaves became one because his white fellow escapee was given a multiple years after repeated escapes, and the black man was simply made a slave for life since he would require more. No doubt the other was one in practical terms by then too.
Based on record, many missing, at least 50,000 to 70,000 convicts were transported and sold to Virginia, Maryland and Barbados (and other colonies) from 1718 to 1776. This does not include the 'servants' who came on their own. After the war, the new government refused shipments as several major epidemics had been blamed on convicts. This is a very conservative estamate, but at the last decade before the revolution between 900 and a thousand arrived per year.
One in a hundred of the people of Virginia at the time of the revolution were either convicts or related to convicts. Tens of thousands of white Americans can trace descent from them. My something g grandfather arrived in 1719 in Maryland and ended up in Kentucky.
The British continued shipping their unwanted to Canada and tried to sneek them in as 'free willers, but that failed. Then Cook discovered New South Wales and the ships went the other direction. But it was still a very prosperous business for some time.
In America, a new ship design that was faster and held more 'cargo' made Africans sufficently cheap that the market for whites mostly dissapeared, but that was into the 1800's. Poor immigrants still sold themselves after the revolution, they just weren't convicts. People continued to indenture themselves until outlawed by the 13th amendment.
With ships arriving in the harbor and the open selling of the merchandise, it was less common but far from rare, and certainly very visible and hotly discussed, with a number of efforts to bar the British shipments were tried and failed. As convicts brought disease and old habits with them, the locals tried variouls means to make it too expensive but they were thrown out. The subject was both visible and discussed often. And the newspapers of the time were full of ads looking for mixed groups of runaways. The companies which commonly sold both would not have been making so much money on them if there hadn't been a market. What killed it was the epidemics of gaol fever, a deadly form of typhus, which came with them, and the desire to rid themselves of what the new citizens considered scum after the war when the British convict ships were sent away.
It was still a going business after the new US declined, so it shouldn't be infered that the practice stopped, just was overtaken by use of newly cheaper Africans in the US while the British had Australia to fill by then.
For those hauled across the seas, either to the colonies or Australia, their experience should not be lessened as human beings just because they came at the end (for the US). The Servant trade was largely a parallel of the Triangle trade by the same companies and all of it was based on money.
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