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Indentured Servant Analysis
Elizabeth Springs' letter to her father on September 22, 1756, is both a letter of apology due to her failure to communicate and a review of the horrendous conditions she was working under as an indentured servant. This paper reviews -- through historical context -- the situation that many indentured servants from England suffered through and puts Springs' letter into a perspective.
The Letter from Springs to John Spyer
Elizabeth Springs is clearly in distress. And to add to her distress over the terrible working conditions in the American colonies she is feeling guilty and sad that she left England under a cloud as to her relationship with her father. "My being forever banished from your sight…" she begins, hoping to touch her father's heart with her present pathos. It seems clear that it wasn't just a matter of Elizabeth leaving without her father's permission, but rather there was some kind of a confrontation before she left.
Knowing that she had "…offended [him] in the highest degree" prior to leaving England has caused her to "put a tie" to her "tongue." In other words she had not written to him apparently out of fear that the tension at the time of her departure meant they would not in any event be back in communication with each other. She was under the assumption that this father-daughter relationship was ended: "…I should be extinct from your good graces," she said.
But immediately after that she brings up the "care and tenderness" her father had shown to her over the years, and that little thought caused her to try and "…kindle up that flame again" with her father. She implores her father to...
If the father can relate to his daughter being whipped and denied ample food, and made to live in deplorable conditions, then perhaps the father can also send her some warm clothing. After all, she is being treated worse than some of the African slaves.
Indentured Servants in the late 18th century in the American Colonies
Christopher Tomlins writes in the peer-reviewed journal Labor History that there were an estimated 470,000 to 515,000 Europeans that migrated to North America in the 18th century; of those, about 54,500 were "involuntary" servants and the remainder, like Elizabeth, were indentured and had signed on for a period of years (Tomlins, 2001, p. 9). "Most" of the indentured servants that arrived in Maryland were between the ages of 13 to 18 (some were as young as 9 years old), Tomlins explains (Tomlins, 41).
In his book, Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic, Tomlins reports that between 1755 and 1791 not one indentured servant in Cumberland County, North Carolina, was "…clearly an adult" (Tomlins, 1993). The average age of indentured servants in Prince George's County around 1700 was 15.3 years, with the great majority of those servants twenty years of age "or younger" (Tomlins). Tomlins goes on to say that English law regarding the treatment of indentured servants was not followed. "Colonial justices would have no use for anything that appeared in English manuals concerning the legal…
Works Cited
Baseler, Marilyn C. "Asylum for Mankind": America, 1607-1800. New York: Cornell
University Press, 1998.
Springs, Elizabeth. "Complaint of an Indentured Servant (1756)." Voices of Freedom /
Creating Anglo-America, 1660-1750. 57-58.
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But, it was an evil system in which "armies of free men, guilty of no crimes and entitled by law to freedom," were contracted to provide labor "without compensation" (Blackmon). In conclusion, while it is true that the Civil War ended and the Emancipation Proclamation (and the 13th Amendment) supposedly freed the slaves, there was still a dark social policy of indentured servitude, as pointed out in this paper. There
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