This paper analyzes Elizabeth Springs' 1756 letter to her father, John Spyer, in which she describes the brutal conditions she endured as an indentured servant in the American colonies. Drawing on scholarship by Christopher Tomlins, Dorothy Mays, and Marilyn Baseler, the paper contextualizes Springs' personal account within the broader history of European indentured servitude in colonial America. Key themes include the youth and vulnerability of indentured servants, the absence of English legal protections in colonial practice, the dangers of the transatlantic voyage, and the particular hardships faced by female servants, including physical abuse, sexual coercion, and punitive labor extensions.
The paper demonstrates effective integration of primary and secondary sources. It uses Springs' letter as the emotional and argumentative anchor, then deploys historical scholarship to validate and contextualize her claims. This technique — moving from the particular to the general — is a hallmark of evidence-based historical analysis at the undergraduate level.
The paper opens with a brief introduction establishing the letter's dual purpose (apology and complaint). A close-reading section analyzes Springs' language and emotional appeals. A substantial historical context section draws on Tomlins, Mays, and Baseler to document working conditions, demographics, and legal failures. A separate subsection addresses shipboard mortality and abuse during the transatlantic voyage. The conclusion ties Springs' individual experience back to the broader significance of colonial labor history.
Elizabeth Springs' letter to her father, dated September 22, 1756, is both an apology for her failure to communicate and a vivid account of the horrific conditions she endured as an indentured servant in the American colonies. This paper reviews — through historical context — the situation that many indentured servants from England suffered through and places Springs' letter into broader perspective.
Elizabeth Springs is clearly in distress. Adding to her anguish over the terrible working conditions in the American colonies is a sense of guilt and sadness about having left England on poor terms with her father. "My being forever banished from your sight…" she begins, hoping to touch her father's heart with her present suffering. It seems clear that it was not simply a matter of Elizabeth leaving without her father's permission — there had also been some kind of confrontation before her departure.
Knowing that she had "…offended [him] in the highest degree" prior to leaving England 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 surrounding her departure meant communication between them was no longer possible. She had assumed the father-daughter relationship was finished: "…I should be extinct from your good graces," she wrote.
But immediately after that, she invokes the "care and tenderness" her father had shown her over the years, and that memory prompted her to try to "…kindle up that flame again." She implores him to offer her some pity — notwithstanding her previously poor behavior — and she clearly believes that although the working conditions "…are beyond the probability of you in England to conceive," her father will listen and help if he can. If he can comprehend that his daughter is being whipped, denied adequate food, and forced to live in deplorable conditions, perhaps he will also send her some warm clothing. She notes, after all, that she is being treated worse than some of the African slaves.
Christopher Tomlins writes in the peer-reviewed journal Labor History that an estimated 470,000 to 515,000 Europeans migrated to North America in the 18th century. Of those, about 54,500 were "involuntary" servants; the remainder, like Elizabeth, were indentured and had signed contracts for a fixed period of years (Tomlins, 2001, p. 9). "Most" of the indentured servants who arrived in Maryland were between the ages of 13 and 18 — some as young as 9 years old (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 further notes that English law regarding the treatment of indentured servants was not followed in the colonies: "Colonial justices would have no use for anything that appeared in English manuals concerning the legal regulation of wage labor." This suggests that the treatment of indentured servants was governed by local practices, some of which were obviously cruel and inhumane.
Readers do not know how old Elizabeth was when she made the voyage to the colonies, but given the statistics presented by Tomlins, it is a reasonable estimate that she was very young — probably twenty years of age or younger. This would make the injustices she suffered even more alarming.
Author Dorothy Mays writes that most female indentured servants were vulnerable to "sexual advances" (Mays, 2004, p. 196). There was one female for every six males at the time, and these women "…were likely to be subjected to relentless sexual pressure," yet they were not allowed to marry (196). If an indentured servant became pregnant, she was shamed in the community and, moreover, "…her pregnant state was considered theft from her master"; once the child was born, she would be forced to "have one to two years added to the end of her indenture" (Mays, 196). Shockingly, because of the brutal treatment many servants endured, "…as many as one-quarter of indentured servants died before their terms were completed" (Mays, 196). Many servants ran away, but if caught, a woman would be required to "reimburse her master ten days for every day of service missed," and her master could legally impose "…a whipping of twenty to thirty-nine lashes" (Mays, 198).
Some ship captains "…tortured their helpless passengers," and mortality rates on certain vessels carrying indentured servants reached upwards of fifty percent (Baseler, 96). Sickness and disease were the most frequently cited reasons for the high number of deaths before passengers even reached the colonies. These conditions underscore the extraordinary danger that servants like Elizabeth Springs faced long before they ever set foot in the New World. For broader reading on indentured servitude as a historical institution, Britannica provides a thorough overview. Similarly, the U.S. Department of State's Office of the Historian offers useful context on the colonial-era labor system that shaped these experiences.
It is clear from the letter Elizabeth Springs wrote to her father that she was being treated in a brutal and inhumane manner. The scholarly literature documents how terrible the conditions were both on the journey from England and Europe to the colonies and after arrival, and how many indentured servants were very young and wholly unprepared for what they would face. That chapter of American history — alongside the legacy of slavery — is important to understand in order to gain a fuller picture of life in colonial America.
Baseler, Marilyn C. "Asylum for Mankind": America, 1607–1800. New York: Cornell University Press, 1998.
Mays, Dorothy A. Women in Early America: Struggle, Survival, and Freedom in a New World. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004.
Springs, Elizabeth. "Complaint of an Indentured Servant (1756)." Voices of Freedom / Creating Anglo-America, 1660–1750. 57–58.
Tomlins, Christopher L. Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Tomlins, Christopher. "Reconsidering Indentured Servitude: European Migration and the Early American Labor Force, 1600–1775." Labor History, 42.1 (2001): 6–43.
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