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The Germans also were first and most emphatic in condemning the cruelties connected with the "white slavery" of the so-called Redemptioners. Cruelly Deceived by the Newlanders. Toward the middle of the eighteenth century there were some 80,000 Germans in Pennsylvania, almost one-half of the entire inhabitants. In 1749 about 12,000 arrived.
See thou to that! Even the children, when they are cruelly kept and learn that they must remain in bondage all the longer on account of their parents, conceive a hatred and bitterness toward them." Mittelberger on Redemptioners.
If anybody escapes a cruel master, he cannot get very far, since good provisions are made for the certain and speedy recapture of escaped Redemptioners. A liberal reward is paid to him who holds or returns a deserter. If a deserter was absent for a day, he must serve a week for it; for a week, a month; and for a month, half a year.
It often happened that some of the Germans who came to buy land and settle, chose rather to put away their money, and sell themselves as redemptioners to English families, so that they might learn the English language and manner of living.
The wretch whom we passed but now knew of it never mind how and for it he has murdered the only friend I had on earth. There will come a day when I will avenge him. There were papers here, lists with the signatures of Oliverians, Redemptioners, sailors, of all classes concerned in this undertaking, save only the slaves and the convicts.
Leader could sell him to Virginia. In later days New England housewives must have longed for the good old times of the whipping-post and coarse diet and hard work for disorderly and insubordinate redemptioners. Hear what gentle Mary Dudley endured with one of her maids.
Some of the descendants of the Irish redemptioners in Massachusetts are found among the prominent New Englanders of the past hundred years.
No stigma or disgrace clung to any of these people under this system. It was regarded as a necessary business transaction. Not a few of the very respectable families of the State and some of its prominent men are known to be descended from redemptioners.
Yet others were men and women who voluntarily bound themselves to work for a term of years in payment of their passage to the colonies. By far the largest number of the white servants in Washington's day belonged to this last-mentioned class, who were often called "redemptioners."
The population, too, was rude and lawless, being made up of trappers, redemptioners having a period of years to serve, transported females, inmates of the House of Correction, Choctaw squaws, and negro slave women all, as an old writer says, "without religion, without justice, without discipline, without order, without police."
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