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Benjamin Franklin and others expressed the fear: "They come in such numbers that they will soon be able to enforce their laws and language upon us, and, uniting with the French, drive all Englishmen out." Many of the Germans were so-called Redemptioners, who, in payment of their freight, were sold and treated as slaves for a stipulated number of years. In Holland they were called "soul-traders."
The redemptioners in front, headed by Ivie and Jonas Tree, tho' they had long served their terms, and with them old Harvey and his son; next the house blacks and the outside liveries, and then the oldest slaves from the quarters.
Here, as well as in many of the other Colonies, was a class of white people, generally from England, who were called "redemptioners." These were poor people, although often persons of fairly good station and education, who desired to emigrate to America, but who could not afford to pay their passage.
Only the wide and almost trackless region of Attakapas was remembered, and by people to whom every day brought a struggle for their own existence. Besides, the children's kindred were bound as redemptioners. Those were days of rapid change in New Orleans. The redemptioners worked their way out of bondage into liberty.
Several of the local historians testify to the presence and influence of Irishmen in the early days of the colony, and in the voluminous "New Jersey Archives" may be found references to the large numbers of Irish "redemptioners," some of whom, after their terms of service had expired, received grants of land and in time became prosperous farmers and merchants.
All the social, commercial, legal, and political life of the colony centered in Charleston, from which a direct trade was carried on with London. Labor on the plantations of Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia was performed exclusively by negro slaves and redemptioners.
This order was promulgated by the General Court of Massachusetts in October, 1654, and is given in full in the American Historical Review for October, 1896. With the "convicts" and the "redemptioners" came the Irish schoolmaster, the man then most needed in America.
And he was about to rebuke me hotly, when I told him I had come from Maryland, where I was born. "Why, ye speak like a gentleman!" he exclaimed. "I was informed that all talk like naygurs over there. And is it not so of your redemptioners?" I said that depended upon the master they got. "Then I take it ye are looking for the lawyers, who mostly represent the planters.
The settlements reached on both sides of the bay, from the Potomac to the Susquehanna. Society was distinctly democratic, for while there were favored families there was no privileged class, and the existence of African slavery and the temporary servitude of convicts and redemptioners tended to place all freemen on an equality.
But the redemptioner could only be held for a certain time, and, if his master was not a good man, he would be apt to get out of him all the work that he could during the time of his service, and to give him no more food or clothing than was absolutely necessary. After a time there were laws made to protect the redemptioners.
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