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But modern times have amply supplied this defect. The witch or sorcerer could not secure the assistance of the demon but by a sure and faithful compact, by which the human party obtained the industrious and vigilant service of his familiar for a certain term of years, only on condition that, when the term was expired, the demon of undoubted right was to obtain possession of the indentured party, and to convey him irremissibly and for ever to the regions of the damned.
An account of a trading voyage to Virginia, a venture in which eight Englishmen joined to send both cargo and indentured servants to the Colony and bring back tobacco, not only conveys an idea of commodities and servants sold for domestic purposes, but projects a picture of life along the estuaries flowing into the Chesapeake Bay, as the ship plied from one plantation wharf to another, selling merchandise and human help, both in demand.
When the negro slave had supplanted the indentured servant upon the plantations of the colony a vast change took place in the pride of the middle class. Every white man, no matter how poor he was, no matter how degraded, could now feel a pride in his race. Around him on all sides were those whom he felt to be beneath him, and this alone instilled into him a certain self-respect.
We had also a negro boy, Harry, brought a year before from Kentucky, by Mr. Kercheval. In the transfer at that time from a slave State to a free one, Harry's position became somewhat changed he could be no more than an indentured servant. He was about to become a member of Dr. Wolcott's household, and it was necessary for him to choose a guardian.
My father had indentured me as apprentice to his lawyer, and sooner than submit to the rule of this man the evil genius of our family I had taken flight. The companion of my wanderings was Darby M'Keown, the piper, the cleverest and cunningest of the agents of rebellion. Then I had met De Meudon, who had turned my thoughts and ambitions into another channel. My companion grew steadily worse.
As the Negroes took their places in the Colony as field-hands, house-servants and craftsmen, the white indentured servant vanished from the scene. As heretofore noted, the supply was never enough in the Colony to fill the demand.
The cherished son of an affluent and honourable house in Israel has become the swineherd of a stranger in a famine-stricken land: the transition is as great as could be displayed on the limited stage of the present world; but when he who was made in God's image and treated as God's child is bound by the chain of his own passions, and indentured as a slave in the devil's service, the fall is greater, as heaven is higher than the earth, and the world of spirit deeper than the world of flesh.
It is doubtless true that occasionally gentlemen continued to arrive in Virginia even during the last years of the Company's rule, yet their number must have been very small indeed. When, in 1624, James I took from the London Company its charter, the colony contained few others than indentured servants and freemen of humble origin and means.
At this time there was a deal of talk in those parts of the Americas concerning Captain Morgan, and the prodigious successes he was having pirating against the Spaniards. This man had once been an indentured servant with Mr. Rolls, a sugar factor at the Barbados.
In the English islands precedents of conspiracy were set before the blacks became appreciably numerous. A plot among the white indentured servants in Barbados in 1634 was betrayed and the ringleader executed; and another on a larger scale in 1649 had a similar end. Incoming negroes appear not to have taken a similar course until 1675 when a plot among them was betrayed by one of their number.
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