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The compensation varied also from mere transportation and sustenance to a payment in advance and a stipulation for outfit in clothing, foodstuffs and diverse equipment at the end of service. The quality of redemptioners varied from the very dregs of society to well-to-do apprentice planters; but the general run was doubtless fairly representative of the English working classes.
Ten years since servants were "bought" in New York, and still are in New Jersey, as really as in Virginia, yet the different senses in which the word is used in those states, puts no man in a quandary. By voluntary contract they engaged to work a given time to pay for their passage. This class of persons, called "redemptioners," consisted at one time of thousands.
We let bygones be bygones with the redemptioners and slaves all but those devils who got away that night at Verney Manor, and with Trail at their head, made for Captain Laramore's ship which was going to turn pirate.
A slow stream of immigration poured into the colonies, chiefly from England. Convicts were no longer deported to be sold as private servants; but redemptioners persons whose services were mortgaged for their passage were still abundant. Many years later, Washington writes to an agent inquiring about "buying a ship-load of Germans," that is, of redemptioners.
In the "William and Mary College Quarterly," in the transcripts of the original records published by the Virginia Historical Society, and in all County histories of Virginia, there are numerous references to the Irish "redemptioners" who were brought to that colony during the seventeenth century.
Sometimes they were called redemptioners, because, by their agreement with the master of the vessel, they could redeem themselves from his power by paying their passage; which they frequently effected, by hiring themselves on their arrival, as is before mentioned.
At a later time there were many of these "redemptioners" in the middle colonies, but in New England they were very few; and as no stigma of servitude was attached to manual labour, they were apt at the end of their terms of service to become independent farmers; thus they ceased to be recognizable as a distinct class of society.
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.
The two first classes were by no means insignificant in 1789, and the redemptioners were rapidly increasing in numbers. In that day, it looked as if this speculative importation of laborers from Europe was to form a material part of the domestic policy of the Northern States.
Negro slaves were also imported to work alongside the redemptioners in the tobacco, cotton, ginger, and indigo crops, and soon proved their superiority in that climate, especially when yellow fever, to which the Africans are largely immune, decimated the white population.
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