United States or Costa Rica ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Labor was performed by slaves, by criminals sent over to the colonies and sold, and by "indented servants," or "redemptioners." Manufactures were forbidden by the laws of trade. Nobody was permitted to manufacture iron beyond the state of pig or bar iron, or make woolen goods for export, or make hats.
In the early history of every town in Massachusetts, without exception, I find mention of Irish people, and while the majority came originally as "poor redemptioners", yet, in course of time and despite Puritanical prejudices, not a few of them rose to positions of worth and independence.
Grymes was secured as counsel in their cause; but on some account not now remembered by survivors scarce a week had passed before they were being sold as redemptioners. At least many were, including Daniel Müller and his children. Then the dispersion began.
Most of the men who came to the backwoods to hew out homes and rear families were stern, manly, and honest; but there was also a large influx of people drawn from the worst immigrants that perhaps ever were brought to America the mass of convict servants, redemptioners, and the like, who formed such an excessively undesirable substratum to the otherwise excellent population of the tide-water regions in Virginia and the Carolinas.
But the trade in redemptioners gradually decreased; and by the middle of the eighteenth century there were not many of them left in New Jersey, although there were a few in the State until after the Revolution. Negro slavery, however, continued much longer.
He was in his early prime, the first full spread of his powers, but he had not forgotten the little Dutch brig Jupiter, or the days when he was himself a redemptioner. Grymes, on the other side, had had to do as we have seen with these same redemptioners before.
Many sought the New World as many still press to the frontier, from sheer restlessness and recklessness, from the love of adventure, the hope that luck will do better for them than labor. Many came as a result of urgent inducements offered by projectors of colonies or agents of shipmasters, as in the case of the early "company servants" or the later "redemptioners" or "indentured servants."
Besides the counsel already named, there were on the slave's side a second Upton and a Bonford, and on the master's side a Sigur, a Caperton, and a Lockett. The redemptioners had made the cause their own and prepared to sustain it with a common purse. Neither party had asked for a trial by jury; the decision was to come from the bench.
They were, on the whole, well and kindly treated, but they have no meaning in history except as an institution, and as an influence in the lives, feelings, and character of the men who made the state. Above the slaves, little better than they in condition, but separated from them by the wide gulf of race and color, were the indented white servants, some convicts, some redemptioners.
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.
Word Of The Day