EXCERPT FROM THE HISTORY AND PRESENT STATE OF VIRGINIA (1705, by Robert Beverley)

The need for human labor in Great Britain's North American settlements was a never-ebbing tide. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, with booming regional economies necessitating greater and greater numbers to assist with the harvest of staple crops like tobacco and indigo, some two hundred thousand African slaves had been kidnapped and transported across the Atlantic Ocean to the New World. Exceeding even this, however, was the number of white indentured servants, bonded for a set number of years as the personal property of the masters who held their contracts. A wealthy planter and local official, Robert Beverly, who was concerned with the legal distinctions between the two classes of servitude, composed The History and Present State of Virginia because he was dissatisfied with a similar book by an English author. The book was an enormous hit and was reprinted several times.

Laura M.Miller,
Vanderbilt University

See also Indentured Servants ; Slavery ; Virginia .

Of the Servants and Slaves in Virginia

Their servants they distinguish by the names of slaves for life and servants for a time.

Slaves are the Negroes and their posterity following the condition of the mother, according to the maxim partus sequitur ventrem. They are called slaves in respect of the time of their servitude because it is for life.

Servants are those which serve only for a few years, according to the time of their indenture or the custom of the country. The custom of the country takes place upon such as have no indentures. The law in this case is that if such servants be under nineteen years of age, they must be brought into court to have their age adjudged, and from the age they are judged to be of they must serve until the reach four and twenty. But if they be adjudged upwards of nineteen, they are then only to be servants for the term of five years.

The male servants and slaves of both sexes are employed together in tilling and manuring the ground, in sowing and planting tobacco, corn, etc. Some distinction, indeed, is made between them in their clothes and food, but the work of both is no other than what the overseers, the freemen, and the planters themselves do.

Sufficient distinction is also made between the female servants and slaves, for a white woman is rarely or never put to work in the ground if she be good for anything else. And to discourage all planters from using any women so, their law imposes the heaviest taxes upon female servants working in the ground, while it suffers all other white women to be absolutely exempted. Whereas on the other hand, it is a common thing to work a woman slave out of doors; nor does the law make any distinction in her taxes, whether her work be abroad or at home.

Because I have heard how strangely cruel and severe the service of this country is represented in some parts of England, I can't forbear affirming that the work of their servants and slaves is no other than what every common freeman does. Neither is any servant required to do more in a day than his overseer. And I can assure you with a great deal of truth that generally their slaves are not worked near so hard nor so many hours in a day as the husbandmen and day laborers in England. An overseer is a man that having served his time has acquired the skill and character of an experienced planter and is therefore entrusted with the direction of the servants and slaves.

But to complete this account of servants I shall give you a short relation of the care their laws take that they be used as tenderly as possible.

By the Laws of Their Country

1. All servants whatsoever have their complaints heard without fee or reward, but if the master be found faulty the charge of the complaint is cast upon him, otherwise the business is done ex officio.
2. Any justice of peace may receive the complaint of a servant and order everything relating thereto till the next county court, where it will be finally determined.
3. All masters are under the correction and censure of the county courts to provide for their servants good and wholesome diet, clothing, and lodging.
4. They are always to appear upon the first notice given of the complaint of their servants, otherwise to forfeit the service of them until they do appear.
5. All servants' complaints are to be received at any time in court without process and shall not be delayed for want of form. But the merits of the complaint must be immediately inquired into by the justices, and if the master cause any delay therein the court may remove such servants if they see cause until the master will come to trial.
6. If a master shall at any time disobey an order of court made upon any complaint of a servant, the court is empowered to remove such servant forthwith to another master who will be kinder, giving to the former master the produce only (after fees deducted) of what such servants shall be sold for by public outcry.
7. If a master should be so cruel as to use his servant ill that is fallen sick or lame in his service and thereby rendered unfit for labor, he must be removed by the church wardens out of the way of such cruelty and boarded in some good planter's house till the time of his freedom, the charge of which must be laid before the next county court, which has power to levy the same from time to time upon the goods and chattels of the master. After which the charge of such boarding is to come upon the parish in general.
8. All hired servants are entitled to these privileges.
9. No master of a servant can make a new bargain for service or other matter with his servant without the privity and consent of a justice of peace, to prevent the master's overreaching or scaring such servant into an unreasonable compliance.
10. The property of all money and goods sent over thither to servants, or carried in with them, is reserved to themselves and remain entirely at their disposal.
11. Each servant at his freedom receives of his master fifteen bushels of corn (which is sufficient for a whole year) and two new suits of clothes, both linen and woolen, and then becomes as free in all respects and as much entitled to the liberties and privileges of the country as any other of the inhabitants or natives are.
12. Each servant has then also a right to take up fifty acres of land, where he can find any unpatented; but that is no great privilege, for anyone may have as good a right for a piece of eight.

This is what the laws prescribe in favor of servants, by which you may find that the cruelties and severities imputed to that country are an unjust reflection. For no people more abhor the thoughts of such usage than the Virginians, nor take more precaution to prevent it.

SOURCE: Beverly, Robert. The History and Present State of Virginia. London: R. Parker, 1705. Edited by Louis B. Wright. Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press, 1947.