Transported Labor, Indentured Servitude, and Slavery in the Americas: A Comparative Approach
While slave labor comprised the majority of the
plantation workforce across the Americas, it was never the sole labor
system in use. Historical records now show that slaves often worked
alongside transported laborers and/or indentured servants. One document
in the ‘Our Americas’ Archive Partnership
(a digital archive collaboration on the hemispheric Americas), James
Revel’s poem “The Poor Unhappy Transported Felon’s Sorrowful Account of
His Fourteen Years Transportation, at Virginia, in America…,” provides
rare insight into life and labor in colonial America. As such, educators
can use the document as a teaching tool within AP History or college
introductory History courses.
Very little is known about Revel, but his
account, composed at some point during the eighteenth century, traces
his path from rebellious teen to Chesapeake tobacco laborer. In the
document Revel states that he lived in England until he was caught
stealing and was sentenced to transportation, which was, “A just reward
for my vile actions base.” As one historian notes, transportation was
Britain’s, “adopt[ion] [of] foreign exile as a punishment for serious
crime” (Ekirch, 1). During their period of exile, felons could
experience a wide array of treatment at the hands of their employers as,
“Parliament enacted laws to prevent their early return home but took no
steps to regulate their treatment either at sea or in the
colonies”(Ekirch, 3). Revel’s exile began in Virginia where he worked
for a farmer who was abusive and cruel. Upon his master’s death, Revel
was sold to a “tenderly and kind” individual who eventually arranged for
Revel to travel back to England as a free man. For a solid overview of
transportation as a British punishment, see Frank McLynn’s Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England (2002).
To
begin with, educators can incorporate Revel’s poem into the classroom
within a discussion of transportation as one method of colonial labor
supply. Whereas AP and introductory courses often cover indentured and
slave labor, transported laborers remain unacknowledged and this misses
an opportunity to display the interconnectedness of the Atlantic
economy. Specifically, a lecture on transportation would fit well within
a U.S. course section on the late colonial period. The height of
transportation was from 1718 (the passage of the British Transportation
Act) to the early 1770s (the build-up to the American Revolution). One
possible classroom exercise would be to read Revel’s poem alongside
another primary document set, such as the transported passenger lists
printed within Peter Wilson Coldham’s Bonded Passengers to America
(full biographical details follow the module). While the poem attaches a
personal face to this labor phenomenon, the lists present the broader
picture of where the convicts departed from, the dates they departed,
the arrival locations, and, on occasion, the crimes supposedly
committed.
Educators can choose to incorporate one lecture
focusing specifically on transportation, or they can take a more
integrated comparative approach and make the evolution of labor systems a
theme within their courses, as the College Board suggests. This
comparative approach can be accomplished through exercises analyzing the
similarities and differences between transported labor, indentured
labor, and slave labor. For example, in the lecture section focusing on
colonial development, educators can ask students to compare the lives of
the three ‘types’ of laborers in one location, such as Virginia. For
this exercise the Revel poem serves as the source on the lives of a
transported laborer, while primary documents from Warren Billings’s The Old Dominion
provide personal accounts of indentured and slave life. Categories of
comparison can include everything from daily diet to the nature of
punishment. Revel facilitates this comparative approach by describing
how, after his conviction, he was transported overseas “bound with an
iron chain,” was sold in Virginia like a “horse,” and then worked with
his “fellow slaves” among the “tobacco plants.”
In
addition, from the mid-seventeenth-century until the
late-twentieth-century, all three groups of laborers could be found
throughout the hemispheric Americas. Revel’s travels from Britain to
Virginia and back again can serve as an entry point into a discussion of
the movement of bodies to satisfy the labor needs of colonial
plantation economies. In the course section on colonial development
educators can focus on comparing the experiences of laborers across the
globe. A wide variety of academic works feature essays on particular,
local labor situations during the colonial period. One essay collection
edited by Kay Saunders contains chapters describing colonial indentured
labor in locations such as Jamaica, British Guiana, Trinidad, Mauritius,
Fiji, Malaya, and Queensland. Asking students to compare the lives of
the laborers described within these essays to the lives of laborers in
colonial North America, including Revel, partially satisfies the
emphasis on globalization recommended by the College Board.
After introducing Revel’s account in the
colonial section of the course, it could also be useful to revisit the
poem during a discussion of emancipation in the U.S. Although it is an
abstract concept the 1660s can be linked to the 1860s through the
questioning of the historical nature of freedom. An educator can begin
by discussing how transported laborers, indentured servants, and slaves
all were granted freedom in right by the conclusion of the U.S. Civil
War. Then, foreshadowing the upcoming discussions of sharecropping and
African-American debt peonage, educators can explore how emancipation,
across the globe, has not always led to what is commonly considered
freedom. Historian Walton Look Lai finds that post Emancipation in the
British West Indies meant that “the phenomenon of labor coercion, far
from dying out, assumed new and diverse forms” (Look Lai, xi). In this
same vein, educators can ask that students explore the continuation of
indentured labor and the problems associated with it throughout the
Caribbean during the twentieth century. Maharani’s Misery
(2002), the story of a young female Indian indentured laborer killed in
1885 on her way to Guyana, is an apt and appropriate work to assign to
students at the introductory college level and upwards. Maharani’s
experiences are in many ways connected to Revel’s account and together
they offer an avenue through which students can understand labor
patterns across place and time.
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