A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

Gloucester County, servants again planned a general uprising. One of them gave the plot away, and four were executed. The informer was given his freedom and 5,000 pounds of tobacco. Despite the rarity of servants’ rebellions, the threat was always there, and masters were fearful.
    Finding their situation intolerable, and rebellion impractical in an increasingly organized society, servants reacted in individual ways. The files of the county courts in New England show that one servant struck at his master with a pitchfork. An apprentice servant was accused of “laying violent hands upon his . . . master, and throwing him downe twice and feching bloud of him, threatening to breake his necke, running at his face with a chayre. . . .” One maidservant was brought into court for being “bad, unruly, sulen, careles, destructive, and disobedient.”
    After the participation of servants in Bacon’s Rebellion, the Virginia legislature passed laws to punish servants who rebelled. The preamble to the act said:
    Whereas many evil disposed servants in these late tymes of horrid rebellion taking advantage of the loosnes and liberty of the tyme, did depart from their service, and followed the rebells in rebellion, wholy neglecting their masters imployment whereby the said masters have suffered great damage and injury. . . .
    Two companies of English soldiers remained in Virginia to guard against future trouble, and their presence was defended in a report to the Lords of Trade and Plantation saying: “Virginia is at present poor and more populous than ever. There is great apprehension of a rising among the servants, owing to their great necessities and want of clothes; they may plunder the storehouses and ships.”
    Escape was easier than rebellion. “Numerous instances of mass desertions by white servants took place in the Southern colonies,” reports Richard Morris, on the basis of an inspection of colonial newspapers in the 1700s. “The atmosphere of seventeenth-century Virginia,” he says, “was charged with plots and rumors of combinations of servants to run away.” The Maryland court records show, in the 1650s, a conspiracy of a dozen servants to seize a boat and to resist with arms if intercepted. They were captured and whipped.
    The mechanism of control was formidable. Strangers had to show passports or certificates to prove they were free men. Agreements among the colonies provided for the extradition of fugitive servants—these became the basis of the clause in the U.S. Constitution that persons “held to Service or Labor in one State . . . escaping into another . . . shall be delivered up. . . .”
    Sometimes, servants went on strike. One Maryland master complained to the Provincial Court in 1663 that his servants did “peremptorily and positively refuse to goe and doe their ordinary labor.” The servants responded that they were fed only “Beanes and Bread” and they were “soe weake, wee are not able to perform the imploym’ts hee puts us uppon.” They were given thirty lashes by the court.
    More than half the colonists who came to the North American shores in the colonial period came as servants. They were mostly English in the seventeenth century, Irish and German in the eighteenth century. More and more, slaves replaced them, as they ran away to freedom or finished their time, but as late as 1755, white servants made up 10 percent of the population of Maryland.
    What happened to these servants after they became free? There are cheerful accounts in which they rise to prosperity, becoming landowners and important figures. But Abbot Smith, after a careful study, concludes that colonial society “was not democratic and certainly not equalitarian; it was dominated by men who had money enough to make others work for them.” And: “Few of these men were descended from indentured servants, and practically none had themselves been