A History of the Episcopal Church (Third Revised Edition). Robert W. Prichard
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brought with them from England contributed to the zeal and the excitement of the competing religious enclaves. The same disagreements, however, resulted in an intolerant attitude toward others. In one sense the colonists were simply mimicking the actions of the British toward them. When the English authorities paid attention to the religious life of this diverse group of colonists, it was most often for negative reasons. In 1638 Archbishop Laud proposed sending a colonial bishop, not to Virginia or Bermuda where episcopal sympathies were strong, but to New England where such a bishop might be used to replace congregational polity.43 Oliver Cromwell would likewise send a delegation with military authority not to friendly territory, but to Virginia and the Barbados in order to convince the colonists there to abandon the Book of Common Prayer with its petitions for the king and royal family, and to Maryland in order to replace the Roman Catholic proprietor.44
The colonists’ record was hardly better than that of their motherland. In 1643, Virginia’s legislature banned all who were not members of the episcopal party from the colony. Groups of Maryland Protestants led armed insurrections against the Roman Catholic gentry (1655–58 and 1689). Massachusetts authorities executed four Quakers for heresy (1659–61) and nineteen residents of Salem for witchcraft (1692). The various groups of colonists had won for themselves the control of their own religious lives, but they were unwilling to grant the same privilege to minorities within their midst.
Indentured and Enslaved Servants
The restoration of Charles II in 1660 contributed to a process already underway of legalizing life-long servitude for Africans. English colonists had relied upon the labor of servants from the beginning of colonization. During much of the seventeenth century the majority of that labor was provided by European servants, who at least theoretically contracted voluntarily to labor for a set number of years in exchange for the cost of passage to the New World.45 Even in Massachusetts—the colony with the highest percentage of free labor—about one-quarter of early emigrants were indentured servants. Elsewhere the percentages were higher. In Virginia and Maryland, for example, about three-quarters of early British emigrants were servants. Barbados had the highest percentage of enslaved labor in the first half of the century, but even there English indentured servants were more important economically than were enslaved Africans or Native Americans before the 1660s.46
There were, however, enslaved Native Americans and Africans from early on. The first African and Native American servants reached Bermuda by 1616. Dutch traders brought enslaved Africans to Virginia in 1619. The colony in Barbados included enslaved persons from its founding in 1627.47
While the conditions of these early indentured and enslaved servants were far from ideal, the contours of servitude were not yet fixed prior to 1660. Members of both groups were called servants in the first half of the century, with the term slave only becoming common for those in involuntary servitude in the second half of the century.48 Farmers worked in the fields beside their indentured and enslaved servants, slept in the same rooms, and at times shared the same beds.49
At least some of the colonists would have been aware that involuntary servitude was a condition from which Europeans were not immune. By some recent estimates, Muslim raiders on the Barbary Coast enslaved one to one and a quarter million Europeans between 1530 and 1780. Europeans also constituted a significant percentage of those enslaved by Ottoman Turks.50 Of this Captain John Smith of the Jamestown colony claimed first-hand knowledge; he wrote that as a young man he had been captured in battle by the Turks and sold as a slave before later escaping by killing his master and fleeing by way of Russia.51
As historian Philip Morgan has explained, indentured servants and enslaved people in the British colonies came to recognize that they had much in common. “The level of exploitation each group suffered inclined them to see the others as sharing their predicament. … Not only did many blacks and whites work alongside one another, but they ate, caroused, smoked, ran away, stole, and made love together.”52
Prior to 1660 and the accession of Charles II the British colonies lacked any clear legal basis for keeping people in permanent servitude or any consistent legal way to distinguish the status of indentured and enslaved persons. Colonists in Bermuda dealt with the ambiguity by extending the length of the indenture for most enslaved Africans and Native Americans to 99 years. There were exceptions, however, including one European given such a 99-year term and about ten percent of the Africans in Bermuda who were given shorter periods of service.53 Something similar must have been going on at the same time in Virginia, where “in some counties perhaps a third of the black population was free in the 1660s and 1670s.” The Barbados Council included the possibility of a contract for a fixed term of service in a declaration about servitude for Native Americans and Africans in 1636.54
There also was confusion about the relationship between the Christian faith and perpetual servitude. Enslaved individuals who were or became Christians argued that they should be made free as a result of their faith. Some Christian servants in Virginia and Maryland sued in the courts for freedom. This argument was used in Virginia as late as the 1690s.55 There was also the question of the status of the children to those in permanent or ninety-nine-year servitude.56
The effort to codify the status of those in servitude was delayed by uncertainties of the English Civil War (1642–48) and the subsequent Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell (1653–58), who increased the supply of indentured servants by sending large numbers of Irish prisoners to the Caribbean. With the restoration of Charles II in 1660, however, matters began to change. Charles II and his brother James, who would follow him to the throne as James II in 1685, were anxious to profit from the slave trade. They founded the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa (1660, reorganized 1663), went to war with the Dutch to support the company’s interests (the second Anglo-Dutch War, 1665–1667), and finally reorganized the body as the Royal African Company (1672). The company claimed a monopoly on all transportation of enslaved persons to British colonies. It would eventually ship “more enslaved African women, men, and children to the Americas than any other single institution during the entire period of the transatlantic slave trade.”57
With a new king supportive of the slave trade, England’s colonies began to put servitude on a more certain level. Barbados led the way in 1661 with the adoption of one act “for the good governing of Servants, and ordering the Rights between Masters and Servants” and another for “the better ordering and governing of Negroes.” The new British colony in Jamaica adopted a version of the same act in 1664, and a further act in 1684. The new colony of Carolina, which Charles II chartered in 1663, would copy the Jamaica act of 1684 in 1691.58
In 1662 the Virginia General Assembly adopted an act that set aside the English precedent that the status of a child depended on that of the father. For enslaved Africans, the status of