Bound to Serve Eighteenth-Century Native Indentures in Archives By Jon Ault Mr. Ault is MPMRC Reference Archivist Archives & Special Collections has recently acquired a 1710 indenture contract from colonial Plymouth, Massachusetts, by which a Native boy named John Wehenok, Jr. entered into four years of service under Lieutenant Melatiah Bourne. This item joins the collection’s other eighteenth-century indenture contract, drawn up in colonial Easthampton, New York in 1755, by which a Native boy named Shadreck entered into fifteen years of service under one Elisha Osborne. Indentured servitude was integral to the establishment of English America. The system likely owed its origins to the growth of early manufacturing industries in seventeenth and eighteenth century England that stripped agriculture of its traditional labor pool. To replenish the supply of needed workers, farmers obtained contractual employees who served for specified periods of time, in return for lodging and board. A much larger labor supply was necessary to make agriculture in the American colonies economically viable. At the same time, few Britons who wanted to emigrate could afford the attendant traveling expenses. Consequently, they entered into contracts with wealthy patrons who had North American land investments: in return for paid transatlantic passage, they would work for their “benefactors” for a mutually agreed-upon length of time. In the colonies, these terms generally lasted a number of years, whereas servants within England were bound for shorter lengths of time. Many came to English America without contracts; these persons would be sold upon arrival, and local courts would then draft their contracts. This system of cheap labor also provided an effective means for England to rid itself of criminals and, during the turbulent mid-seventeenth century, of Royalist prisoners of war and political and religious undesirables. As much as two-thirds of white Europeans arriving in the English colonies after 1630 were indentured servants. Among the colonists, indentured servitude provided a means by which a destitute family could have its children educated and vocationally trained. Indentured servants enjoyed marginally greater freedoms and qualities of life than the slaves who became the main source of bound labor in the English colonies after 1700. As historian Abbot Emerson Smith has noted, “Whether property or not, indentured servants (from Great Britain and Germany) were Christian and they were white, and hence they were protected against arbitrary and unnatural cruelties, as well as against insufficient maintenance and other injustices, by their right of complaining to the magistrates.” However, the contracts usually forbade servants from marrying or traveling without their masters’ consent. Many masters also physically abused their charges and refused to release them upon the contracts’ expirations. Runaway servants presented a more difficult problem in the colonies than in the mother country. Legislation sought to curb this by requiring all travelers to carry passes and by imposing severe penalties on apprehended fugitives.     Although the majority of indentured servants were white Europeans, Natives were among the first to be thus bound in the English colonies and this practice continued well into the eighteenth century. In 1674, Plymouth Colony enacted a law which required “idle” or indebted Indians to provide bonded labor. Native parents in need of money often sold their children into temporary servitude, or used them as collateral for loans. Sometimes, they sought indentures as a way of assimilating their offspring into European culture. In general, their ethnicity did not condemn them to treatment harsher than that experienced by their white counterparts, though both types of servants often encountered cruel, rather than benevolent, overseers. In colonial Virginia and New England, white families acquiring custody of tribal children were often obligated to instruct them in Christian doctrine. Our 1710 indenture contract concerns a Native boy in colonial Massachusetts, whom this document bound to Lieutenant Melatiah Bourne of Barnstable County for a period of four years. Notably, both father and son, John Weeknuock (sic) and John Wehenok (sic), Jr., have signed the contract with their names, rather than “marks.” In contemporary London, only 62 percent of adult white males in agriculture and 38 percent of white children in their mid-teens were literate. These rates likely dwarfed those of the surrounding countryside. Literacy rates in the early eighteenth-century colonies were similar. Though the ages of the two indigenous signatories to this contract in 1710 are unknown, their ability to sign their own names is truly remarkable for this time period. By our second contract, dated forty-five years later, Nansey, a single mother living in Southampton, Suffolk County, New York, arranged for her son Shadreck to be an indentured servant to one Elisha Osborne of Easthampton for a period of fifteen years. In return, Nansey received thirty New York shillings. Shadreck’s service was scheduled to begin upon his sixth birthday (he was one year old at the time of this document’s creation). As part of the agreement, Osborne pledged to teach Shadreck to read, and also to give him a “good Suit of Apparel for Every Daye’s Ware” at the conclusion of the fifteen years. SOURCES CONSULTED Faragher, John Mack (ed.). The Encyclopedia of Colonial and Revolutionary America. New  York: Da Capo Press, 1996. Galenson, David W. White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis. London, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Lauber, Almon Wheeler. Indian Slavery in Colonial Times Within the Present Limits of the United States. Williamstown, MA: Corner House Publishers, 1913. Smith, Abbot Emerson. Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America, 1607-1776. Chapel Hill, NC: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina, 1947.