Finding People Who Don’t Want to be Found: Students and the Chesapeake’s Unfree People

In 1673, a Black woman named Pendall escaped with her son from the Accomack County plantation of Tabitha Browne, where they were enslaved. They stole a boat and crossed the Chesapeake from the Eastern Shore to the mainland, no small navigational feat. Two years later, Browne petitioned the Virginia General Court for a judgment against Colonel Thomas Goodrich, claiming Pendall  “in company [with] other Negroes Stole a boate & went from your petitioners plantation in Accomack to Coll Thomas Goodrich his house in Rappa[hannock] County,” and that Goodrich refused repeated requests to return them. Browne wanted restitution from the court, in the form of 10,000 pounds of tobacco, plus a fine “according to law” for detaining the two enslaved people, and all costs of the suit.¹

This single page from over 350 years ago leaves us wanting to know more about Pendall’s experience of 17th-century Virginia history: why and at what point did she choose to risk escape? What did she know about evolving race and runaway law? How did she navigate across the bay and up one of the mainland’s rivers at a different plantation? And, what was her ultimate goal once she reached her destination? These are some of the questions at the core of our student-powered public and digital history project. Students and faculty working on Dangerous Harbor: Finding Escaped Unfree Laborers in the 17th-Century Chesapeake find and gather these stories together so that we can illuminate the skill and bravery behind escape attempts and look for patterns in archival records.

Dangerous Harbor, a partnership between Virginia State University, Virginia Tech, North Carolina Central University, Michigan State University, and students from institutions nationwide, represents the first large-scale effort to make accessible stories of escape from enslavement and servitude in the 17th-century Chesapeake. Our team has already digitized and read court records from a few counties in Virginia, made available to us with big thanks to the Library of Virginia and digitized by Backstage Library Works, with select records available for online access at the Data Repository (and we will add more through 2028). By digitizing, preserving, and mining county- and colony-level court records, deed books, and order books, we are currently expanding a publicly accessible dataset of escape attempts from records in Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina.

We (and by that we mean, a motley crew of dedicated college students) have already identified and transcribed over 300 cases and counting, while a team of library professionals have made their work accessible on Wikibase and other platforms. These records reveal how unfree people resisted bondage and participated (albeit unwillingly) in early American civic life, and how elites and local governments facilitated the evolution of race law and slavery in North America.²

This project spans the 1600s, when planters sought to fortify law and practices surrounding slavery and servitude which would stabilize their society and shore up their families’ financial futures. Although slavery was present since the first arrival of Africans in 1619, indentured servants dominated the labor force.³ They arrived in a variety of forms: artisans, criminals, children, and economically disadvantaged English, Welsh, Irish, and even Dutch laborers. Smaller numbers of people–Indigenous people from nations in the Chesapeake and Piedmont, if not farther afield, Virginia-born English children, and African or African-descended laborers and artisans–were also indentured, or held the precarious shifting legal standing between servitude and slavery. By midcentury, many elite planters turned to enslavement of Black people, who were not only enslaved for life but, after a law passed in 1662, whose children would also be enslaved.⁴ For the colony’s richest planters, the promise of a permanent and growing labor force, while other settlers sickened and died around them, justified the massive investment in slavery. By the 18th century, Virginia’s tobacco economy and Virginia’s future economic and political primacy relied on slavery and not indentured servitude. Over time, the difference between indentured servitude and slavery would underscore the duality between freedom and enslavement: access to freedom and civic life, including legal redress, was afforded to those in servitude but not those in slavery.⁵ This was also happening across many of the English colonies; the writers of these laws in colonies like Barbados and Carolina looked out for news of one another anxiously.⁶

Indentured servitude in Virginia proved to be exploitative and dangerous, an ugly and distinct cousin of servitude in England. Chesapeake English mortality rates were much higher well into the 17th century than they were in England and New England, leading to an often-unstable labor force upon which the burgeoning tobacco economy leaned. In England, most contracts were renewable yearly and with the consent of both parties. But many Virginia arrivals had accrued debt for the cost of the passage to the colonies without a contract and relied on the county courts to adjudge their age in order to be assigned a term of service that would pay off the debt. Planters’ desire to keep people at work for as long as possible led to long terms of service, either a set age of 21 or 24, depending on the year, or for a set number of years.⁷ This means that an indentured child of three might be freed two decades later, if they lived that long. Upon reaching the end of their term, servants–particularly those of Indigenous or African descent–might find their freedom questioned by masters. Further, servants enjoyed customary rights in England which would be unfamiliar to Virginia’s servants: contracts could not just be unilaterally broken or changed by either a master or servant, including the selling of an indenture to another master.⁸ And yet, lawmakers who also eroded the privileges of servants simultaneously shored up the line between indentured servants and enslaved people: among other restrictions, these included prohibitions against Black people from bearing arms, congregating, or “go[ing] off from the plantation” without a certificate, all core privileges that free white male subjects enjoyed in the English colonies.⁹

For students working with Dangerous Harbor, individual court cases provide an entry point to explore the broader workings of this system and its place in colonial society. These individual stories are part of the history of the country’s political and economic development. Some of our students highlighted cases and law surrounding servitude and slavery; their work is peppered throughout the links below. (Also, be kind, as this is the first time these students have read their own words from a teleprompter.) Virginia Tech students created this video about English indentured servant William Collins, who received a four-year penalty for escaping to a neighboring plantation in 1666. The students explain how Collins’ story reveals the networks among powerful people–like the plantation owners who sent a lawyer and surgeon to capture and bring him to court–but also shows the independent thinking and ingenuity Collins used to resist this exploitative system.

It might seem obvious why someone would attempt an escape from this system. What we’ve found in documenting these individual stories, however, is that there are probably many kinds of decision points, based on an individual’s identity, opportunity, and circumstance. (For an early exploration of people’s identities and their place in these court cases, check this data visualization out.) The details in the cases reveal the experience of people who don’t often appear in records from this early period–as one student on the project noted, rediscovering the voices of “people who otherwise would not have been heard.” The few women and children whose escapes were recorded, like Pendall and her son, tell us part of this story. While most people in the Virginia colony were young men, enslaved and indentured women also provided vital labor in tobacco fields, caring for domestic animals, and working inside of planters’ homes. They also faced risks like sexual assault and punishment for bastardy or fornication–including extended terms of servitude for white women, who were expected to bear the cost of their children’s birth and infancy in the absence of a named father. (Our students outline this.) Their children might also be taken from them and their bodies or labor sold to other households.

Almost 20 years after Pendall’s case, white indentured servant Katherine Thomas triggered a complex set of court cases in Westmoreland County. White female indentured servants are easy to track compared to Pendall, since the names of indentures are registered in English port cities like Bristol and London. (One video, shown on the right, explores another example of a white indentured woman, studied by our students.)

Katherine Thomas was one of six Welsh servants to arrive in Virginia on the ship the John, in 1685. Joseph Hardwich bought her indenture alongside the indenture of David Myles, who had grown up in a small town 13 miles to the northeast of Katherine’s Welsh village. Sometime in 1688 with a year left on their indentures, set to expire at the same time, Katherine became pregnant with David’s child. Seemingly alone, she ran away for 35 days, and sometime after was “brought to bed of a bastard child” back in Hardwich’s home. For Katherine, coming back meant facing an extra two-year term for giving birth to an illegitimate child, the customary added sentence for an escape attempt (double the time of her absence), and the likelihood that her infant would also experience servitude. Hardwich then collected from David “charges for nursing & maintaineing the Child seaven weekes & three dayes” in the form of debt to be repaid after his own indenture expired. David and Katherine’s child disappears from the records here, but Katherine is still indentured seven years later in 1696, when she is once again accused of running away from a (different) plantation.¹⁰

If we understand them to be as consensual and straightforward as they seem from the outside, David and Katherine’s decisions are intelligible to a modern reader: finding someone who shares your rural upbringing, language, and harrowing journey to an isolated place. Deepening that connection over years in a new environment, while legally unable to wed (which would just add time to their indentures). And in Katherine’s case, running from fear of punishment and perhaps fear of childbirth. The consequences of these decisions were disproportionate and heartbreaking for Katherine and indeed kept her indentured during much of her infant’s childhood and her own young adult years; her understandable attempts to escape them mired her deeper in her servitude. Presumably, Hardwich himself is the only person to benefit from her misery.

Katherine’s story is exceptionally well-documented even in these four or five mentions in court documents and registers. Much less is available in archives about people of color, and our students have found the stories of Indigenous people, whose status is sometimes uncertain, most challenging to fit into the dataset. For example, Indigenous women are often unnamed, and unlike for Irish or Dutch servants, their nations are never mentioned. This 1690 case from Rappahannock County (now Essex County) is a typically vague entry:

William Harwood this day making Complaint to the Court That an Indian Woman & an Indian boy, both his Servants did about forteen months now last past absent themselves from their sd Service, & have not yett Returned¹¹

If the accusation is true (and we’ll never know, which is as she would have wanted it!) this woman convinced others, perhaps not even of her own nation or language, to take a substantial risk on her family’s behalf. She reminds us that while her bonded status produced only a small and vague mention in English court records, she certainly was not anonymous within the networks she leveraged. Indigenous people, regardless of their status, placed value on kinship and friendship as part of a survival and escape strategy. Of the handful of cases involving escaped Indigenous people or Indigenous abettors found so far in Virginia and North Carolina, only one man travelled alone; so far in our research, Indigenous women have always taken children with them. For Black and Indigenous women, there’s so much more material waiting in the archives, and much more we hope for–names, hometowns, families, language, and nation–which will never emerge from the documents.

Bonded labor, and running away from servitude and slavery, does not look like what our students recognize from popular media focusing on the 19th century: slavery long entrenched in race, from which a lone person running to the Northern states through the wilds of the American South and in between stops on the Underground Railroad seeks to escape. Resurrecting an individual’s journey and their most often painful conclusion in court, most of which have not been discussed publicly since a servant or enslaved person’s sentencing, means grappling with the contexts, identities, goals, and skills entangled in a single risky decision. Although historians have analyzed the networks of early American merchants, explorers, and diplomats who traversed the Eastern seaboard, we are only beginning to discover the scope and breadth of ordinary unfree people’s travels and alliances. (See a sample network visualization of our work so far.) By making archival records available in a searchable database, this project makes accessible virtually unknown stories about people who indeed built the economy and landscape which supported the English colonies’ first representative government. In divulging destinations and appearing in court next to their abettors and accomplices, we can glimpse their visions for a different and free future.

-Jessica Taylor, Virginia Tech and Sarah McLennan, Virginia State University