Harlots, Hussies, and Poor Unfortunate Women: Crime, Transportation, and the Servitude of Female Convicts, 1718-1783

5. Servants and Masters

5 servants and Masters After the sale process was completed, the factors handed over the convict women to the strangers who were to be their masters—effectively their owners—and with whom they were likely to spend the next seven, or possibly fourteen, years of their lives. despite the interval since their sentencing in britain, legally their punishment was only just beginning. Their sentence and servitude ran in tandem and started when they arrived in Maryland.1 during this term, unless they died, committed another offense, ran away, or were advertised for sale, the women essentially disappeared from view as they undertook employment that was virtually unregulated , frequently harsh, and occasionally cruel or callous. The reasons for this were both deliberate and/or situational but can be understood within the framework of Maryland’s contemporary circumstances—the new economic, social, and cultural world of the convict women. dominated geographically by the vast bisector of the chesapeake bay, Marylandwasaregionof greatdemographicandgrowingeconomicvariation.itstretched from the wetlands of the lower Eastern shore to the great Appalachian valley in the “backcountry” or western part of the colony from which Frederick county was formed in 1748. regular accounts by colonial governors to the board of trade and Plantations in london provide a progressive picture of Maryland’s economy, which, for most of the eighteenth century, was heavily dependent on a single commercial crop, Nicotiana tabacum—tobacco. The type most commonly grown in Maryland was “orinoco” (or oronoco) a light-colored, air-cured variety that possesses good burning qualities. it was favored in Europe, whereas the other principal typeoftobacco—“sweetscented”—wasthepreferredchoiceofbritishconsumers. in the 1720s, spurred by the development of an efficient marketing system in Europe , demand for tobacco expanded there, and a growing taste for snuff created a whole new set of consumers. in every part of Maryland growers responded to rising tobacco prices with an increase in output. The numbers of planters raising the crop also increased. however, the five counties on the peninsula bounded by the chesapeake bay and the Potomac river—Anne Arundel, calvert, charles, Prince george’s,andst.Mary’s—dominatedproduction.inthemiddleofthecenturythe Servants and Masters / 83 high price of tobacco inhibited agricultural diversification and restrained the development of marketing networks and urban centers of the type that developed only a short distance away in Pennsylvania.2 yet from about the 1730s—particularly on the Eastern shore but in other areas as well—planters (particularly german and scotch-irish settlers) began to move away from monoculture and started to raise wheat, corn, and oats. This diversification was probably a response to different soils as well as the prohibitive distance from markets and shipping.3 Maryland’s other exports included meat, lumber, staves, furs, and pig iron which, as stated in the last chapter, was being produced by a number of different ironworks on the Patuxent and Patapsco rivers.4 yettobaccoremainedthedominantexportcommodity.in1771Maryland’stobacco exports constituted approximately one-third of all that produced in north America. As a crop it was twice as valuable as coffee and rice, the next most important commodities exported from mainland America to britain and elsewhere.5 A New Map of Virginia, Maryland and the Improved Parts of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, taken from a 1685 map by christopher browne that was revised by John senex and published in 1719. (courtesy of the Maryland state Archives.) 84 / Chapter 5 The dependence on tobacco meant that Maryland’s economy was susceptible to downturns whenever tobacco prices were low. At such times the colonists had no means to buy imported manufactured goods and were obliged to produce their own “country-made” cloth or, as one official reported, “go naked.” by 1776 there was quite an extensive network of local industries that, if they did not supplant them, at least supplemented the supplies of manufactured goods that had previously been exclusively imported.6 in1720thepopulationof Marylandwasapproximately62,000, of which around 18 percent was black. by that date the majority of the white population was native born and, as one early eighteenth-century governor noted, “by the name of country borne distinguish themselves from the rest of her Majesty’s subjects.”7 by 1755 the population had reached 153,564 (107,208 white, 42,764 black, and 3,592 “mulatto”). in 1770 it was approximately 220,000, of which about 31 percent was black.8 in the early part of the century Annapolis was the largest town, but even by 1760 it had a...