In 1654 the Bristol City Council passed an ordinance requiring that a register of servants destined for the colonies be kept, the purpose being to prevent the practice of dumping innocent youths into servitude. The registers, covering the period 1654 to 1686, are the largest body of indenture records known, and they also are a unique record of English emigration to the American colonies.Of the total of 10,000 servants in these registers, almost all came from the West Country, the West Midlands, or from Wales. Most entries give the name of the servant, his place of origin (until 1661), length of service, destination (usually Virginia, Maryland, or the West Indies), name of master, and, after 1670, the name of the ship. Four indexes have been included, one each for servants, masters, places of origin, and ships. [from Ancestry.com]
This article discusses the practice of sending children from Britain to America to be indentured servants. It cites court records in the late 17th century that document the indenture process required of the persons who purchased the children in America. " It was a common practice to ship young children to America where servants were in demand. Overseers of orphanages and workhouses and poor parents were thus relieved of the expense of a child's maintenance. Some children were simply kidnapped....Procuring or stealing children to sell as servants seems Dickensian to us now, but it was an acceptable and prevalent practice for many centuries."
"In the record office of the City of London is a register containing the names of 3,398 servants bound out for service in the American colonies and the West Indies. Details concerning nearly 2,000 of these indentured servants, taken from the original indenture forms, were published over twenty years ago. Yet information on 1,544 additional servants, whose names appear in the register but for whom no indentures survive, had never been published. With this present work, however, we now have a published list of these missing servants as well as a digest of associated data. In addition to the servant's name and the name of the transporting agent, the tabulation includes the name of the colony to which the servant was shipped and the date--either the date of the indenture form itself or the Assize at which it was registered. The majority of these servants were destined for Maryland, Pennsylvania, or the West Indies." [from GoogleBooks]
Includes bibliographical references (pages 335-359) and index.
Contents
German soldiers in British service -- Subsidy treaties -- Recruitment patterns -- Social composition -- Into captivity -- Prisoners of war in western warfare -- Capture and surrender -- Prisoners of war -- The first prisoners of war in revolutionary hands, 1775-1776 -- German prisoners of war, 1776-1778 -- Provisions and exchange, 1778 -- The Convention Army, 1777-1781 -- Continuity and change, 1779-1783 -- Release and return -- Epilogue -- Appendix: Common German soldiers taken prisoner.
Summary
"Some 37,000 soldiers from six German principalities, collectively remembered as Hessians, entered service as British auxiliaries in the American War of Independence. At times, they constituted a third of the British army in North America, and thousands of them were imprisoned by the Americans. Despite the importance of Germans in the British war effort, historians have largely overlooked these men. Drawing on research in German military records and common soldiers' letters and diaries, Daniel Krebs places the prisoners on center stage in A Generous and Merciful Enemy, portraying them as individuals rather than simply as numbers in casualty lists. Setting his account in the context of British and European politics and warfare, Krebs explains the motivations of the German states that provided contract soldiers for the British army. We think of the Hessians as mercenaries, but, as he shows, many were conscripts. Some were new recruits; others, veterans. Some wanted to stay in the New World after the war. Krebs further describes how the Germans were made prisoners, either through capture or surrender, and brings to life their experiences in captivity from New England to Havana, Cuba. Krebs discusses prison conditions in detail, addressing both the American approach to war prisoners and the prisoners' responses to their experience. He assesses American efforts as a "generous and merciful enemy" to use the prisoners as economic, military, and propagandistic assets. In the process, he never loses sight of the impact of imprisonment on the POWs themselves. Adding new dimensions to an important but often neglected topic in military history, Krebs probes the origins of the modern treatment of POWs. An epilogue describes an almost-forgotten 1785 treaty between the United States and Prussia, the first in western legal history to regulate the treatment of prisoners of war."--Publisher's website.
