daughters as will appear in a later chapter; moreover provision was made for grants larger than fifty acres. The trustees showed a willingness to make concessions to the family interest. The minutes of the trustees for July 26, 1742, show a petition of Christian Steinharrel, Theobald Keifer, etc., in behalf of the German servants in Savannah indented to the trustees. Their term was about to expire but their sons were bound to serve till twenty-five, and the girls till eighteen. The parents wanted to settle in Georgia and had some cattle but "they must unavoidably labor under great difficulties by being deprived of the freedom of their children, without whose assistance it will be impossible for them to make any progress in cultivating the land, being most of them advanced in years." They prayed for the freedom of their children to take effect at the time when their own indentures should expire. The trustees resolved to recommend to the council to grant the petition. As previously observed English primogeniture drove younger sons across the ocean. In Georgia gentle stock and serf lineage dressed alike, married and intermarried. As indicated in the account of Virginia the failure of the family interest was a factor also in the peopling of the South. Recreant husbands and wives could escape justice by coming to America. The Mayor of Bristol in 1662 said: "Among these who repair to Bristol" for America "some are husbands that have forsaken their wives, others wives who have abandoned their husbands, some are children and apprentices run away from their parents and masters." Bishop Spangenberg (Moravian) in his Journal of Travels in North Carolina (1752) noted that some of the people "have left a wife and children elsewhere." Some involuntary im migrants to America were persons whose marital partners or other relatives, for reasons of their own, contrived to have them deported.123 New World settlers removed thus from all restraints of family were exposed to divers temptations. Yet such cases as these do not obscure the eminence of the family motive in American colonization. The family interest was prominent in migration to the frontier. At the beginning of the eighteenth century as inducement to settlers to migrate to Western Virginia every male or female coming into the frontier colony was to have fifty acres. Families were to have fifty for each member. Villages did not spring up as had been expected. Presbyterians and others did come as settlers. The Presbyterian congregations in Virginia sought wilderness homes "where every man's cabin might stand upon his own acres." Pioneer families moved in companies or fixed their abodes in neighborhoods for defence and for social and religious privileges. In some places intermarriage merged groups of different sects. Thus the family appears as the shaper of the new people. As the hunter penetrated the western wilds and found game abundant he thought to himself, "Well now, if I had the old woman and babies here, I should be fixed." Special inducements were offered to draw population westward. In 1776 Virginia offered each family settling vacant lands on waters of the Mississippi four hundred acres and to families who, for greater safety, had settled together and worked the land in common a town site of six hundred forty acres was given and a further grant of four hundred acres contiguous to town to each family on consideration of such settlement. 123 Morton. History of Highland County, 44-45. XIII. FAMILISM AND HOME LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH The life of the Southern family, at least on the coastal plain, was very different from that of the North Atlantic section. Especially in Maryland and tidewater Virginia did plantation life prevail. The plantations tended to isolation and self-support. They were isolated because tobacco soon sapped the fertility of the soil and made it necessary to seek fresh fields. Old grounds were left to revert to wilderness. Thus plantations were often separated by belts of forest. The estates had to be independent, for roads were poor and communication was often directly with England by means of vessels coming up the streams to the plantation docks. Domestic industry was a matter of course. In old Virginia female slaves and white servants wove coarse cloth and fashioned it into suits. Cotton spinning was a home industry. Artisans were to be found among the indentured servants. Washington's plantation at Mt. Vernon was a specimen of the self-sufficing estate. He had a smithy, charcoal-burners, brickmakers, carpenters, masons, a flour-mill, coopers, and a vessel to carry produce to market. He also employed shoemakers and operated a weaving establishment. The importation of white slaves was promoted by the fact that the immigrant to the South might secure for himself additional land for every servant brought over. The condition and treatment of bond-servants was variable. Redemptioners were often separated from their family. Alsop, a redemptioner who came in 1658, paints the position of a servant in Maryland in the brightest colors as far better than that of an apprentice or young craftsman in London. He argues in favor of the indenture of children as a means of giving them a place in the world. It has been suggested that his work is perhaps a paid-for puff of Maryland in the interest of the proprietor and merchant adventurers. Opinion differs on this point. The author of Leah and Rachel reports that in Virginia The women are not (as is reported) put into the ground to worke, but occupie such domestique imployments and housewifery as in England, that is dressing victuals, righting up the house, milking, imployed about dayries, washing, sewing, etc., and both men and women have times of recreation, as much or more than in any part of the world besides, yet some wenches that are nasty, beastly, and not fit to be so imployed are put into the ground, for reason tells us, they must not at charge be transported and then maintained for nothing, but those that prove so aukward are rather burdensome then servants desirable or useful. In Maryland of 1679, The servants and negros, after they have worn themselves down the whole day grain have yet to grind and pound the for their masters and all their families, as well as themselves and all the negros. A letter from Savannah dated 1741 reads: The trustees German servants in general behave well and are industrious: of these, eight or ten families are more remarkably so, and have this last year purchased a good stock of cattle, some having six cows, the least two; and each having a garden, where they raise some corn, peas, pumpkins, potatoes, etc., which with the milk of their cows is the chief part of their food; they are at little expense for clothing. On the St. Johns River in Florida was placed, during the English régime following 1763, a colony of people |