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indentured servitude

Richard More, The Pilgrim Saint Who Sinned a Lot

Richard More was just six years old when his embittered legal – but not biological – father packed him off to the New World on the Mayflower, along with his brother and two sisters.

Indentured to William Brewster, he was the only one of the More children to survive past the first terrible winter in Plymouth. He returned to the sea at age 14 and spent most of his life as an enterprising ship captain. Richard More may have been the last of the First Comers to die, having lived long enough to witness the Puritan experiment go awry with the Salem witch trials.

The Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor by William Halsall.

During the course of a colorful lifetime he sailed the Atlantic, carried supplies to infant colonies, fought naval battles, fought King Philip’s War, ran a tavern and married at least three wives, not all sequentially. As a First Comer who survived the Ancient Beginning, he enjoyed certain privileges. He took full advantage of them.

Richard More

Richard More’s legal parents were Katherine and Samuel More, landed gentry in Shropshire, England, on the Welsh border. His real father, though, was probably Jacob Blakeway. Katherine and Jacob were betrothed before her father arranged a marriage with Samuel More, when Samuel was 17 and Katherine 25. Katherine had four children in quick succession: Elinor in 1612, Jasper in 1613; Richard in 1614; and Mary in 1616.

Mayflower plaque in St. James Church in Shipton, Shropshire commemorating the More children baptism. courtesy of Phil Revell.

By the time the youngest came along, Samuel More began to notice they looked more like Jacob Blakeway than him. He accused Katherine of adultery, seized the children and stashed them with a tenant. Katherine didn’t deny the charge. She argued her betrothal to Blakeway meant she’d married More illegally. After years of court battles, Samuel More won the right to pack the children off to the New World on the Mayflower – a likely death sentence.

He didn’t care. He called the children “a spurious brood” and justified his cruelty by claiming to send them away from their home, where “great blotts and blemishes may fall upon them.”

First Comer

By the end of the first winter in Plymouth Colony, Elinor, Jasper and Mary had all died.

Six-year-old Richard, the lone survivor, grew up a servant for elder William Brewster. He lived in the Brewster household with his two sons, Love and Wrestling, who were about his age. Later two older children, Patience and Jonathan, joined them. Richard helped the family with chores, learned to read and write and attended Sunday meeting, where William Brewster often presided.

William Brewster

His indenture ended in 1627, when he turned 14. The next year he was apprenticed to Isaac Allerton, a merchant seaman. Allerton married one of William Brewster’s daughters, Fear, who arrived in Plymouth in 1623. Richard sailed with Allerton up and down the coast buying and selling fish, grain, tobacco and other commodities.

Sometime in the 1630s, More sailed to England — exactly when and why is unclear. He then returned to Plymouth in 1635 on the Blessing. Romance must have bloomed on the voyage, for a few months after his arrival he married a fellow passenger, Christian or Christiana Hunter.

They lived on a 20-acre farm in Duxbury, where the Plymouth settlers had distributed land and begun to spread out on it. The Mores didn’t stay long, but sold their property in 1637. They then moved 50 miles north to another Puritan settlement, Salem Neck. Together they would have seven children.

From Stranger to Saint

When Richard More boarded the Mayflower as a six-year-old child, he did not belong to the tight-knit group of 40-some Separatists who called themselves Saints. He belonged to the other, secular group of about five dozen people called Strangers.

Signing the Mayflower Companct 1620 by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris.

As time passed, the Mayflower settlers took on a mythic aura. They had suffered and survived the “Ancient Beginning.” So in 1643, Richard More became a Saint when the Puritan congregation in Salem admitted him as a member.

But for a Saint, he had a good deal of the sinner in him.

He became a sea captain and pursued the coastal cargo trade he’d learned from Allerton, delivering provisions to colonies in Virginia, New York, the West Indies and Nova Scotia. He probably carried tobacco, grain, salt fish, lumber and fur to England and the West Indies. In 1674, he started a tavern in Salem, selling beer and cider.

Bigamy?

In 1645, 10 years after his marriage to Christian, a “Richard More of Salem” married Elizabeth Woolnough in St. Dunstan’s Church in Middlesex, England. That “Richard More of Salem” left town in a hurry after he was charged with drunkenness in the company of a prostitute. Historians don’t agree on whether it was the Mayflower Richard More who cut that swathe through Middlesex in the 1640s. Whether it was or not, that Richard More had a daughter named Elizabeth, after her mother.

While still in his 30s, the Puritan elders considered Richard More an “Ancient Freeman” and gave him land in Plymouth. A fighter as well as a lover, he fought a naval battle against the Dutch near New York in 1653. The next year he joined a fleet of English ships to capture the French fort at Port Royal. And in 1675, after King Philip’s War broke out, he marched with a thousand-man militia to what is now South Kingstown. There he joined in the Great Swamp Fight, a massacre of as many as 1,000 Narragansett Indians, mostly noncombatants.

Christian More gravestone in Salem.

Christian died in Salem during King Philip’s War, in 1676. Samuel quickly remarried Jane Crumpton. Two years after her death, the 72-year-old man was caught performing “gross unchastity” with another man’s wife. The Salem elders censured him.

According to the records of the First Church of Salem, Old Captain More had been for many years “under suspicion and a common fame of lasciviousness at least some degree of incont[in]ency.” Sundry brethren and elders spoke to him several times about his debauchery. However, they had no proof and could go no further.

Then, left to himself, three witnesses saw him commit “gross unchastity” with another man’s wife. Justices of the peace censured old Captain More for his scandalous sin, and the church elders cast him out of the parish.

Salem Witch Trials

Richard repented, however, and returned to the church in 1691. In 1692, he witnessed the hysteria of the Salem witch trials – a second perversion of Puritan zealotry during his lifetime. The first had sent him to Plymouth Colony, an orphaned, six-year-old servant.

Richard More gravestone in Salem.

Richard More died sometime between April 1694 and April 1696, possibly the oldest surviving First Comer. He lies buried in the Charter Street Burial Ground in Salem.

With thanks to Mayflower Lives by Martyn Whittock.

Images: Plaque By Phil Revel, Shipton, Shropshire – https://www.flickr.com/photos/25709911@N08/6809987125, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18269228. Christiana More grave marker By Max Anderson, Chicago IL – https://www.flickr.com/photos/25709911@N08/6809950259, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18269206. Richard More grave marker By eagle.dawg – Richard More, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18184059. This story updated in 2022.

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Stephen Hopkins, Jamestown Settler, Mayflower Pilgrim – and Shakespeare Character?

Stephen Hopkins settled both Jamestown and Plymouth, and many believe Shakespeare based a character on him.

Though he wasn’t among the first Jamestown settlers, he did arrive within the first three years. He might have gotten there sooner but for a shipwreck – a shipwreck that probably inspired Shakespeare to write The Tempest.

Shakespeare portrayed him as a drunken clown with ambitions of grandeur. In real life, Stephen Hopkins narrowly avoided execution for mutiny and later ran into trouble with the Plymouth authorities for overserving the patrons of his tavern.

Calilban, Stephano and Trinculo from the painting The Tempest by Johann Heinrich Ramberg

Stephen Hopkins

Stephen Hopkins was born in 1581 in Hampshire, England. By 1604, when he’d reached his mid-20s, he lived in Hursley, Hampshire; he had married Mary Kent.

They lived with her widowed mother, Joan Kent, and kept a small alehouse in Hampshire. Hopkins’ mother-in-law apparently liked to sample the product. In 1605, Joan Kent was charged with being acommon tippler and fined four pence.

Sea Venture

By 1608, Mary and Stephen Hopkins had three children: Elizabeth, Giles and Constance. In 1609, Stephen Hopkins got a job as a minister’s clerk, probably to help support his growing family.

In his new job, he read religious works to a congregation that included members of the Virginia Company.

Then that same year, Stephen Hopkins signed up as a three-year indentured servant bound for North America. He left for Jamestown on the Sea Venture, a 300-ton flagship leading seven other ships in a flotilla.

Thomas Gates

The Sea Venture carried supplies, settlers and the new governor, Sir Thomas Gates, to Jamestown.

Two months into the voyage, a hurricane separated the Sea Venture from the rest of the flotilla. Lashed by the storm for three days, the Sea Venture began to leak badly. Seawater reached nine feet in the hold when land — Bermuda — was sighted.

The ship ran aground and all 150 people aboard made it safely to land. The castaways quickly discovered they’d landed in paradise, and they lived on the island’s fresh water, pigs, turtles and birds.

Nearly all of them survived for nine months in Bermuda. While there, they built two small ships from Bermuda cedar and parts salvaged from the Sea Venture. On May 10, 1610, Stephen Hopkins and the surviving castaways set sail for Jamestown. Eleven days later, they arrived in Virginia.

The Tempest

A report of the shipwreck reached England, as did tales of the castaways. In November 1611, Shakespeare’s play The Tempest first appeared on the English stage. In a comic subplot, the drunken power-hungry butler named Stephano tries to depose the island’s ruler, Prospero.

Many scholars believe the Sea Venture‘s wreck inspired Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. Many also think Stephen Hopkins inspired Stephano because of an incident on Bermuda.

As the castaways labored to build their boats, Stephen Hopkins started questioning the authority of the group’s governor, Sir Thomas Gates. He argued they should sail to England, not Jamestown. Gates had him arrested and charged with mutiny.

Hopkins was found guilty and sentenced to death. But he pleaded for his life with ‘sorrow and tears,’ and so many castaways begged mercy for him he received a pardon. From then on, Stephen Hopkins wisely avoided controversy.

Stephen Hopkins, Stranger

The Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor by William Halsall.

Back in England, Mary Hopkins supported herself and her three children partly by working as a shopkeeper. Some of Stephen’s wages were also sent to her. In 1613, Mary Hopkins died suddenly. News of her death came by letter to Stephen Hopkins in Jamestown. Soon after he returned to England to take care of his children.

Living in London, Stephen Hopkins married again, to Elizabeth Fisher, and they had a daughter, Damaris.

The Pilgrims recruited Hopkins as a Londoner, or Stranger, to help with the voyage. In September 1620, Hopkins, his children, his pregnant wife and two servants boarded the Mayflower.

During the terrible voyage, Elizabeth gave birth to their son, Oceanus, the only child born on the vessel at sea. Peregrine White, son of William White and Susanna Jackson, was the second, born at anchor off Provincetown before they went across to Plymouth.

On Nov. 9, 1620 (O.S.), off the coast of Provincetown, Stephen Hopkins and 40 other men signed the Mayflower Compact.

Signing the Mayflower Compact 1620 by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris.

Plymouth

In Plymouth, Stephen Hopkins proved useful for his knowledge of the American Indians, gained during his stay in Jamestown. When Samoset first approached the settlers, he spent the night in Stephen Hopkins’ house.

The entire Hopkins household survived that first grim winter, only one of four in Plymouth to escape death.

Stephen and Elizabeth had five more children and they ran a tavern. By 1630, he began to get into trouble with the Puritan authorities.

The court fined him for allowing drinking and shuffleboard on Sunday, for overcharging his customers and for letting his customers get drunk. The court also committed him to custody for refusing to support a servant who gave birth out of wedlock.

Stephen Hopkins died in 1644. In his will he asked to be buried next to his wife, and left his possessions to his surviving children. His famous descendants include Richard Gere, Tennessee Williams, Dan Quayle, Sarah Palin, Norman Rockwell and Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, according to Familypedia.

Need some new ideas for your Thanksgiving feast? How about trying something old — and authentic — while learning the history behind the foods. From the New England Historical Society. Available now from Amazon (click here).

This story was updated in 2023. If you enjoyed it, you may also want to read about the Pilgrims’ free-thinking neighbors in Merrymount (now Quincy, Mass.) here.

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Puritan Justice of the New Haven Colony: Sometimes Nasty and Brutish

Under Puritan justice in 17^th century New Haven, rumors of sex with a pig got you hanged, exposing sexual harassment got you whipped and disagreeing with a minister got you hauled into court.

Jon Blue, a Connecticut Superior Court judge, found these long-forgotten court cases of the New Haven Colony in a courthouse library.

“I was finding these old records that no one had looked at for years,” he said in an interview. “It was like Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

He deciphered the handwritten, archaic notes from the trials and wrote a book about them, called The Case of the Piglet’s Paternity: Trials from the New Haven Colony, 1639-1663. The case notes tell us much about day-to-day life in the New Haven Colony and present what Blue calls ‘a broad menu of disturbing cases.’

New Haven Colony

Puritans established New Haven Colony as a moral community – another theocratic ‘city on a hill’ — that adhered to Biblical law. The Puritans who ran New Haven saw their role as enforcing adherence to church doctrine.

The court, at its Solomonic best, divided an estate between a widow and her children. At its worst, it ordered a small girl to be whipped and sold into slavery. Unlike Massachusetts, at least, the New Haven General Court refrained from such cruel punishments as ear-cropping, branding or boring holes in people’s tongues. But it did order whippings and hangings.

The court records reveal a society as scary and Orwellian, with spies everywhere. The smallest hint of religious dissent could land a person in court.

Blue compared early New Haven with North Korea.

Map of New Haven in 1638.

In the case of three dissident women, a servant overheard her mistress and two others disagree with their minister. She asked another servant to help her eavesdrop, then went to the authorities with what she’d heard. The three women went to trial on a dozen charges. One woman was even accused of criticizing authorities for ordering people to be cruelly whipped. The disposition of the case is lost to history.

Puritan Justice for Women

The New Haven Colony made no distinction between consensual and nonconsensual sex. It was also not a good place to be a poor, low-status woman, as the Goodwife Fancy case shows.

Goodwife Fancy belonged to the lowest of the low. She and her husband lived in the cellars of other people’s houses, moving around frequently. She did menial work in the fields and kitchens of wealthier women. At every turn, men groped and abused her. One day, for example, she found herself alone in a cellar with a Thomas Robinson.

He took hold of her, pulled down his breeches, put his hand under her skirt, and “with strength and force labored to satisfy his lust and to defile her.” When she cried out, he covered her mouth. He finally left when he heard some shipmen calling him.

This happened over and over, but Goodwife Fancy kept quiet, knowing what could happen to her. A third party went to the magistrate with the story of her sexual harassment. She had to testify under oath. The court believed her story – and ordered her and her husband whipped along with one of the men who had attacked her.

“Reading this travesty of a case, the modern reader cannot help but despair at the human condition,” concludes Blue in the book.

The Brickmaker’s Apprentice

Though Blue admired some of the New Haven court’s decisions, he found the way it treated children disturbing. Puritans viewed children as small adults, he said, and tried and punished them as such.

In ‘The Brickmaker’s Apprentice,’ a 13-year-old English boy named Edward House was sold as an indentured servant on the condition he be taught the brickmaker’s trade. He was sold and resold again, though he was infirm, and he was not taught to make bricks. In the end, the court ordered the boy be taught a trade.

The enduring image of the case is its pathetic inception, writes Blue.

Picture the young House, a boy of twelve or thirteen years, alone on a ship bound from England to the New World. This was not a young man adventurously off to see the world. This was a boy unaccompanied by his parents, apprenticed for seven years to a man in Boston whom he almost certainly did not know. His master was the ship’s cook, who ungenerously fed him a diet rivaling that of Oliver Twist. Instead of thin gruel, House had to subsist on bread soaked in fat. As a result, he developed scurvy.

Starving and malnourished, House had to drink liquor and then sign an even more onerous indenture. If he didn’t, he’d get thrown overboard. Arriving on land, his owners sold him again and again like a sack of wheat or, more accurately, a slave. He was bled, which undoubtedly made his medical condition worse. He had a sore that festered and he was so diseased that he was hardly fit for service.

The Pig’s Paternity

In New Haven in 1642, a sow gave birth to a piglet with one large eye and no hair on its entire body. The belief prevailed then that sex between species could produce offspring.

The weird animal went before the magistrates, who decided the piglet looked like a servant named George Spencer. Spencer worked on the farm where the piglet’s sow lived, and he had one deformed eye himself.

Spencer confessed to having sex with the sow, then recanted. He confessed again, and recanted again. Finally he went to trial, where he received a guilty verdict. Turning to Biblical law, Leviticus 20:15, the pig was to be killed in Spencer’s presence, and Spencer was to be hanged.

On April 8, 1642, the terrible sentence was carried out on both pig and man.

”These were people who shared the belief system of the time,” Blue said. “It should make us sober about our limitations today.”

This story last updated in 2021.

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Harriet Wilson Describes Racism in 1859. Few Cared.

On April 19, 1859, Harriet Wilson copyrighted and deposited a copy of her novel in the Office of the Clerk of the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts.

She called her novel Our Nig Or, Sketches From the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House . It was the first ever published by an African American on the North American continent. In it, Harriet Wilson told her own story: of her mother’s abandonment, of her indentured servitude to a cruel mistress, of her eventual decision to fight for herself.

The novel got little notice until 1983, when scholar Henry Louis Gates established her identity. The book, wrote Gates,

…stands as a hallmark of literary history as the first novel published by an African American woman in the United States; and it subtly combines compelling storytelling with unflinching indictments of Northern anti-black racism.”

Harriet Wilson

Indentured Servitude

Harriet Adams was born on March 15, 1825 in Milford, N.H., to Margaret Ann Smith, who was white, and Joshua Green, an African American hooper of barrels. Her father died when she was young and her mother abandoned her when she was six at the farm of Nehemiah Hayward Jr. The court bound the orphaned child to the Hayward family as an indentured servant.

Scholars believe Our Nig is a fictionalized account of her abuse by Mrs. Hayward and her daughter. They mocked her, beat her and forced to do hard physical farm labor.

Hutchinson Family Singers

The Haywards had connections to the abolitionists in town and to the Hutchinson Family Singers. In Our Nig, Harriet Wilson vehemently denounced Northern racism and hypocrisy. But she also told a story about a young girl who learned to fight back.

The crucial scene comes in Chapter 10, when her character ‘Frado’ is told to fetch wood by her mistress, ‘Mrs. Bellmont.’

She was sent for wood, and not returning as soon as Mrs. B. calculated, she followed her, and, snatching from the pile a stick, raised it over her.

“Stop!” shouted Frado, “strike me, and I’ll never work a mite more for you;” and throwing down what she had gathered, stood like one who feels the stirring of free and independent thoughts.

By this unexpected demonstration, her mistress, in amazement, dropped her weapon, desisting from her purpose of chastisement. Frado walked towards the house, her mistress following with the wood she herself was sent after. She did not know, before, that she had a power to ward off assault.

Escape

Harriet Wilson turned 18 in 1853 and could finally leave the Haywards. She quickly married a man named Thomas Wilson, who claimed to be a fugitive slave. She had a child, George Mason Wilson, but his father soon abandoned them. He admitted he made up the fugitive slave story to gain support from abolitionists.

Harriet worked as a seamstress and a house servant. She also sold a hair restoration product, but she couldn’t earn enough to take care of her young son. She left him in the Poor Farm. And she wrote her novel, hoping it would support them. In the preface to Our Nig she wrote:

Deserted by kindred, disabled by failing health, I am forced to some experiment which shall aid me in maintaining myself and child without extinguishing this feeble life.

A few weeks after she copyrighted the novel, George C. Rand and Avery published it anonymously. It faded into oblivion, possibly because its indictment of Northern racism offended abolitionists. George then died at the age of seven.

Moving On

Hattie Wilson gave up trying to earn a living in Milford. She moved to Boston, where she became a spiritualist, communicating with the dead. People knew her as “the colored medium.” Harriet gave lectures, either entranced or in her normal state, at camp meetings, theaters and in private homes. She spoke, often humorously, about her life experiences, about childhood education and about labor reform. She traveled to Chicago as a delegate to the American Association of Spiritualists convention.

From 1879 to 1897, she worked as a housekeeper at a Boston boardinghouse on the corner of Berkeley and Tremont streets. She also worked as a healer and nurse. She died at age 75 at the Quincy Hospital in Quincy, Mass.

In 2006, The Harriet Wilson Project raised money to create a bronze sculpture of Harriet Wilson in Milford, N.H.

This story was updated in 2022.

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