“During the summer of 1663, indentured servants (held for several years of service) in the Poropotank River and Purtan Bay Region plotted an insurrection against their masters. It was prevented when John Berkerhead, servant of Maj. John Smith, of Gloucester County, informed the authorities of the planned uprising. For his “honest affection of the preservation of his country” the Virginia House of Burgesses, on 16 Sept… granted Berkerhead his freedom* and 5,000 pounds of tobacco. In addition the Burgesses proclaimed that 13 Sept. would henceforth annually be kept holy’”

Virginia Historic Marker, N 58

*This possibly indicates that a servant could not simply be freed by a kind master, if such a master there was, and that the House of Burgesses had a built in check on any person [there were anti-slavery pamphleteers at the time] who might decide to buy men just to free them.

A lot of men surely hung from the neck on 13 September, 1663.

Why would they take such a chance, unarmed except for axes and knives, against mounted, armored and pistol-wielding masters backed by tribes of gun-armed Indian warriors, battle-tested Sailors in the employ of The Virginia Company and operating cannon, and armed black slaves?

This link shows the cavalier or "master" of the time:

Why fight a war, and get hanged if you lose, to avoid three years of an apprenticeship learning a trade?

Or was there something more to these “indentured servants" sentences?

Modern convicted felons serving three years and less are not prone to escape attempts let alone rioting or murdering the warden. This is the behavior shown with regularity and en masse only by men who believe they will not survive their sentence.

The fact is, these men were not indentures but “rogues” [homeless, jobless, or penniless men, and sometimes criminals and drunks] who had been rounded up and sold into slavery on order of the Judges of Edinburgh, Scotland in 1662. Some of them would also have been child slaves kidnapped from London, Plymouth, Southampton, Dover and Aberdeen and sold for terms of 16 years for boys and 14 years for girls. Terms were not given for “rogues,” and “vagabonds,” who were all either worked or beaten to death, escaped to the Carolina back country, or won their freedom in the way that John Berkenhead had.

Thirteen years later, in 1676, Nathanial Bacon led a slave revolt against Indian warriors armed by the Governor and in possession of over a ton of gunpowder in their stockade fort, English cavaliers, British sailors and freed black slaves armed as a militia, defeated them all and burned Jamestown to the ground, almost liberating Virginia from its slave masters, but falling ill and dying just before the decisive battle against a force from Maryland, whose rank and file were prepared to desert to his cause.

Hopefully John Berkenhead died a horrible death during that brief war.

About this time the House of Burgesses decided to send 100 men who had worked off their indenture and were now free, to settle in North Carolina and expand the Virginia Colony. Enough freed men were not found, of the tens of thousands that had been shipped into Virginia since 1607, to mount this expedition. Out of roughly 70,000 [estimates range up to 100,000] souls sold into bondage in Virginia over a half century, not 100 could be found who had won their freedom and still lived.

Three years?

The link to this partially falsified monument inscription is here: