1678: Virginia. School teacher, Thomas Hellier, who was enslaved as a field worker, was tortured by his master’s wife and retaliated by slaughtering the entire family with an axe. [Thomas Hellier is the personal hero of James LaFond and Mescaline Franklin].

1678: Virginia. Planter Charles Grimlin, lived up to his surname, when he beat his white servant girl to death and was found guilty and immediately pardoned.

1678: Virginia. A white woman “of low origins,”[meaning she was a former white slave or the daughter of a white slave] went before the same judge that pardoned Charles Grimlin and was found guilty of slaying her wealthy husband. For which this most equitable judge sentenced her to be “burned alive” according to the law.

1679: Virginia. A census of escaped white servants found them to be living at subsistence levels, farming the less fertile hill country. The king orders Governor Culpeper to arm the servants as a militia.

1680: Great Britain, 10,000 poor men, women and children, sold into slavery.

1680: England, shipments of slaves suffered death rates of 25 to 50 percent en route to the plantations.

Circa 1680: A sugar plantation report states, “the colonyes were plentiful supplied with negro and Christian servants, which are the nerves and sinews of a plantation.”

1680: Maryland, of five thousand indentured servants bound over since 1670, fewer than thirteen hundred were eligible to collect their fifty acre “freedom dues”. Fourteen hundred of these five thousand did not survive.

1680: New York. In their Journal of a Voyage to New York and a Tour of Several American Colonies, Peter Sluyter and Jaspar Danckaerts described how a master made his dying servant dig his own grave in which he was laid a few days later.

1681: Virginia. Governor Culpeper writes in the margins of the King’s two-year old instructions to form a militia that, “Masters have arms. Servants not trusted with.”

1681: The independent ‘Swedish Nation,’ until recently living under Dutch protection, loses its autonomy when William Penn is granted his colonial charter.

1682: London. King Chares II proclaims that no indenture would be valid unless signed in England by a magistrate and that 14-year-olds and younger could not be indentured without parental consent. A group of English Planters complained that this would not leave them with enough whites in the colonies to “govern the Negroes,” indicating that the planter class had now determined to use former white slaves to supervise and police fresh black slaves, an understandable divide and conquer strategy in the wake of bacon’s highly successful white-black alliance.

1682: Devon, England, four men enslaved by judicial decree for homelessness.

1682: Virginia. Tobacco cutting riots are the last joint white uprising in Virginia. Poor Virginians soon begin migrating to Pennsylvania and points West, in an attempt to distance themselves from the plantation economy, and, like imitative abused children, to expand the plantation economy to un-cleared lands with themselves as the slave masters.

1682: Pennsylvania, white slavery instituted.

1683: Virginia. With the exodus of white servants and freemen to the north Virginia only requires a militia force of 20 men!

1685: Scottish “Monmouth rebels” sold into slavery.

1685: July 2nd, Rappahannock county, Virginia. An unnamed orphan complained to the County court that a certain Major Hawkins had enslaved him had been remanded to the custody of the same Major Hawkins by the court.

1686: Virginia. French visitor describes the Virginia gentry as addicted to gambling.

1686: London, England, the Halls of Justice, King Charles II ordered the enslavement and transportation to the colonies of Presbyterians and Scottish covenanters.

1686: Virginia. Six in seven whites are slaves, referred to by the Governor as “the Giddy Multitude.”

1686: Maryland. Unrest among servants.

1688: August, British Caribbean. Sir Thomas Montgomery wrote a letter to the Lords of Trades and Plantations, complaining about the cruel nature of the treatment of

white servants, claiming that it was more “barbarous”

than the cruelties suffered at the hands of Muslim slavers in Algiers.

1688: New England. Indian warriors and French troops attack the frontier.

1689: January 8. New England. Joshua Moodey writes about the “dreadful, lengthy, wasting Indian war.”

1689: April 18, New England. Rebels topple the New England government and jail the governor.

1689: New York. Leisler’s Rebellion. Captain Leisler assumes the governorship of New York.

1690: February 12, New England. The General Court rules that a man may become a freeman if he possesses good character, paid his county tax, and owned a house and land worth at least six pounds. In March and April 917 men enrolled under these conditions.

1690: Maine. New England troops serving against the Indians remain unpaid.

1690: Charles County, Maryland, the county court decreed that seven white slaves had been illegally kidnapped, but further ruled that these men should continue as the property of their masters based on “the custom of the country.”

1690: New England. Unrest among New England troops and “rage and fury of the people,” were attributed to the long-running Indian war and injured and maimed soldiers who had not been compensated.

1691: Leisler was executed upon the arrival of the new governor sent from England.

1692: New England. The Salem Witch Trials.

1692: Maryland. The “independence,” an uprising of protestant servants and freed man unsuccessfully revolted against the catholic governor.

1695: Maryland. Tobias Stansbury receives a patent for a plantation in Baltimore County in what will become the neighborhood of Loch Raven Village, where this author coaches boxing. The house still stands.

1699: Virginia. Runaways are made to wear strings of bells and iron collars. Slave hunters received 1000 lbs of tobacco paid for in labor by the returned runaways. Twenty to thirty nine lashes were the usual preliminary beating upon capture. White slaves and poor white freemen are noted as resenting black slaves

1699: The House of Burgesses declares that black slaves should not be Christianized, another successful measure to keep black and white servants separate.

1700: Massachusetts. White servants, formerly whipped for running away, were to be whipped again if found away from their master’s farm without a note.

1700: North Carolina. The mountains of North Carolina were known in Virginia as “the refuge of runaways”.

1700: Maryland. John Dandy beat to death his servant boy and threw him in the creek.

1701: Calendar of State Papers Colonial Series; America and West Indies, 919, Pg. 565, “The spiriting away of Englishmen without their consent and selling them for slaves, which hath been a practice very frequent and known by the name of kidnapping.”

1702: Virginia. French Protestant traveler, Francis Louis Michel reported that there were ‘no poor people” in Virginia at all, meaning that there were no poor free people. Every person was either a slave or a master, or among the small class of skilled craftsmen and overseers that could receive good commissions from the wealthy planters. This was peace achieved in Virginia.

1703: In Carolina, one in four slaves is an Indian.

1705: West Indies, Pere Labat describes in his memoirs “white slaves.”

1705: Virginia. White slavery was legalized in the case of convicted criminals for use as labor and for fighting Indians.

1707: New Engalnd. Daniel Hayes, then aged twenty-two, was captured by the indigenous people and carried off to Canada. The capture was witnessed, and a rescue party raised, but the group did not catch up with the captors. He was tied up each night, and bound to saplings. It took thirty days to reach Canada, at which point Hayes was forced to run the gauntlet. Near the end of the gauntlet, he hid in a wigwam to avoid an attempted blow by a club. The woman in the wigwam declared that the house was sacred, and having lost a husband and son to a war, adopted Hayes as her son. He remained for several years, attending to the woman. Eventually, he was sold to a Frenchman, who learned that Hayes had skill as a weaver, so put him to work in that business. Hayes managed to earn enough to buy his freedom after two years. He then returned to Simsbury, settled down on a farm and married. He became prominent, both in civil affairs as well as the church at Salmon Brook

1708: Maryland, a poem composed by kidnapped English girls ends with this line: “But things are changed, kidnap’d and fool’d.”

1713: Boston, New England. At age eight, Benjamin Franklin is indentured to the church by his father, who, “…intended to devote me, as the tithe [church tax] of his sons, to the service of the Church.”

1715: Scottish Jacobites sold into slavery in the Americas.

1717: South Carolina. “The ownership of one white man,” was proposed as a qualification for election to the South Carolina Assembly.

1717: Boston, New England. At age 12 Benjamin Franklin is indentured to his brother James.

1720: July, Bristol Parrish, Virginia. John Sadler, born a bastard to Margaret Micabin, servant to David Crawley, was bound over to Mister Crawley for the customary thirty one years.

1721: Annapolis, Maryland. A band of white servants were arrested while attempting to take the arsenal for use in an uprising against the Planters.

1721: Boston, New England. Benjamin Franklin is bonded to his oldest brother as a servant by his father, who does retain patriarchal authority and is often asked to judge the treatment of Benjamin by his brother.

1723: England. the Waltham Act classified 200 minor offenses as Capital crimes.

1722: Boston, New England. Benjamin Franklin is beaten often and severely by his older brother and master, who he must obey, and work for free of wages until his last year [age 21] in which he will be paid a journeyman’s wage. In old age Franklin will reflect that his brother’s cruel treatment of him “…might be a means of impressing me with that aversion to arbitrary power that has stuck to me through my whole life.”

1723: September, Boston. Benjamin Franklin escapes from bondage and flees to New York and Philadelphia, where he is questioned by a Quaker who suspects him of being a runaway. Franklin’s account of the perils and suspicion surrounding any free young man indicate that New England, New York and Pennsylvania were tightly policed slave states.

1726: Virginia. A statute tacking on the costs of runaway servants translated into a term of years equivalent to the cost of his recovery.

1728: Ireland. James, heir to the earldom of Annelsey at age 12, is kidnapped by his uncle and shipped to a Delaware plantation to live out his life as a slave. This story seems to have formed the basis for Robert Louis Stevenson’s story, Kidnapped, which was set in Stevenson’s homeland of Scotland. The resulting legal case generated voluminous court documents of which Stevenson was an avid reader.

1730?: Servant Edward Hill wrote “we live in the fearfullest age that ever Christians lived in.”

1730?: Pennsylvania. Henry Carman, kidnapped in London at age seventeen, made servant Alice Chambers pregnant and was punished with an additional seven years of servitude.

1730?: Virginia. Henry Smith raped two of his female servants and beat to death his elderly white servant.

1731: August. Chester County, Pennsylvania. Lawrence Finney was sentenced to an additional seven years and eleven months of forced labor for attempting to escape his master.

1731: September, New Jersey. The American Weekly Mercury reported that a servant boy drowned himself rather than suffer the beatings from his master.

1732: June. Chester County, Pennsylvania. Runaway white man, William Fisher was sentenced to an additional six years and 250 days of hard labor.

1735: Scotland. shipping of kidnapped children to the plantations is formalized on a large scale.

1738: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Dr. Thomas Graeme reported to the Capital Council of Pennsylvania that if two shiploads of white slaves were allowed to land, it might cause an epidemic.