In the town of Little York, New Jersey, in July of 1824, a boy named William was born to Isaac and Eliza-Metlar Garrison. The Garrisons would have a total of six children, five of them girls, with the youngest, Matilda Tillman, passing away in Rochester New York in 1923.

Their son's name was William, who Isaac—who was a raging alcoholic who also fathered children with two other women—"bound out" to local farmers to whom he owed debts. William worked to pay off his drunken father's debts until, at age 16, he shipped out on a whaling ship, either from Newark or Cape May, never to return to the cruel man who fathered and enthralled him. The treatment of William by his father may be surmised based on his extreme aggression and brutality in later life, which would make him an American frontier legend.

The bond-servant role of sons, in a world where debt was a crime and children were more often than not unloved, was mirrored for the opposite gender in the practice of selling daughters as brides to widowed men, which was the fate of many young women who found themselves being shipped to the Plantations—later the United States of America—to live out their lives as the property of an older man. However, after the formation of the United States, sons would only be bound-out until age 21. The common notion that indentured servants served for only seven years, and in the case of child-selling, orphan enslavement and the taking of the children of the poor by authorities in England, the practice itself was based on the fact that the nuclear family was, first and foremost, an economic unit and that the parents had a right to the labor and produce of that labor, until the youth reached the age of majority at 21. With malnourished children generally not becoming fit for hard labor until age 14, seven years became the practical default term for the enslavement of a white child, a term, which in reality, was a practical minimum, being extended through penalties for misbehavior or by the practice of kidnapping or bonding out younger children.