American History

Robert J. Steinfeld in The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350-1870 challenges conventional wisdom regarding the sources, the functions, and the nature of indentured servitude in the American colonies.

These challenges are integral to his larger argument that free labor was fundamentally an American achievement rather than a European achievement and that free labor actually evolved from indentured servitude in the American colonies as a uniquely American invention.  In support of these arguments, Steinfeld traces indentured servitude in the American colonies to a variety of master-servant relationships from medieval times and implies that free labor as it is known today might not have developed as quickly absent the indentured servant relationship as it was exported to the American colonies from England most specifically and as it developed in a uniquely American context.  The conventional wisdom is that England in post-medieval times had moved toward its own form of free labor and away from the types of servitude historically associated with master-servant relationships. Steinfeld, however, argues that this assertion is patetntly false, stating that in in seventeenth-century England, the nearly universal legal form of consensual manual labor was not free labor but unfree labor. English law made the violation of most labor agreements punishable by imprisonment.  Labor agreements in England, for example, were written in such a manner as to effectively negate the consensual nature of the employment arrangements which they memorialized.

An English worker might sign a contract in order to trade wages for employment, but once that employment contract was signed the worker was effectively indentured because violations of that work contract could lead to imprisonment.  Steinfeld thus contributes some interesting and new perspectives because, rather than viewing indentured servitude in the American colonies as an American anachronism, he firmly roots this indentured servitude in English labor practices and thereby demonstrates that the creation or the invention of a more complete type of free labor did not in fact occur until indentured servitude became eliminated in the Americas.  Steinfelds perspective about indentured servitude in the American colonies thus deviates to a considerable extant from previously accepted assumptions.  First, he argues and supports his argument that free or consensual labor never really existed in England or Europe at the time because of draconian labor agreements which rendered the employees duties compulsory because of threats of imprisonment for contractual breaches by the employees.  Second, he argues that indentured servitude in the American colonies was firmly rooted in English and European labor traditions based on master-servant relationships dating back to medieval times.  The American colonies, as a result, could not be said to have resurrected indentured servitude as an economic tool because the labor institution was directly exported though modified from England.  Finally, because of the aforementioned alterations to conventional wisdom, Steinfeld concludes his revisionist point of view by characterizing the evolution of free labor as an American achievement rather than a process initiated by England or other European states.

In terms of his normative viewpoints, Steinfeld seems to view the incorporation of indentured servitude into the economies of the American economies as an historical inevitability and as a valuable contribution toward eventual revolution in American against the English masters.  Though ostensibly consensual, premised on the notion that new migrants to the American colonies signed up for these indentured servitude arrangements voluntarily, Steinfeld provides a wealth of historical data to argue that many American colonialists viewed indentured servitude as a lesser form of slavery.  Specifically, From the outset, some people denounced it as slavery. Thomas Best, for example, wrote from Virginia in 1623 that my Master Atkins hath sold me for a 150 sterling like a damnd slave.  

Indentured servants took advantage of the labor arrangements for short term benefits such as the opportunity to migrate to the American colonies and the ability to provide for immediate necessities such as shelter and food.  The deeper sentiments, as Steinfeld consistently points out, concern a deep-seated resentment regarding English authoritarianism and how this authoritarianism manifest itself in the unequal positions of masters and servants in the form of indentured servitude.  The roots of resentment and rebellion that would eventually give rise to the American revolution, though frequently attributed to unfair forms of taxation, can also be attributed to the stubborn and rigid forms of indentured servitude in the American colonies.  American colonialists compelled to function as indentured servants clearly understood the speeches about freedom and liberty intimately given the constraints imposed by this form of labor.  This viewpoint, linking the resentments caused by indentured servitude to a growing desire for broader freedoms and anti-English sentiments, deepens and enriches an understanding of the underlying causes of the American split from England.

Second, Steinfeld also frames indentured servitude in the American colonies as functioning as a necessary and intermediate step toward a truer type of free labor in America and the world more generally.  This assertion that free labor was effectively invented in the American colonies is supported by Steinfelds extensive discussion regarding attempts to revive the indentured servitude institution after free labor started becoming an uniquely American aspiration at one point, for instance, he notes that The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Companys attempt to lower its labor costs by reviving indentured servitude failed because it could not hold its imported laborers to their contracts.   Free labor, once it started to become established in the American colonies, was an irreversible trend that could not be stopped by English-style master-servant labor contracts.

In conclusion, Steinfelds book is quite valuable because it demonstrates through the use of plentiful primary sources that free labor was fundamentally an American creation rooted in attempts to break free of the rigid master-servant relationships that gave rise to institutions such as indentured servitude.  His perspectives also better illuminate a number of historical situations and even current events because he persuasively characterizes Europe as being resistant to freedoms in ways that sought to preserve the master-servant relationships whereas the trends in the American colonies tended to desire a dismantling of the master-servant relationships in all aspects of colonial life.  Even modern day references to the Tea Party in America, for example, seem to characterize American rebellion as a sort of anti-tax sentiment whereas a careful examination of Steinfelds book might root the deeper American rebellion in a distrust of the remnants of the master-servant relationship that continue to be manifest in struggles between governmental authority and individual freedom.  In a sense therefore, although the book is primarily concerned with indentured servitude and the movement toward free labor, much of the work transcends these issues and speaks to the very essence of the uniquely American struggle between masters and servants.