Rensselaer Republican, Volume 12, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 June 1880 — Colonial Life in Maryland. [ARTICLE]

Colonial Life in Maryland.

Colonial society in the American Provthe breaktag of political ties with the mother countiy. We have no good general picture of this life either in historyor fiction, nor fa it easy to make one.. The subject would, need to be treated in compartments, for society and social customs differed vridely in the different provinces. The daily life and daily thoughts of the gentlemen of Mew England were as unlike tboseof gentlemen in the New Netherlandaor Pennsylvania as theirs, in turn, were different from the ideas and daily tatarerts of the cultivated classes on the shores of the Chesapeake, or neare^ to the tropics under a southern sun * The social conditions of a.country are always baaed on three things—Us climate, its means of communication, and its labor system. In tfce two former, Maryland was favored above all her slater provinces, but her labor system differed from that of the communities around her. Each vessel

that passed the capes, and found its way up her rivers and broad creeks to the planters’very doors, brought “servants” nto thecolonyaapart of its assorted cargo. These servants were of three kinds^ —convicts transported for seven years, the proceeds of whose sale went to the British Government; indentured servants, bound to a Maryland master, if minors till they came of age, or it adults for a service of five years; and freewillers or redemption era, who might pay their passage, if they could, in two weeks from their arrival, but who, in default of such payment, were sold by the captain of the ship which brought them, tor four years, to defray their charges • As soon as the captain’s arrival was made known, planters in want ot servants flocked down to the vessel The whole gang was then paraded and inspected, after which a great deal of chaffering took place pver apple-toddy - and old Jamacia ruin. The prisoners were all obliged to claim skill m some department When a man knew . nothing useful, the captain usually entered him on hte manifest as a gardener. The favorite purchase was of toys and girls; the next of convicts, because they served seven years; while the poor redemptioner, deceived by the crimps and agents of the traffic into the expectation that he would step ashore to ease and fortune, found himself relegated to the roughest tasks and hardest treatment of slavery. Very frequently schoolmasters were sought out of these arrivals. There were no schools whatever in operstioa in 'the Colony till 1728, and as a worthy .clergyman in 1760 remarked, in a sermon delivered at Port Tobacco: “At least two. thirds of the little education we receive is derived from instructors who are either indentured servants or transported felons. -Not a ship arrives, either with redemptianers* or convicts, in which schoolmasters are not as regularly advertised for sale as weavers, tailors, or any other trade; with little other difference that I can hear of, excepting; perhaps, that the former do not usually f’ptch so good a price as the latter.”