Manners and Customs in Colonial Days 95 



whose interests would be favorably affected by the disappear- 

 ance of the seized person. ■ The person whose services were 

 disposed of became legally bound to the buyer, who thus 

 became the owner, or master, of the bond-servant until the 

 expiration of the term of service, when the servant became 

 free. The same laws and penalties, practically, applied to a 

 runaway bond-servant as to a runaway slave. 



The class of indentured servants was not composed of the 

 vicious and the wicked. Most of them were poor and unfor- 

 tunate and thought they could do better in a new land than 

 in the thickly settled countries of Europe; sometimes pique 

 drove them to the step, sometimes disappointed love, or dis- 

 sipation, or disappointment. But there was another class of 

 servants composed of criminals and malefactors who were sold 

 into the plantations for life or for a certain period of time 

 as determined by the judges who sentenced them. Their 

 services were sold to the highest bidder as in the case of the in- 

 dentured servant. When we recall the number of crimes that 

 were capital in England, even up to the nineteenth century, we 

 may believe that those who escaped the hangman were not 

 usually guilty of what we should consider in these days very 

 heinous crimes. Of these transported men and women, com- 

 paratively few reached New York; there w~as a greater demand 

 for them in the southern colonies and in the West Indies. 



In regard to crimes and misdemeanors, the English laws 

 prevailed, with such additions and modifications as the con- 

 ditions of a new country would require. There was the same 

 long, ghastly list of capital crimes; and the stocks, the pillory, 

 and the whipping-post stood always ready for the minor 

 offenders. In the court records of the borough-town of West- 



1 The uncle of David Balfour, in Stevenson's story, Kidnapped, at- 

 tempted to get rid of his nephew in this way. 



