of Turkish nationality.[1] Jonathan Newell of York County owned four Turkish servants, whose value was placed at the very high figure of ninety-five pounds sterling.[2] The inventory of the estate of George Jones of Rappahannock included a Turk whose term had still seven years to run. In the last decade of the century, a suit was entered in York by Mathew Catillah, probably an Algerian, for the recovery of his freedom, his mistress retaining him beyond his twenty-fourth year.[3]
The greater number of the Indian servants were children, many of whom were of a very tender age, the explanation of this circumstance lying in the fact that Indian parents were always at liberty to bind out their offspring as apprentices. Doubtless, too, it was recognized by the planters that the younger the Indian, the greater the probability that he might be educated to become tractable and useful. The grown persons of the race, when reduced to this condition, were in most cases unmanageable, and hardly worth the constant attention required to control them. In every agreement which an Indian parent in disposing of his son or daughter entered into, a covenant had to be inserted providing that the child should be instructed in the Christian religion. The contract, as a whole, was to be sworn to before two justices of the peace in order to exclude the possibility of collusion.[4] The regulation was established and strictly enforced that
- ↑ Records of Lower Norfolk, original vol. 1646-1651, f. p. 50. A Turk was imported by George Menefie in 1635. See Va. Land Patents, vol. I, p. 200.
- ↑ Records of York County, vol. 1675-1684, p. 142, Va. State Library.
- ↑ Ibid., vol. 1694-1697, p. 135, Va. State Library. References to Portuguese servants will be found in Records of York County, vol. 1687-1691, p. 558, Va. State Library, and in Records of Northampton County, original vol. 1664-1674, f. p. 138.
- ↑ Hening’s Statutes, vol. I, p. 410.
