order, and he was instructed to have a bill introduced in the Assembly to confirm it.[1] After this, no attempt was made in the seventeenth century to thrust upon the Colony the presence of men who had been condemned in England for political offences.
The same reasons which led the landowners during the existence of the Company to prefer youths as servants continued to influence them when that corporation had been abolished. The author of the New Description of Virginia merely gave expression to the general feeling of the planters when he stated that the laborers who were most desired were persons who had just passed their sixteenth year, and all the evidence confirms the correctness of his remark that many thousand of this age could have found immediate employment in the Colony.[2] So great was the demand for these youthful laborers that in one year alone, 1627, fourteen or fifteen hundred children who had been gathered up in different parts of England were sent to Virginia.[3] In 1629, the Governor took steps to obtain a large number from the city of London. This demand continued during the remaining portion of the century.
The youthfulness of a majority of the laborers who emigrated to the Colony is revealed in various ways. In 1657, the ship Conquer was lying in the Thames ready to sail to Virginia, having nineteen indented servants among its passengers. Information as to their ages has been preserved. The average age was nineteen.[4] The law of Virginia defining tithables provided that the number of the years of the youths brought into the Colony
- ↑ British State Papers, Colonial Entry Book, No. 97, pp. 172-174; Sainsbury Abstracts for 1685, p. 207, Va. State Library.
- ↑ New Description of Virginia, p. 8, Force’s Historical Tracts, Vol. II.
- ↑ See Letter quoted in Neill’s Virginia Carolorum, pp. 46, 47.
- ↑ British State Papers, Colonial, Vol. XIII, No. 29, I; Sainsbury Abstracts vol. 1640-1691, pp. 170, 171, Va. State Library.
