A sizable indentured servants' uprising occurred in Virginia in 1661 over the issue of adequate food. The customary ration for servants at the time included meat three times a week. When a planter named Major Goodwin decided to keep his servants on a diet of cornbread and water, discontent followed. Leaders of the servants named Isaac Friend and William Cluton determined to petition the king for redress.
According to one witness, the plot became more troublesome to the plantation owners when Isaac Friend stated, "they would get a matter of Forty of them together and get Gunnes, and he (Cluton) would be the first and lead them and cry as they went along 'who would be for liberty and freed from bondage?' and that there would enough come to them, and they would goe through the country and Kill those that made any opposition, and that they would either be free or die for it". (Punctuation editor's.)
The York county court settled the case by bounding William Cluton over for inciting servants to rebellion, but after several witnesses testified to his good character, the judges discharged him. Isaac Friend escaped punishment as well. The court admonished the masters and magistrates to keep a close watch on their servants. In 1662 a law was passed which restrained servants from "unlawful" meetings under heavy penalties.
The Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in the kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland took place in 1660 when King Charles II returned from exile in continental Europe. The preceding period of the Protectorate and the civil wars came to be known as the Interregnum (1649–1660).
West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943), is a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court holding that the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment protects students from being forced to salute the American flag or say the Pledge of Allegiance in public school. The court's 6–3 decision, delivered by Justice Robert H. Jackson, states "the right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights" are placed "beyond the reach of majorities and officials."
At Trinity College Dublin and the University of Cambridge, a sizar is an undergraduate who receives some form of assistance such as meals, lower fees or lodging during his or her period of study, in some cases in return for doing a defined job.
Mary Dyer was an English and colonial American Puritan-turned-Quaker who was hanged in Boston, Massachusetts Bay Colony, for repeatedly defying a Puritan law banning Quakers from the colony. She is one of the four executed Quakers known as the Boston martyrs.
Isaac Allerton, and his family, were passengers in 1620 on the historic voyage of the ship Mayflower. Allerton was a signatory to the Mayflower Compact. In Plymouth Colony he was active in colony governmental affairs and business and later in trans-Atlantic trading. Problems with the latter regarding colony expenditures caused him to be censured by the colony government and ousted from the colony. He later became a well-to-do businessman elsewhere and in his later years resided in Connecticut.
John Washington was an English merchant, planter, politician and military officer. Born in Tring, Hertfordshire, he subsequently emigrated to the English colony of Virginia, where he became a planter. In addition to serving in the Virginia militia and owning several plantations operated using a combination of indentured and later enslaved labour, Washington also served for many years in the House of Burgesses, representing Westmoreland County. He was the first member of the Washington family who hailed originally from Northeast England to live in North America as well as the paternal great-grandfather of George Washington, the first president of the United States.
Col. Isaac Allerton Jr. was planter, military officer, politician and merchant in colonial America. Like his father, he first traded in New England, and after his father's death, in Virginia. There, he served on the Governor's Council (1687-1691) and for many years in the House of Burgesses, representing Northumberland County and later Westmoreland County.
Anthony Johnson was an Angolan-born man who achieved wealth in the early 17th-century Colony of Virginia. Held as an indentured servant in 1621, he earned his freedom after several years and was granted land by the colony.
Lieutenant-General Josias Fendall, Esq., was the 4th Proprietary Governor of Maryland. He was born in England, and came to the Province of Maryland. He was the progenitor of the Fendall family in America.
Richard Lee I was the first member of the Lee family to live in America. Poor when he arrived in Virginia in 1639 on a ship with the colony's newly reappointed governor and the woman who became his future wife, by the time of his death, Lee may have been both the Virginia Colony's wealthiest inhabitant as well as its largest landholder. Lee had a varied career, for in addition to several important government and military posts, he became a merchant, planter and politician who served one term in the Virginia House of Burgesses as well as managed to negotiate several major political upheavals—both successfully and to his economic advantage.
Slavery in Indiana occurred between the time of French rule during the late seventeenth century and 1826, with a few traces of slavery afterward.
Elizabeth Key Grinstead (or Greenstead) (1630 – January 20, 1665) was one of the first Black people in the Thirteen Colonies to sue for freedom from slavery and win. Key won her freedom and that of her infant son, John Grinstead, on July 21, 1656, in the Colony of Virginia.
Bushrod Washington was an American attorney and politician who served as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1798 to 1829. On the Supreme Court, he was a staunch ally of Chief Justice John Marshall. Washington was a co-founder and president of the American Colonization Society, which promoted the emigration of freed slaves to Africa. The nephew of American Founding Father and President George Washington, he inherited his uncle's papers and Mount Vernon, taking possession in 1802 after the death of Martha Washington, his uncle's widow, and with Marshall's help, published a biography of the first president.
George Mason I was the American progenitor of the prominent American landholding and political Mason family. Mason was the great-grandfather of George Mason IV, a Founding Father of the United States.
Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, owned more than 600 slaves during his adult life. Jefferson freed two slaves while he lived, and five others were freed after his death, including two of his children from his relationship with his slave Sally Hemings. His other two children with Hemings were allowed to escape without pursuit. After his death, the rest of the slaves were sold to pay off his estate's debts.
Slavery in Virginia began with the capture and enslavement of Native Americans during the early days of the English Colony of Virginia and through the late eighteenth century. They primarily worked in tobacco fields. Africans were first brought to colonial Virginia in 1619, when 20 Africans from present-day Angola arrived in Virginia aboard the ship The White Lion.
John Punch was an enslaved African who lived in the colony of Virginia. Thought to have been an indentured servant, Punch attempted to escape to Maryland and was sentenced in July 1640 by the Virginia Governor's Council to serve as a slave for the remainder of his life. Two European men who ran away with him received a lighter sentence of extended indentured servitude. For this reason, some historians consider John Punch the "first official slave in the English colonies," and his case as the "first legal sanctioning of lifelong slavery in the Chesapeake." Some historians also consider this to be one of the first legal distinctions between Europeans and Africans made in the colony, and a key milestone in the development of the institution of slavery in the United States.
Gabriel Jacobs, born about 1650, was the progenitor of the Jacobs family of free African Americans originating in Northampton County, Virginia. Several of his descendants migrated south in the mid-1700s, primarily to southeastern North Carolina. His story and that of his descendants is representative of the experiences of hundreds of other freedmen originating in early southern American colonies.
John Graweere also known as John Gowen was one of the First Africans in Virginia, who was a servant who earned enough money to pay for his son's freedom. He filed a lawsuit to free his son, arguing that he wanted to raise him as a Christian. The court agreed and freed the son.
Jane Webb, also known as Jane Williams was an indentured servant in Northampton County of the Colony of Virginia. She entered a seven-year contract with Thomas Savage so that she could marry an enslaved man named Left. It allowed for children born during those seven years to be bound over to Savage, but after she was free, Webb expected her children to be free. Savage used the courts to his advantage and also used stall tactics to prevent the case from being settled. In the end, Left and their children were enslaved to Savage and his heirs.
