ommerce.[36]

In Virginia the life of the community depended upon agriculture;
therefore slavery was thought to be its labor prop and was joyfully
welcomed and earnestly defended. In Massachusetts and New York trading
was an elemental factor, and whatever swelled the volume and profits was
accounted a blessing to the community and was held justified. Laws, the
judges who enforced them, and the spirit of the age reflected not so
much the morality of the people as their trading necessities. The one
was often mistaken for the other.

THE BONDING OF LABORERS.

This condition was shown repeatedly in the trade conflicts of the
competing merchants, their system of bonded laborers and in the long
contests between the traders of the colonies and those of England,
culminating in the Revolution. In the churches the colonists prayed to
God as the Father of all men and showed great humility. But in actual
practice the propertied men recognized no such thing as equality and
dispensed with humility. The merchants imitated in a small way the
seignorial pretensions of the land nabobs. Few merchants there were who
did not deal in negro slaves, and few also were there who did not have a
bonded laborer or two, whose labor they monopolized and whose career was
their property for a long term of years. Limited bondage, called
apprenticeship, was general.

Penniless boys, girls and adults were impressed by sheer necessity into
service. Nicholas Auger, 10 years old, binds himself, in 1694, to
Wessell Evertson, a cooper, for a term of nine years, and swears that
"he will truly serve the commandments of his master Lawfull, shall do no
hurt to his master, nor waste nor purloin his goods, nor lend them to
anybody at Dice, or other unlawful game, shall not contract matrimony,
nor frequent taverns, shall not absent himself from his master's service
day or night." In return Evertson will teach Nicholas the trade of a
cooper, give him "apparell, meat, drink and bedding" and at the
expiration of the term will supply him with "two good suits of wearing
apparell from head to foot." Cornelius Hendricks, a laborer, binds
himself in 1695 as an apprentice and servant to John Molet for five
years. Hendricks is to get L3 current silver money and two suits of
apparell--one for holy days, the other for working days, and also board
is to be provided. Elizabeth Morris, a spinster, in consideration of her
transportation from England to New York on the barkenti