THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

https://doi.org/10.1080/0268117X.2022.2127864

Between the galley and plantation: the rhetorical

construction of English servants in the seventeenth century
Brian Smith
Political Science and International Relations, Nazarbayev University, Astana, Kazakhstan

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This paper seeks to show that due to the transformations of the Received 8 June 2022
working class in seventeenth-century England, a discursive tradi­ Accepted 20 September 2022
tion emerged in devotional literature and servant manuals that KEYWORDS
valorized a specific form of servitude. By embodying the will of English labour; servant
their masters, servants were free. By resisting their master’s will, manuals; plantation slavery;
they resembled either African slaves forced to toil on the planta­ galley slavery
tions or galley slaves compelled to row for Muslim masters. These
racialized forms of slavery were designed to generate a powerful
intuition of idealized servitude. Servants who complained or those
who sought to become hirelings, or independent free labourers,
risked becoming worse than a slave. In short, the imagery of planta­
tion and galley slaves was strategically utilized to construct a pliable
and obedient working class in England. In short, by accepting one’s
station and willingly submitting to a master English servants per­
formed Christian liberty.

Introduction
A great deal has been written about the origins of racial slavery in the Americas.1 By the
1660s, slavery in Barbados, Jamaica, and South Carolina was almost universally under­
stood to be African slavery in contrast to white, ‘Christian’ servitude. Though servants
and slaves had originally possessed a much closer social status – indeed, the words
servant and slave were often used interchangeably in the early seventeenth century –
over time there was a concerted effort to stratify and rank those in the lower orders of
society. It is well known that the colonial strategy of racial differentiation was one of
divide and conquer, to accentuate distinctions between white and Black servants to
prevent collaborative resistance against their masters.2 Many legal reforms in the latter
half of the seventeenth century explicitly served this function.3 For instance, in 1661, the

CONTACT Brian Smith [email protected] Political Science and International Relations, Nazarbayev
University
1
Beckles, White Servitude and Black Slavery; Billings, ‘The Law of Servants and Slaves in Seventeenth-Century Virginia’;
Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery; Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness; Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the
Americas; Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia; Guasco, Slaves and Englishmen; Menin, ‘Introduction: Slavery and the
Racialization of Humanity’. Jordon, White Over Black; Patterson, Slavery and Social Death; Morgan, American Slavery,
American Freedom; Sweet, ‘The Iberian Roots of American Racist Though.’
2
See Thandeka, ‘The Whiting of Euro-Americans.’
3
The racialization of slavery was further solidified in the reactionary politics that ensued from Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676.
Parent, Foul Means, 85.
© 2022 The Seventeenth Century
2 B. SMITH

Barbados Assembly passed a slave code which sought ‘to create clear distinctions between
the status of “Christian servants” and that of “Negro slaves”.’4 Christian servants in the
colonies were coming to be seen as Anglo-Europeans who were indentured for a specific
period, whereas Africans were increasingly seen as perpetual slaves. As one seventeenth-
century chronicler of Caribbean slavery, Richard Blome, explains, ‘What I have said in
this Treatise of Barbadoes concerning their Servants, and Slaves, may be said in that of
Jamaica; for the Servants, and Slaves, are their greatest stock; those they Buy, the Servants
for a Tearm of years, the Negroes forever’.5 From the mid-seventeenth century, Rugemer
concludes, colonial legislatures ‘worked to establish racial distinction and the practices of
New World mastery for England’s Caribbean empire’.6
This racial stratification had a profound effect on the socio-legal construction of the
labouring classes in the Americas.7 What is less understood, however, is the degree to
which the racialization of slavery in the colonies became infused with the servant and
wage-earner discourses in the metropole.8 Even though servants and hired workers were
routinely classified as slaves of a kind by early liberal theorists, wage labourers increas­
ingly came to be seen as occupying a status that was qualitatively different from slavery.9
An emerging free-labour discourse in this period characterized hired workers as ‘con­
tracting’ with their masters.10 These social transformations generated a great deal of
anxiety among the upper classes, and as such, this precipitated new strategies of control
and domination. This paper seeks to show that the rhetorical strategy employed by the
English elite, articulated in the many Christian devotionals and servant manuals of the
period, was designed to valorize a particular form of servitude. English servants who
willingly consented to the authority of a master were morally superior to both slaves, who
under the threat of violence were compelled to work, and ‘hirelings’, those disloyal
‘market spirits’ who dangerously experimented with self-governance. In short, it was
better to be a servant, that is, a person who willingly accepted their station, than a slave or
hireling.
In the broadest sense, this paper will argue that there are two components to the
racialized discourse of slavery that found its way into the many devotionals and workers’
manuals that gave expression to the duties of English servants. First, and to a lesser
extent, the imagery of African slavery in the Americas was turned back onto the
metropole to help construct a pliable, subservient, and grateful social class of white
servants. Hired workers were enjoined to remember that they were not African slaves

4
Rugemer, ‘The Development of Mastery and Race in the Comprehensive Slave Codes of the Greater Caribbean During the
Seventeenth Century,’ 431.
5
Blome, A Description of the Islands of Jamaica, 93. For a similar claim, see Rochefort, The History of the Carriby-Islands, 200.
6
Rugemer, ‘The Development of Mastery and Race in the Comprehensive Slave Codes of the Greater Caribbean During the
Seventeenth Century,’ 433.
7
As David Roediger argues, there was a concerted strategy to cultivate white unity among the lower classes starting in the
seventeenth century, even if the category of race was not entirely coherent or systematic. These early efforts eventually
led to the construction of the ‘white worker’. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, 20.
8
With some exceptions, though these do not touch explicitly on this subject. See Puckrein, Little England; and Amussen,
Caribbean Exchanges.
9
As Roxann Wheeler notes, ‘in the mid-seventeenth century, the distinctions between a slave and an indentured servant
were not always as significant as the similarities in terms of their value and treatment as individual labor units and as
overall workforce’. Wheeler, The Complexion of Race, 85.
10
As Carole Pateman argues, the wage contract was not an agreement between equals; rather, it defined the terms of
social hierarchy and domination. Pateman, The Sexual Contract, 59. See also Eltis, ‘Labour and Coercion in the English
Atlantic World from the Seventeenth to the Early Twentieth Century.’
 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 3

forced to work on colonial plantations. At the very least, unlike African slaves, who were
often described as soulless and incapable of an inner life, servants could locate Christian
freedom within. Secondly, and much more pervasively, servant discourses in England
frequently raised the spectre of white or ‘Christian’ slavery, both figuratively, as
a metaphor for slavery to sin, and literally, as slavery to ‘Turkish’ masters.11 Living
recalcitrantly is both literally a manifestation of sin and it resembles the coercion of
Christian servants to Muslim masters.
The line between this figurative and literal usage of slavery in this discourse was often
blurred, making it difficult to meaningfully distinguish between the two. For instance,
one seventeenth-century commentator, Robert Persons, writes, ‘If you should see
a Christian-man in slavery under the great Turk, tyed in a Galley by the legs with chains,
there to serve by rowing for ever, you could not but take compassion of his case’.12 Part of
what made this enslavement so miserable, Persons continues, is that Christians were
being enslaved ‘to a more base Creature than is a Turk’, namely, a life of sin.13
Enslavement to the Turk was wrong because he was a ‘base creature’, but being bound
to a life of sin was worse.14 The best way to dramatize the peril of sin was to juxtapose it
with something that would evoke a powerfully visceral reaction, captivity under the
‘barbarous’ Turk.15 Another author in this period, Thomas Brooks, likewise notes, ‘We
hate the Turk, for selling Christians for Slaves, and what shall we think then of those who
sell themselves, their precious Souls, for toys and trifles that cannot profit’.16 As much as
one should despise the ‘unnatural’ and unjust enslavement of Christians to Turkish
masters, one should hate enslavement to sin even more. As can be seen, this metaphor
did double work. Raising the spectre of Christian slavery was a poignant way to
dramatically illustrate the degradation of the sinful servant’s soul, and much like the
discourse on African slavery, it also reminded hired servants that their situation could be
much worse.
It is worth remembering that in the modern era ‘galley slavery’, a form of captivity
where one was forced to row the oars of galleys, had seen something of a revival. Galleys
were used by France, Spain, Turkey, and the Barbary states.17 In places like France, these
slaves were often criminals, sometimes prisoners of war.18 However, in the English
servant discourse this image was repeatedly deployed specifically to evoke the spectre
of Christian slavery to Muslim masters.19 The menace of Christian slavery proliferated in
the literature of this period as can be seen in the dozens of first hand liberation
accounts.20 In a popular account of his journey to the Levant, the well-known

11
For an account of the taxonomical shift from ‘Christian’ to ‘white,’ see Gerbner, Christian Slavery, 89.
12
Persons, A Christian Directory Guiding Men, 519.
13
Ibid., 519–520.
14
In the seventeenth century, ‘Turk’ was generally synonymic with ‘Muslim’.
15
For a sense of how the Turk was perceived in this period, see Ҫirakman, From the ‘Terror of the World’ to the ‘Sick Man of
Europe.’
16
Brooks, Apples of Gold for Young Men and Women, 144.
17
For more on the revival of galley ships in this period, see Guilmartin, Gunpowder and Galleys..
18
Though, they also purchased slaves. See Bamford, ‘The Procurement of Oarsmen for French Galleys, 1660–1748.’
19
The proliferation of this rhetoric should not be confused with the questionable scholarly effort to insinuate (intentional
or not) parity between institutions of European and African enslavement. See Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters;
Milton, White Gold; and Davis, Holy War and Human Bondage.
20
See Fox, The Admirabl Deliverance of 266 Christians; Knight, A Relation of Seaven Yeares Slaverie Under the Turkes of
Algeire; Phelps, A True Account of the Captivity of Thomas Phelps; and Brooks, Barbarian Cruelty Being A True History of the
Distressed Condition of the Christian Captives Under the Tyranny of Mully Ishmael.
4 B. SMITH

seventeenth-century French travel writer, Jean de Thévenot describes slave markets at

Khan el-Khalili in Cairo; ‘White Slaves are sold there, aswel Women and Girls, As Men
and Boys’.21 It was widely reported that Barbary pirates raided European coasts to collect
and sell galley slaves.22 As the seventeenth-century historian, Joseph Morgan, explains,
the Turks provided the Muslim communities of the Barbary Coasts with ‘Galeots’ which
could seat forty-eight rowers, and that ‘incredible Damages have been continually done
to the Christians on the Coasts and Islands within and without the Mediterranean’. He
continues by noting that the main ‘prey they hunt for is Slaves’.23
In the seventeenth century, the galley slave was transforming into a powerful rheto­
rical symbol of Christian slavery.24 This is clearly seen in the image’s frequent occurrence
in the devotional literature and servant manuals of this period.25 If the enslavement of
Africans was being described as a justified and even benevolent institution,26 galley
slavery came to signify the unnatural and unjust subordination of white Christians to
Muslim masters.27 As noted above, the galley slave could represent both figurative slavery
to sin and the literal enslavement to an ‘infidel’ master. As will be seen, both these images
were used to construct a pliable servant class. To avoid becoming like (or worse than)
a galley slave, servants should obey their masters, humbly submitting to their will.
This two-part process of racialization of slavery – African enslavement to white
Christian masters and European enslavement to Muslim masters – helped rhetorically
frame and valorize the conditions of English servitude. These images were employed to
engender an inner acceptance of one’s station. They were specifically deployed to help
manufacture an obedient and subordinate class of poor white servants. This rhetorical
approach had arisen due to the anxieties about the social transformations of free labour
that were taking place in this period. Many commentators were wary of the perceived

21
Thevenot, The Travels of Monsieur De Threvenot, 143. See also William Lithgow’s account of looking to redeem Christian
slaves from Turkish captivity. At a slave market in Constantinople, he viewed five hundred males and females. These
slaves were ‘Hungarians, Transilvanians, Carindians, Istrians, and Dalmatian captives’. This was such a popular text is
had gone through ten editions by the end of the seventeenth century. Lithgow, Lithgow’s Nineteen Years Travels
Through the Most Eminent Places in the Habitable World, 132–133.
22
These claims were pervasive enough that merchants were encouraged to insure against the loss of goods and to pay
ransoms for captured and enslaved crew members. See Jacob, Lex Mercatoria, 97.
23
Morgan, A Compleat History of the Present Seat of War in Africa, 8, 9.
24
While this paper does not weigh in on this issue, there is considerable debate as to whether ‘white slavery’ existed.
There were certainly historical institutions of bondage throughout Europe, but the severity and scale of the emerging
racialized institution of slavery in the Americas is worth distinguishing as categorically unique, that is, in the same way
the Holocaust was not merely an extreme form of anti-Semitism, but a categorical shift. Chattel slavery became slavery
par excellence. For a measured analysis of these issues, see Clarence-Smith and Eltis, ‘White Servitude’. For more on the
white slavery debate, see Newman, A New World of Labor; and Handler and Reilly, ‘Contesting ‘White Slavery’ in the
Caribbean.’
25
Roxann Wheeler notes but does not thematically develop this point. She writes, ‘The discussions of servitude common
to conduct literature, or even legal analysis of the master-servant relationship, frequently include a contrast to slavery’.
Wheeler, ‘Slavery, or the New Drudge,’ 158.
26
This appalling position was often used as a justification for slavery. Richard Baxter writes, ‘It is a great mercy accidentally
for those of Guiny, Brasile, and other Lands, to be brought among Christians, though it be as Slaves: But it is a sin in
those that Sell and buy them as Beasts, meerly for Commodity, and use them accordingly: But to buy them in
compassion to their Souls as well as for their Service, and then to sell them only to such as will use them Charitably like
men, and to employ them as aforesaid, preferring their Salvation, is a lawful thing, specially such as Sell themselves, or
are sold as Malefactors’. Baxter, The Catechizing of Families, 311.
27
There are also indications that galley slavery signified unnatural tyranny more broadly. Elias Neau published
a provocative account of French Huguenot galley slavery to Catholic masters in this period. See Neau, An Account of
the Sufferings of the French Protestants. Indeed, by many accounts galley slavery to European nations was much more
brutal than slavery to Muslim nations. For a compilation of additional texts, see Nabil Matar, British Captives from the
Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1563–1760 (Leiden: Brill, 2014).
 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 5

new liberties free labourers were beginning to accrue. One way of confronting this
problem was through Christian imagery. In the devotional writing of this period, servants
were both enjoined to submit to their masters and to resist the temptation to become
‘hirelings’, i.e., independent wage-earners who have no permanent masters. Quite para­
doxically, the hireling – those who would sell labour at their leisure – was portrayed in an
extremely unflattering light, often worse than a slave. They lacked the moral guidance of
a master and risked extreme economic precarity, or worse, a life of idleness. As the
embodiment of the recalcitrant sinner, the hireling was characterized as morally incom­
petent, tempted by a life of indolence, or greedily disloyal, i.e., willing to serve anyone for
the right price (including the devil).
The point to be emphasized here is that the tiered structure of the servant and slave
class was designed to conceal the many similarities of this social station – better a slave
than a hireling, but best to be a humble and obedient servant. The conferral of Christian
liberty onto servant labourers helped to obscure the fact that there were very few practical
differences between servants and slaves. They were dominated in many of the same
ways.28 Servants who refused to work would be arrested, beaten, and forced into carceral
slavery. They could be compelled to work the highways, in the mines, or in public
workhouses. Lest there be any misunderstanding, profound differences did emerge
between wage and bondage slavery. Nothing ultimately compared to the institutionalized
trauma of African extraction and the brutal trans-Atlantic transmission of slave labour,
an unparalleled violation that produced unprecedented socio-legal legacies of domina­
tion and subordination, some of which persist today. The point here is that by manu­
facturing or heightening perceived differences between these classes, this helped to
constitute a submissive servant class in the metropole. Of course, it is difficult to know
whether the devotionals and servant manuals giving expression to the moral virtue of
servitude were being read by servants, but these texts certainly show how the public or
elite-driven moral discourse of this period sought to publicly legitimize the duty of
submission.29
This paper proceeds as follows: the first section will illustrate the anxiety around free
labour and how theorists conceptualized hired workers as slaves of a kind. The following
section will illustrate how the free choice of servant submission to their masters was
entailed in the Christian devotional literature of this period. Using the spectre of Turkish
slavery, servants were enjoined to willingly accept their station in life and to avoid the
temptation of becoming a mere hireling. The following section will show how servant
manuals highlighted the duty to submit as the essence of Christian liberty, again often
using the image of African or galley slavery. This section will also show how the servant
discourse was situated in a rhetorical climate where African slaves were denied the
privilege of an inner life.

28
In some cases, domestic servitude was worse than slavery. However, as Ottabah Cugoano rightfully points out ‘as bad as
it is, the poorest in England would not change their situation for that of slaves’. Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments, 17.
This is, of course the point of the rhetorical strategy to differentiate servitude so rigorously from slavery that servants
could accept indignity and abuse so long as they weren’t slaves.
29
There is some indication that these books were bought by servants, though, they were likely purchased mostly by
employers. See Fergus, ‘Provincial Servants’ Reading in the Late Eighteenth Century.’
6 B. SMITH

Wage labour as imperfect slavery

Throughout the seventeenth century, there was near universal consensus among early or
pre-liberal theorists that hired servants were slaves of a kind. Hugo Grotius explains,
‘Besides that perfect and utter Slavery’, namely contractual, life-long slavery or enslave­
ment from capture in a just war, ‘there are also some imperfect Kinds of Servitude’.30
Imperfect slavery consisted of either temporary or time-delimited subordination, or it
was based in some kind of ‘particular agreement’ or contract. Under this category,
Grotius lists a) freemen who are bound to the service of their patrons; b) those who
were slaves, statu liberi, until certain conditions had been fulfilled or an event had
happened; c) debt slaves who were bound to serve their creditor until the full payments
of their debts; d) husbandmen who were bound to the land; e) indentured servants
contracted for seven years; f) mortmain or individuals who did not have the liberty to
dispose of their goods without the consent of their patron; g) penestae which were a class
of unfree labourers in Thessaly who were able to reside and work, serving local residents
on the condition they were not driven away or killed; and finally, and perhaps most
important for the purpose of this paper, h) hired servants.31
Samuel Pufendorf likewise notes that there is a distinction to be made between ‘perfect
Slaves’, those taken as captives in war, and ‘those of the other Kind, who engage
themselves in Servitude by their own free Motion’.32 Since humans ‘lie under an
Obligation to perpetual Labour’ there is ‘perpetual certainty’ that many will need to
contract themselves to ‘work by the Hire’ in order to acquire sustenance.33 As the close
proximity of the categories he employs suggests, for Pufendorf there should be no illusion
that though contractual in some sense, hired labour is a form of coerced labour that is in
the same conceptual orbit of perfect slavery. In fact, he concludes that the ‘Prohibition of
Slavery among Christian hath chiefly occasion’d that Flood of thieving Vagrants, and
sturdy Beggars, which is usually complain’d of’.34 Though the social role of labour was
transforming, Pufendorf makes it clear that states have a responsibility to ensure ‘lazy
Rascals’ are productively employed. The slave-like labouring class must be compelled to
work. It is therefore important to remember that when hired labourers began to emerge
onto the scene, eventually becoming of theoretical interest, they were almost universally
viewed as slaves of a kind. The difference between ‘perfect slaves’ and hired workers was
one of degree, not kind.
As a wage-earning class began to emerge and grow, this started to create tensions
within the social order.35 Pufendorf’s concern about the prohibition of slavery by
Christian nations speaks to these undercurrents. In the late sixteenth century, the
prominent parliamentarian, Thomas Smith, also made note of the transformations in
social and economic relations that were beginning to take place.36 While the traditional

30
Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, Bk 2. Chap. 5, sec. 30, 212.
31
Ibid.
32
Pufendorf, On the Law of Nature and Nations, Bk. 6, Chap. 3, sec 10, 620.
33
Ibid.
34
Ibid.
35
For a description of expanding wage labour in this period, see Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change, 93.
36
There is a vast literature describing the emergence of the labour class: Adams, Labour and the Wage; Booth, Households:
On the Moral Architecture of the Economy; Boulton, ‘Wage Labour in Seventeenth-Century London’; Hill, The Century of
Revolution; Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England; Thompson, The Making of the English Working
Class; Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England.
 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 7

institutions of English slavery had largely gone extinct, namely, the vassals or villeins of
the prior age, there had emerged a new kind of slave class.37 He claims that besides
apprentices and indentured servants, there had developed a successor institution to the
traditional modes of English slavery, namely servants and hired labourers. Smith explains
that those hired for wages ‘called servaunts or serving men and women throughout the
whole Realme, which be not in such bondage as apprentises, but serve for the time for
daily ministrie, as servi and ancillae did in the time of gentilitie, and be for other matters
in libertie as full free men and women’.38 While in many respects hired labourers
resembled the slaves of antiquity, they had certain freedoms that traditional servi did not.
Though the framing is somewhat obscure, Smith’s emphasis on ‘matters in liberty’ or
‘free time’, was indicative of a widespread concern that the poor were becoming, as
Pufendorf had noted, lazy and indolent, and that Christian mercy was undermining not
only social hierarchies but the productive forces of society more broadly. Tim Meldrum
convincingly argues that Smith’s worries stemmed from the failure of the Tudor attempt
to ‘recreate domestic slavery as a tool against vagrants’.39 The 1550 repeal of the Vagrancy
Act (1547), he argues, was indicative of the pervasive concern that Christian sentiments
were undermining traditional modes of slavery and servitude.40 Nevertheless, severe laws
punishing vagrancy persisted throughout the seventeenth century, as attested to in the
many legal manuals of this period. As Jane Whittle explains, there was a concerted effort
to regulate the rise of hirelings those ‘casual workers, tied to no one master’.41 The strict
legal regimes were designed to discipline and constrain the newly emerging labour class.
Dudley North, a prominent mid-seventeenth-century political economist, put forward
a very similar argument to Smith’s. He argues that servants were now worse off because
masters had become too lax:

for not a full Century of years past, Masters gave small wages, and their Servants expected
reward by a good pennyworth in some Farm when they were aged. This kept them in
diligence, and in a strict observance of their Master, they having an eye to the reward, which
still remained in his power. But now by Contract Servants have Wages equivalent to the
Service they are obliged to, and being sure of that which is agreed upon, they may stand at
defiance with their Master, and not care how perfunctorily they apply themselves to their
duty.42

Unfortunately, North continues, a progressive Christian sentiment had undermined the

productive potential of the servant class:

But in processe of time that precious thing called Liberty of the People, gained so much
ground in our Laws, as now a Master cannot sufficiently chastise his Servant, or put any
restraint upon him within limits of his House, without incurring a Complaint to the
Magistrate for breach of the Peace, or false Imprisonment, which giveth much presumption
to Servants.43

37
While the classical wisdom sees mature working-class conflict arising only in the early nineteenth century (E.P.
Thompson), this paper largely agrees with Andy Wood who argues that class conflicts arose regionally, on the local
level, throughout the seventeenth century. Wood, The Politics of Social Conflict, 26.
38
Smith, De Republica Anglorum, 114.
39
Meldrum, Domestic Service and Gender, 26.
40
Ibid.
41
Whittle, The Development of Agrarian Capitalism, 298.
42
North, Observations and Advices Oeconomical, 42.
43
Ibid., 45–46.
8 B. SMITH

Servants’ labour had become perfunctory and of a much lower quality. Their inactivity
could not be punished, an argument that can be traced back to the supposed failure of
severe vagrancy laws designed to hold hired servants in line. Not only were servants
getting paid for sloppy work, but what had been seen as a potentially punishable form of
vagrancy had transformed into ‘free time’. Workers had too much spare times on their
hands, which made them less dutiful.
These fears of a free and empowered working class were dramatically overblown. As
Robert Steinfeld has shown, in no sense could seventeenth-century free labour be
described as free.44 The desperation of their poverty and the misery of their working
conditions bore many similarities to the older institutions of slavery. The working poor,
as Christopher Hill points out, were transforming into ‘a permanent class with no hope of
escape from their poverty’.45 In fact, contrary to North’s concern, this enforced precarity
remained a persistent and deliberate strategy throughout the seventeenth century. Steve
Hindle notes that since the growing demand for labour threatened the fabric of society,
there was ‘a growing consensus, emerging among the propertied elite in the century after
1650, about the “utility of poverty”.’46 Low wages bred diligence, frugality, and moral
virtue. This partly explains why the legal regimes governing labour were so brutal. In fact,
the rigorous subordination of the emerging working class was aptly described by Smith
himself. Earlier in the same text he had explained that under the various classes of
freemen, there persisted a class of labourer who was conspicuously unfree. This class
had been known as the ‘capite censij proletarij or operae, day labourers, poore husband­
men, yea marcantes or retailers which have no free lande’.47 These workers, he continues,
‘have no voice nor authoritie in our common wealth, and no account is made of them but
onelie to be ruled, not to rule others’.48 Smith is describing a class of labourer who is
politically and, for the most part, juridically dead. Though servants could complain about
withheld pay and excessive abuse, the vast power differential between employers and
hired hands made the recourse to the courts extremely risky.49
The brutal coercion of the law was one disciplinary strategy to cope with these
economic and social transformations. Masters held disproportionate power over the
workers who entered their dominion. Enforced economic precarity was another delib­
erate strategy to suppress and discipline the working poor. Many elites believed that
driving down wages would amplify workers’ dependence on masters. Eking out a living
on meagre wages, it was believed, would breed the moral virtues of frugality and
responsibility while at the same time driving workers into continuous subsistence labour.
They would naturally forego the idle enjoyments of ‘free time’ to fight for their survival.
There was, however, another disciplinary strategy that can be seen throughout the
seventeenth century. Christian devotionals and servant manual literature attempted to
rhetorically construct an idealized notion of servitude. As will be seen in the following
sections, this strategy attempted to inculcate a moral intuition about what Godly servi­
tude entails. These literatures explicitly attempted to drive a wedge between servant and
44
Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor, 3.
45
Hill, Liberty Against the Law, 60.
46
Hindle, ‘Work, Reward and Labour Discipline in Late Seventeenth-Century England,’ 255.
47
Smith, De Republica Anglorum, 33.
48
Ibid.
49
In any case, many of the legal provisions extended to servants and hired labourers, including the ability to earn a wage
and to complain of abuse, were already firmly established in Roman slave law. See Buckland, The Roman Law of Slavery.
 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 9

racialized slave classes. By convincing servants that they were not slaves but internally
free, they might be willing to accept their social station more easily.

Servants and slaves in Christian devotional literature

Seventeenth-century Christian devotional literature routinely addressed the social duty
of hired servants to their masters. Of course, the image of the humble, suffering servant
runs throughout the Christian tradition.50 In Romans 1:1, Paul calls himself a slave
(doulos) to Christ. This language of subordination was designed, ultimately, to highlight
God’s love and paternal affection. As the epitome of the good master, God not only loves
and cares for his servants but sees them as his children. In contrast, being a slave to sin
represented perpetual torment, a path that would lead to destruction. Being a willing
slave to Christ symbolized the highest form of freedom, whereas slavery to the lusts of the
flesh was suggestive of the most desperate form of servitude, slavery to the devil.
In the devotional literature of this time, the metaphor of the Christian servant was
quite literally transposed over the patrimonial structure of society. The image of the
dutiful servant took on a much more poignant, indeed, explicit meaning in a social
context that had an extensive servant and wage slave class.51 According to this literature,
Christian supplicants and servants had a duty to submit not only to the law of Christ but
also to their earthly masters. Performing domestic servitude dramatized service to God.
Those who willingly submitted to God’s laws found inner freedom and salvation; their
burden and labour were light. In contrast, those who refused to submit became like galley
slaves, that is, forced into an unnatural relationship with a ‘base creature’, a racial
inferior. As noted above, grudging servants were portrayed as being in a situation
more desperate than Christians enslaved to a Muslim master. Samuel Otes argues that
sinners are slaves and ‘there is no difference between a Gally-slave and him, but that the
one is fettered in body, the other in minde; the one serveth the Turke, the other the
Divell’.52 Thomas Watson notes that a sinner is ‘Just like a Slave’, that is to say, ‘if the
Turk bids him dig in the Mine, hew in the Quarres, tug at the Oar, the Slave must do it, he
dares not refuse . . . But Sinners are willing to be Slaves, they will not take their
Freedom’.53 Christian supplicants are called to accept the only form of freedom extended
to them. This freedom is actualized through submission and living a life of dutiful
obedience. Christian servants enact their freedom through the acceptance of their station.
As Richard Baxter laments, ‘A Turkish slave would be delivered if he could, and would
give a thousand thanks to him that would deliver him, but you might be delivered, and
will not’.54 Servants always already have the power to be liberated from slavery through
the acceptance of Christ and with it the social manifestation of this submission.

50
For an extended discussion of this, see Martin, Slavery as Salvation; Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity; and Bryant, Paul
and the Rise of the Slave.
51
To illustrate how large this class was, Charles Davenant shows that roughly half of the English population could be so
classified. He categorizes hired labourers, out-servants, paupers, and vagrants into one category. With seamen and
soldiers, this makes up more than half the population of England: 2,825,000 out of 5,500,250. Davenant, An Essay upon
the Probable Methods of Making a People Gainers in the Ballance of Trade, 29.
52
Otes, An Explanation of the General Epistle of Saint Jude, 355.
53
Watson, A Practical Body of Divinity, 86.
54
Baxter, A Treatise of Conversion, 151.
10 B. SMITH

Throughout this period, Christian devotional literature routinely analogized a life of

sin to Turkish slavery, but these texts also highlighted the transformative potential of
servants who willingly submit to their masters. By voluntarily obeying one’s master, the
slave is transformed into something resembling a free subject. As Thomas Watson writes:
‘a wicked man is under a force, terrour of conscience hales him to duty; he is like a slave
that is chained to the Gally. He must work whether he will or no, he is forced to pull the
Rope, tug at the Oar; but a godly man is like a free subject, that consents to his Princes
Laws and obeys out of choice’.55 This image of the godly man, the individual who
willingly accepts his station, embodies Christian freedom. While the specifics of daily
toil may be indistinguishable in practice from that of galley slavery, what matters is one’s
inner disposition. When servants internalize the master’s laws they participate in their
own freedom.56 Elsewhere, Watson writes,
Is it not folly to preferre Slavery before Liberty? If a Slave in the gally should have his
freedom offered him, but he should say, he had rather Tug at the Oar and be a slave, than
have his liberty, would not he be Judged indiscreet? Such is the case of him who Fears not
God. The Gospel offers to free him from the miserable captivity of Sin, but he chooseth
rather to be a slave to his lusts.57

Again, accepting the gift of freedom did not mean that one was no longer required to toil.
What changed was one’s inner disposition, a perspectival or attitudinal shift to the task at
hand. As Lewis Stuckley explains, ‘how like Slaves chain’d to Gallies, you must work,
though sore against your wills? Did you love God, you would count nothing tedious’.58
Following Christ transforms one’s temperament and attitude to the work one is required
to do. Joseph Alleine continues: ‘Fear hath its use, but this is not the main spring of
motion with a sanctified heart. Christ keeps not his subjects in by force, but is King of
a willing people. They are (through his grace) freely resolved for his service, and do it out
of choice, not as slaves, but as the son or spouse, from a spring of love, and a loyal
mind’.59 Instead of being brutally compelled to toil as a galley slave, by accepting the will
of the master one becomes something like a labouring son, one who voluntarily serves the
master out of devotion and love. Rather than serving God like a ‘Turkish slave doth his
Pateroon’ a Christian ‘must not serve God with this hellish fear’, but instead ‘serve him
with an ingenuous fear sweetened with love’.60 With this disposition, even a galley slave
can ‘finde freedom in bondage’.61
In this literature, labourers become like slaves only when they sought to live recalci­
trantly, as spiritual anarchists asserting their own wills and desires. By submitting to God
and His earthly envoys, i.e., temporal masters and overseers, one participates in Christian
liberty. In another devotional meditation, Theophilous Dorrington asks his reader to
contemplate that the ‘Toilers of the World are chain’d perpetually like Slaves to their
Work’, labouring tirelessly ‘To gain a few Pence, or some pretty Honour’.62 He reminds
his readers that God’s commands are easy and that ‘half these sufferings would place us in
55
Watson, The Beatitudes, 461.
56
For a similar point, see Hill, ‘Protestantism and the Rise of Capitalism,’ 30.
57
Watson, Religion Our True Interest, 41.
58
Stuckley, A Gospel-Glass, 84.
59
Alleine, An Alarme to Unconverted Sinners, 55.
60
Watson, Religion Our True Interest, 21.
61
Young, A Christian Library, 89.
62
Dorrington, Reformed Devotions, 279.
 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 11

thy Account among the Martyrs; were they devoutly undertaken for Thee, and the higher
Enjoyment of thy Glorious promises’.63 Much as martyrs willingly suffer torture,
labourers will be empowered to endure the drudgery and toil of their station.
All of this confirms the ascendant framework which sought to privilege the status of
the willing servant; not only did servitude dramatize the Christian virtues of obedience
and humble submission, but it was routinely characterized as morally and economically
safe. Pierre Gassendi argues that submission to a master should be seen as preferable to
a life of unrestricted freedom. He insists that a servant

thinks himself happier that his Master, being only in subjection to his Will, and having
nothing else to do but obey his Commands; whereas his Master remains under the Tyranny
of many Masters, more Cruel and Troublesome, his Ambition, Envy, Anger and other
Passions; so that in short, he must needs be much the happier, being freed from a thousand
Cares and Distractions, which the other is daily liable to.64

As this language suggests, servants were enjoined to celebrate their servitude. Their
lives were easy because they were embedded in a hierarchic structure that liberated them
from the tyrannies of necessity and self-rule. They were cared for by a loving master. It
was quite common in this period for pre-liberal theorists to argue that some form of
servitude or slavery was preferable to being entirely independent of a master’s authority.65
Under their master’s authority, servants were liberated from the burden of self-rule.
This was a rhetorical strategy designed to construct a valorized notion of servitude, to
convince servants that not only does God require them to submit, but that this submis­
sion makes life both easier and morally safe. Along these lines, the risk of galley slavery to
a Turkish master was developed as part of a symbolic structure designed to enable
servants to swallow the bitter pill of servitude, to accept their station in life. This image
was designed to highlight the preferability of Christian hierarchies and the privileges
afforded to servants who could accept their proper station. As John Bunyan unselfcon­
sciously notes, ‘look upon thy self as thou art; that is, as a Servant, not a Child, nor Wife;
thou art inferior to these; wherefore count thy self under them, and be content with that
station’.66 One should remember that the work of servants is ‘the Will and Ordinance of
God’.67 By embracing one’s station, submitting to a Christian master, one would dra­
matize submission to God and His ordained hierarchies.68
William Okeley chides Christian servants for their disobedience. He reminds them
that their station in life stems from God’s providence to which they should willingly
submit. After all, he argues, things could be much worse: ‘Perhaps thou art a Servant to
a Christian; dost thou murmur? It shews, thou little knowest what it is to be a Slave to an
imperious Turk. Thou Servest him that prays with thee, and for thee; dost thou repine?
63
Ibid., 279–280.
64
Gassendi, Three Discourses of Happiness, Virtue, and Liberty, 272.
65
Grotius and Pufendorf both argue that permanent servitude is preferable to being a hired day-labourer. They argue that
one of the benefits of permanent servitude was that a master would care for and morally direct the servant. The
economic and moral risks of self-mastery would be avoided. See Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, Bk 2, Chap 5,
sec 27, 210; and Pufendorf, On the Law of Nature and Nations, Bk. 6, Chap. 3, sec 10, 620.
66
Bunyan, Christian Behavior, 84.
67
Ibid., 86.
68
Of course, this same logic applied to those who had been enslaved, too. One anonymous author writes, ‘when we are
chained to Misfortune as Galy-Slaves tugging at the Oar, we must not despise God’s Wrath, as we ought not to slight his
Longsuffering and Forbearance’. Satan Sifting, 183.
12 B. SMITH

God might have made thee Serve one who would curse and torture thee, and make little
Provision for thy Body, and none at all for thy Soul’.69 Christian servants should be
grateful that they are subordinate to godly masters who pray for their souls. Indeed,
nothing is worse, John Scott explains, than a society where ‘those that are inferior do obey
with a perverse and stubborn Heart, and will submit to nothing but what they are forced
and compelled to, and ’tis nothing but meer Power and Dread by which they rule and are
ruled’.70 In such a world, those who obey their masters with an obstinate will are nothing
more than ‘surly and untractable Slaves’.71
As seen to a limited extend above, devotional literatures emphasized the fact that not
having a master was a moral liability. One of the unusual features of this discourse was
the degree to which it denigrated the status of the independent wage earner, the hireling
who serves multiple masters for pay. Many argued that refusing to submit to a single
master as a servant was in some sense worse than Turkish slavery. Again, one might recall
that this discursive tradition was designed to ensure that servants not only accepted and
celebrated their subordination, but it also sought to foreclose on the possibility that they
would transform into something resembling free labour. It was much safer to be a servant
to a wise master or a Turkish slave rather than someone presumptuously seeking self-
mastery. John Milton argues that the spirit of the ‘hireling’ should be purged from the
church.72 Hired labour came to be equated with a mercenary spirit more closely linked
with the devil. As Benjamin Jenks summarizes, by striving to love and please the master ‘I
do him more Ingenious and Acceptable Service; than when I work only as a Slave, for
Dread; or as a Hireling, for Wages’.73 William Secker also notes that God has established
three kinds of servants in the world, ‘some are slaves, and serve him for fear; others are
hirelings, and serves him for wages; others are sons and serve him for love’.74 He goes on
to clarify that it is most desirable to be a son, someone who serves God willingly, but if left
to choose between becoming a slave and hired labourer, it is better to be a slave who
submits out of fear rather than one who merely works for wages.
Much like the hierarchy established above, willful submission of the self to a master
was preferable to slavery, but the hireling was believed to embody a morally destitute life
of idleness, wastefulness, and sin. As William Pemble claims, ‘not every free man in
a civill estate, is not a free subject of Gods Kingdome; No, there be that feede daintily, lye
soft, goe richly clad, live lazily, and who take their fill of world pleasures in all licen­
tiousnesse, who yet are as arrant slaves as any that serve in a Gally’.75 Hired workers were
routinely characterized as unfaithful, unpredictable, and conspicuously unfree, and in
some respect more enslaved to their own corrupt desires than those in physical bondage.
Secker continues that the hireling is ‘a changling; he that will serve God for something,
will serve the Divel [sic] for more, he shall have his works, if he will but augment his
wages’.76 The rhetoric is a bit perplexing at times. Better to be a literal galley slave than
a hireling, but hirelings are like galley slaves to the devil.

69
Okeley, Eben-ezer, ‘The Preface.’
70
Scott, The Christian Life, 214–215.
71
Ibid., 215.
72
Milton, A Supplement to Dr. Du Moulin Treating of the Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings Out of the Church of England.
73
Jenks, Submission to the Righteousness of God, 100.
74
Secker, The Nonsuch Professor, 183–184.
75
Pemble, Five Godly and Profitable Sermons, 547.
76
Secker, The Nonsuch Professor, 184.
 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 13

Part of the hireling’s corruption is seen in their impetuous desire for better wages. Like
mercenaries, they were often characterized as unfaithful and disloyal, selling their
services to the highest bidder. Always looking for a better deal in the form of higher
pay, they would prioritize their own interests before their master’s. As John Stackhouse
explains, hired workers ‘care only for the profit, and are not willing to expose themselves
to hazard, and loss, and danger’.77 Peter Sterry reminds the public that when one
embraces the moral law of God one is freed from the ‘legality of the law’ of Moses.
They are no longer ‘hirelings of the law [. . .] They are Servants in the House, not chained
slaves in the Mines, or chained offenders in Prison’.78 Being liberated from the law
through God’s grace transforms the supplicant into a ‘house servant’, a station desirable
simply for its proximity to the good master, not for the wages. Again, all of this illustrates
the view that self-subordination is the mechanism of liberation and that perpetual
servitude it preferable to self-mastery and free labour.
While becoming a willing servant was routinely valorized, a peculiar feature of this
discourse was that bondage slavery was portrayed as preferable to a life of non-
submission and sin. One could embody sin not only through the status of hireling but
also through grudging obedience, i.e., when a servant refused to internalize the master’s
will. The image of the sinner suffering a fate worse than slavery runs throughout this
literature. Edward Elton explains that being ‘enthralled in the bondage of sinne [. . .] is the
greatest bondage that can bee: for why? Even a gally slave under the Turke, though hee
bee in extreme hard servitude and bondage, yet his mind may bee at liberty, free from the
chaines of sinne’.79 James Ussher claims that it is better to ‘be galley slaves to the Turk
a thousand times than to endure this slavery to Satan’s will’.80 William Bates writes,

the condition of the most wretched bond-slave is more sweet and less servile than that of
a sinner; for the severest tyranny is exercised only upon the body, the soul remains free in
the midst of chains; but the power of sin oppresses the soul, the most noble part, and defaces
the bright character of the Deity that was stamped upon its visage.81

Edward Fowler notes that ‘Those who are Slaves in the vulgar sense, that are taken captive
by the Turk, or such like merciless and inhumane Masters, are necessarily inslaved only
as to their Viler part, their Bodies’.82 Those who are physically vassals and slaves to others
‘may retain their Liberty still in spight of them’.83 Reiterating this point, Robert Persons
writes,

the Covetous Man’s Case is directly the same as so is the Drunkard’s, the Angry and
Revengeful; and in a Word, Every Man breathing whose Passions have got the upper
hand of his Reason. No Slave, that is chained in the Galleys, there to row for his Life,
endureth so merciless a Captivity. His Prison and Fetters confine his Body only, but this
Man’s Mind is manacled and locked: His every Sense, his Thoughts and Faculties are all
bound up.84

77
Stackhouse, The Mutual Duties of Elders and People Delivered, 29.
78
Sterry, The Spirit Convincing of Sinne, Epistle Dedicatory.
79
Elton, An Exposition of the Epistle of Saint Paul to the Colossians, 152.
80
Ussher, The Whole Works, Volume 13, 480.
81
Bates, The Harmony of the Divine Attributes, 48.
82
Fowler, Libertas Evangelica, 8.
83
Ibid.
84
Persons, Parsons his Christian Directory, 317.
14 B. SMITH

Bondage slavery was a lesser evil than the interior prison of degeneracy and sin. As
Jeremy Taylor succinctly writes, ‘the tugging at an Oar, in the Gallies, compared with
Hell, a Glory!’85 Again, Turkish slavery was a powerful metaphor in this period. It was
better to be physically bound to a racial inferior than living a life of sin, and in this respect
servitude was the best social position to take. Workers would be morally governed and
steered away from a life of sin and instructed in productive labour. This literature
encouraged servants to avoid the temptation to live as a hireling, constantly seeking
better pay, and instead willingly submit to a Christian master for life.
The discourse illustrating Christian servitude had several functions. First, it sought to
valorize the loyal and submissive servant. Christian servants in England were encouraged
to see their salvation linked to the performance of their domestic duties. Those who
willingly obeyed their masters participated in Christian liberty, that is, even if the actual
work they were required to do differed only marginally, if at all, from galley slavery. One’s
inner disposition ultimately transforms the relationship to the work one is required to do.
While servants were still required to toil, when performed out of love those duties
supposedly felt light. Servitude should be seen as a labour of love and devotion.
Secondly, this literature reiterated the claim that the hireling, the person who had no
permanent master, epitomized the recalcitrant sinner. Hirelings, or independent free
labourers more generally, personified greediness and disloyalty; or worse, since they
lacked moral direction, hired workers were likely to mismanage their lives, that is, since
they were constantly tempted to live idly. Hirelings were slaves to Satan. According to the
typology presented in this devotional literature, the condition of literal bondage slavery
was preferable to the moral hazard of self-rule. The hardships of slavery served as a kind
of morally safe disciplinary framework that, at the very least, keeps recalcitrant sinners
from a life of idleness, where they could act on their sinful desires.
These texts all share a similar theme – the willing submission to a master is the highest
form of freedom a servant could expect. Inasmuch as they grumbled and complained,
servants resembled galley slaves, which was undignified not only because of the toil and
hardship but, perhaps more significantly, that it meant one was subordinated to a racial
inferior. This hazard was repeatedly highlighted through the intentional correlation of
grudging disobedience and a desire for independence with Christian slavery. The indig­
nity and unnaturalness associated with Christian slavery to Muslim masters was
a rhetorical tool to shame and provoke servants to live a life of willing obedience. To
avoid the humiliation of the galley, Christian servants must not only embody the will of
their masters but come to love those they serve.

Manuals for servants

The broader Christian devotional discourse that emphasized the duty to willingly submit
to Christ was explicitly incorporated into the manuals and conduct books written to
instruct servants and labourers as they prepared themselves for a life of service.86 As Tim
Meldrum explains, throughout the seventeenth century the ‘growth of the genre of

85
Taylor, Contemplations of the State of Man in this Life, 81.
86
For earlier texts see Markham, A Health to the Gentlemanly Profession of Servingmen; Overbury, Sir Thomas Overburie His
Wife with New Elegies.
 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 15

didactic literature increasingly provided servants with their own manuals of

instruction’.87 It should be noted, however, that the line between the devotional and
servant manual genres was not always clear. In many respects these servant manuals
merely formalized the ascendant wisdom of Christian servitude that was already well
established in the devotional tradition.
Much like the devotional literature, the key theme of this genre was that servants and
wage labourers were commanded to willingly submit to their masters, i.e., not mere
obedience but an internal reverence. Even if they were contracting themselves to
a condition of extreme self-subordination, this voluntary submission was routinely
described as the embodiment of Christian freedom. Resisting one’s duties of station,
refusing to submit, transformed the recalcitrant servant into a slave, someone pressed
and coerced to do the will of the master, or worse, a hireling, someone who would sell
their services to the highest bidder. The impetuous desire to assert one’s private will
meant that one would be compelled to serve, and this coercion is what formed the bright
line between Christian servitude and bondage slavery. As seen in the devotional manuals
above, it was difficult to distinguish between the Christian archetype of the humble
servant and the duties imposed upon the social class of servant labourers. In many
respects the lines distinguishing between the two were quite fuzzy. The call for servants
to dutifully obey their masters was not merely a powerful metaphor of devotional living
but a moral imperative for those who, quite literally, occupied the social status of
servants.
For instance, in his 1622 treatise, Domesticall Duties, William Gouge admonishes
servants to obey their masters with ‘feare and trembling’.88 Not only must they sub­
ordinate their will to the master’s, but they must humbly accept reproof and punishment,
even if those corrective blows are perceived to be unjust and unwarranted. After all, who
are servants to determine the objective validity of the punishments they receive? As in the
preceding discourse, Gouge also relies on the image of the galley slave. He chastises those
servants who only obey ‘grudgingly, by compulsion (as Bears are brough to a stake) and
of necessity’.89 In doing so, they have become like ‘slaves in a galley’.90 In their recalci­
trance, they live as if in a prison.91 In another manual of this period, John Gother notes ‘a
slavish Spirit is fit to make Slaves’.92 Much as the prior discourse had claimed, servants
should perform both internal and external obedience. Caleb Trenchfield notes that
a servant should obey commands ‘with such a pleasant cheerfulness as gives account
that you’re delighted to obey’.93 This is in contrast to those who ‘with a sullen murmur
they receive all that’s directed to be done, and with a slavish servileness do seem to act
onely because they must, and move no further than they’re over-looked’.94 These servants
differ little from a ‘slothful Ass that onely moves as Whip and Cudgel forceth’.95
Grudging obedience is elicited through coercion and is therefore an expression of slavery.

87
Meldrum, Domestic Service and Gender, 46.
88
Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, 615.
89
Ibid., 619.
90
Ibid.
91
Ibid., 611.
92
Gother, Instructions for Masters, Traders, Laborers, 6.
93
Trenchfield, A Cap of GrayHairs for a Green Head, 55.
94
Ibid.
95
Ibid.
16 B. SMITH

Simon Patrick reminds readers that even though servants are ‘not now meer Slaves
and Bondmen, as they were in the Apostles days; yet they are in a state of Subjection, and
are tied to such Obedience as we find enjoined in the Apostolical Writings’.96 Servants are
required to willingly submit to their masters out of a spirit of fealty, devotion, and love.
They must embody the spirit of Pauline slavery. Indeed, much earlier William Perkins
had argued that rather than holding servants in bondage by force, it would be better ‘if
the servant say thus, I love my master, my wife and my children, I will not go out free’.97
Servitude, he continues, should not ‘be procured and retained by force’, but by willing
submission.98 Richard Lucas concurs with this assessment. He writes, ‘Look upon your
Master and Mistress as your Adopted Parents; resolve to love and serve ’em as such, and
never be persuaded that your own Interest can be divided from theirs. Ah! Would you
but go thus qualified to Service, you would find it indeed a state of True Liberty, not
Slavery’.99 Thomas Carter explains that ‘without this harty love and inward affection
towards them, your outward obedience will bee but false and hypocriticall, and all this
your zelous duty must be mingled with feare’.100 In the same way being coerced into
servitude is like slavery, serving a master out of the fear of punishment partakes of that
slavishness. Patrick continues, that when serving in fear one does not serve their master
‘as Christians, but as vile Slaves, and Men-pleasers that mind nothing but to avoid their
anger’.101 In Richard Burton’s The Apprentices Companion (1693), he also contrasts
a servant’s godly obedience to ‘that slavish fear, when a Servant is afraid of nothing but
the revenging power of his Master, the Whip or the Rod, as we may say; and if they can
avoid that, they take no further care whether their Master be pleased or not; this is that
fear, which causeth Servants to wish, that their Masters had no power over them or that
they were rid of them’.102
As the logic of the above passages imply, while servants were not technically in
bondage, being forced to serve a master against one’s will transformed them into
a something like slave. Of course, due to the exigencies of life, most servants were
compelled to enter a life of service. Their poverty and life station required that they
subordinate themselves to a master-employer for their survival. If, however, servants
willingly accepted their position, indeed, if they came to not only externally obey but to
inwardly love their masters, this inner subordination exuded the spirit of Christian
servitude. In this sense, to be truly free was to transform oneself into a willing vessel of
the master’s will. As Thomas Fosset explains, the servant needs to ‘be in subjection, to
haue no will of his owne, nor power ouer him selfe, but wholly to reseigne himselfe to the
will of his Master, and this is to obey’.103 This requires ‘a voluntarie reasonable sacrificing
of a mans owne will, voluntarily, freely, and without any constraint’.104 In other words,
one must serve a master ‘as though they served God himself’.105

96
Patrick, Book for Beginners, 115.
97
Perkins, Christian Oeconomie, 159.
98
Ibid., 160.
99
Lucas, The Duty of Servants, 14.
100
Carter, Carter’s Christian Commonwealth, 247–248.
101
Patrick, Book for Beginners, 119.
102
Burton, The Apprentices Companion, 8–9.
103
Fosset, The Servants Dvtie or the Calling and Condition of Servants (London: Printed by George Eld, 1613).
104
Ibid.
105
Cleaver, A Godly Forme of Houshold Government for the Ordering of Private Families, ‘The Servants dutie towards their
Maisters.’
 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 17

To a contemporary reader, the way these manuals speak of inner Christian liberty
sounds much more like what one might call slavery. Servants were effectively called upon
to dissociate or de-self, to turn themselves into empty vessels to be filled with their
master’s will. Transforming this kind of psychic debasement into a Christian virtue was
potentially a significant tool of control and domination. At the very least, these texts
signify the concerted effort of elites seeking to pacify labour.106 Those who defied these
standards were characterized as atheists and blasphemers, living worse lives than galley
slaves. It is important to remember that the image of slavery deployed in this discourse
was not a rhetorical flourish or mere metaphor. This language was a calculated brutality
to morally constrain and punish grudging servants. After all recalcitrant servants would
be subjected to the corrective wisdom of their masters. On the one hand, the spectre of
bondage slavery and the stigma it evinced could be used to denigrate grudging servants;
in their disobedience, they were not only acting beneath their station, but they risked
eternal damnation in their defiance of God.

Servant discourse and African slavery

This freedom to internally submit was also indicative of another aspect of the English
servant discourse. The self-possession that permitted servants to willingly love and
humbly submit to their masters, inwardly, as a part of the practice of godly devotion,
was conspicuously denied to the African slaves forced to work on American plantations.
If in their grudging obedience English servants transformed into galley slaves, by reject­
ing this inner freedom, those servants resembled slaves forced to toil on American
plantations. African slavery was deployed to dramatize the privilege of an inner life and
with it the freedom of internalized subservience.
In Richard Mayo’s Present for Servants, he reminds English servants why they should
be grateful for their station in life. He writes, ‘How far then, has God set you above
Servants in other Times and Places, which have been, and are compelled to Slavery, and
forced Subjection to the Lusts of Men’.107 If those in prior ages they were asked to submit
without complaint, ‘how much more should you?’ He continues:
[H]ave you never heard of the Slaves in the Plantations, and how they are us’d (especially
with respect to their Souls) by some more Savages than the Negro’s that they call so? And
what Servant in England dares repine at their state, that has ever known the Condition of
their own Country-men, when Slaves in Algiers, and other places? For not only are they
enslav’d in a strange country [. . .], but the Miseries they suffer under Barbarous Masters,
calls for your pity towards them, and contentment with your merciful Lot.108

This passage is remarkable because it appeals to both African slavery on the colonial
plantations and the enslavement of Christians to Algerian galley masters. These examples
of bondage slavery are explicitly deployed to remind the English servant to rejoice in their
station. As Mayo continues, the danger for African slaves is two-fold. First, bondage slaves
106
As Nietzsche argues, part of the success of Christianity’s ‘slave morality’ is that it transforms degradation into an
honour. He writes, ‘Lies are turning weakness into an accomplishment [. . .] and impotence which doesn’t retaliate is
being turned into ‘goodness’; timid baseness is being turned into ‘humility’; submission to people one hates is being
turned into ‘obedience’.’ Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, 27–28.
107
Mayo, A Present for Servants, 60.
108
Ibid., 60–61.
18 B. SMITH

are routinely brutalized, ‘upon the slightest Faults cruelly beaten, that they often die of their
pain’.109 But secondly, these hardships tempt them to dream of escape ‘by a dreadful
Apostasie’.110 He explains that because of the brutality they face, African slaves are enticed
by the fantasy of a life of ease and comfort – to live idly in comfort with no master.
Mayo’s meaning here is that because African slaves lack an inner life, they could not
humble themselves to embrace their station. Like animals they constantly needed to be
disciplined and kept in check. They are only driven by the physical stimuli of pleasure
and pain and can therefore not persevere as Christian slaves. Physical punishments
constantly tempt them to escape rather than inducing them to repentance. This is
a ‘dreadful Apostasie’ because, as many of the above commentators note, slavery protects
the morally weak from a life of idleness and the dangers of self-direction. ‘Weaker’
creatures need physical and moral guidance. As Mayo implies, proponents of African
slavery often justified this institution with dehumanizing claims that slaves lacked souls
and the inner world necessary for self-direction.
For instance, the French historian, Claude Fleury, degradingly notes, ‘There are other
Barbarians absolutely stupid, as the Negroes and Cafres, in whom we find no Sentiments
of any Religion at all; such dull heavy Souls that nothing but what is sensible and Palpable
can enter into their understanding’.111 African souls were routinely described as impene­
trable, unable to conceive of religious sentiment. In the English context, John Owen
argues that he who denies the authority of scripture loses ‘those internal Aids whereby he
establisheth and assureth our Minds against Force and Prevalency of Objection and
Temptations against the Divine Authority of Scripture’.112 Those who lack such an inner
light, he continues, ‘we shall find them to be like the Moors or Slaves in some Countries
or Plantations’.113 Denying the scripture makes one like those slaves on the plantations
who categorically lacked the assistance of the Holy Spirit, i.e., ‘those internal aids’. Much
as Mayo had indicated, due to this lack of internal guidance, they were constantly
tempted to ‘[cast] off that Yoak and restraint’.114 However, this is not the liability it
may seem to be, Owen explains. He argues that even though slaves on the plantations
greatly outnumbered their masters, they did not pose a sufficient threat due to the ‘want
of Communication, with Confidence’.115 African slaves seek to minimize their pain, but
since they lacked the ability to communicate and coordinate their resistance, Owen
concludes, this permits a small number of rulers to dominate them.
The prevalence of the belief that African slaves lacked an inner world can in part be
seen in the wide-spread debate about whether Christian masters should permit their
slaves to convert to Christianity. This was the most pronounced and urgent feature of the
African slave discourse in this period. There was a great deal of anxiety among slave
masters that slave conversion would lead to manumission. Indeed, some colonies
expressly prohibited the baptism of slaves for this reason.116 These concerns were so

109
Ibid., 61–61.
110
Ibid.
111
Fleury, An Historical Account of the Manners and Behaivior of the Christians, 292.
112
Owen, The Reason of Faith, 102.
113
Ibid.
114
Ibid., 103.
115
Ibid.
116
One law passed by the Somers Island Company in Bermuda prohibited the baptism of ‘Bastards or Negroes’. Golding,
Servants on Horseback, 13.
 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 19

pronounced that an assembly in the Virginia colony passed a 1667 act ‘declaring that
Baptism of Slaves doth not exempt them from Bondage’.117 Despite the existence of such
laws, a vast literature debating the spiritual status of African slaves persisted into the late
seventeenth century. For instance, one author chastises planation masters ‘who refuse to
make any Negro a Christian, least they should lose the Slave; defacing at the same time
that Christianity in themselves, which they refuse to the Negro’s’.118 Richard Baxter
wonders if more could be done ‘to Convert the Blacks that are our own slaves or servants
to the Christian faith?’119 Richard Steele argues the godly tradesmen will ‘indeavour the
Instruction and Conversion of the poor Negros, who have Souls and precious and
immortal as his own’.120 Philip Cary asks why ‘are not our American Planters, that buy
multitudes of Negro’s, required to baptize them as fast as they buy them, and their
Children born in their Plantations?’121
That there proliferated so many texts promoting the conversion and baptism of
African slaves in the last few decades of the seventeenth century is a clear indication
that the controversy had not been fully settled. Despite there being laws on the books in
Virginia and South Carolina ensuring that masters could own baptized slaves, they were
reluctant to treat their slaves as though they had souls. In one fictionalized dialogue
between a master and his slave (named Sambo),122 Sambo seeks to point out the extreme
hypocrisy of Christian masters. He characterizes them as violent and chained to their
lusts: ‘but let them know’ he argues, ‘we are humane rational Souls, and as much in the
Image of God as themselves, and want none of the noble Faculties, therefore our innocent
Blood will equally call for Vegeance [sic], and as powerfully as if you have killed one of
the pretended Christians’.123 He continues, ‘We Blacks are more gentle to you, than you
Christians are to one another; and I have been assured, that all the Heathens in the World
have shed less Christian Blood, than what Hypocrite Christians themselves have greedily
let out’.124 Though at first the Christian master reproaches Sambo for presuming to
instruct his superior, he eventually concedes; ‘I cannot deny the Truth of what you have
said’.125 Of course, the purpose of the discourse was not to abolish slavery but to remind
Christians that, as Sambo effusively rejoices after winning the debate, good Servants
require good Masters, and good masters baptize their slaves.126
A few years prior, Morgan Godwyn (a former student of John Locke’s) had published
The Negro’s and Indian’s Advocate (1680) and a year later A Supplement to the Negro’s
and Indian’s Advocate (1681), both of which were impassioned pleas ‘for the
Christianizing of our Negro’s and other Heathen in those Plantations’.127 He sought to
prove that slaves possess all the faculties ‘peculiar to the Rational Being, or Soul, seated in

117
‘An Act declaring that Baptism of Slaves doth not except them from Bondage,’ in A Complete Collection of all the Laws
of Virginia Now in Force, 155. Two years later, in 1669, the South Carolina colony would also enshrine the right of
masters to determine the religion of their slaves: ‘Every free man of Carolina shall have Absolute Power and Authority
over his Negro Slave, of what Opinion or Religion soever’. The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, §40, 59.
118
R.S., Avona, 29.
119
Baxter, How to Do Good to Many, 45.
120
Steele, The Trades-man’s Calling, 215.
121
Cary, A Solemn Call, To the Reader.
122
For more on the history of the racist caricature of ‘Sambo,’ see Boskin, Sambo: The Rise & Demise of An American Jester.
123
Tryon, Friendly Advice to the Gentlemen-Planters of the East and West Indies, 182.
124
Ibid., 186–187.
125
Ibid., 215.
126
Ibid., 216.
127
Godwyn, The Negro’s and Indian’s Advocate, ‘The Preface.’
20 B. SMITH

Man only: Of whose Species, if our Negro’s can be truly said to partake, then will it of
necessity follow, that they are Originally stated in the like Natural Right to the Privileges
of Religion’.128 Again, that such vigorously argued treatises were necessary is an indica­
tion that the debate over this question was far from settled.
The persistent discussion about whether African slaves had an interior world had
direct bearing on the servant discourse in the seventeenth century. The exclusive
privilege of inner submission heightened the value of the will and internalized obedience.
Christian servants could perform Christian liberty by willingly submitting to and loving
their masters because they had the Holy Spirit. This freedom was not automatically
afforded to African slaves, who, as Richard Mayo and John Owen had claimed, needed to
be dominated because they lack the ‘internal aid’ of the Spirit. Without such assistance,
they would constantly and impetuously seek to liberate themselves from the physical
discomforts of slavery. Christian servants, in contrast, would find an inner joy in service
because they were truly serving God.

Conclusion
This servant discourse was dynamic. Over the course of the seventeenth century, the
growing social distinction between African slaves and English servants – namely, that
English servants were being rhetorically constructed as neither chattel nor galley slaves –
weakened the potency of the correlation. In other words, the success of the racialized
construction of English servants as a class wholly distinct from slaves attenuated the need
for such analogies. At the beginning of the century, it was very difficult to perceive
a meaningful difference between servant and slave.129 By the end of the seventeenth
century, these comparisons increasingly made less sense. Even the great political philo­
sopher John Locke came to argue that there was a difference between servants and
slaves.130 This evolution can also be seen in the transformation of servant manuals
throughout the eighteenth century. While these books emphasized many of the same
themes of obedience and an internalized Christian liberty as those in the seventeenth
century did, the appeal to slavery became much more subdued if it existed at all. For
instance, by 1705, William Fleetwood would argue that masters do not have the right ‘to
exhort the hired Servants to submit to be sent under-ground, or to the Labour of the
Gallies’.131 The English servant occupied a place of subordination but one that was now
so conceptually distinct from slavery that the juxtaposition was less effective.
This paper has argued that various servant discourses in England used the racialized
elements of bondage slavery to help construct a distinct social role for the servant class.
Servants were neither African slaves forced to work on plantations, nor galley slaves
forced to row for a Turkish master. Though, they began to resemble these undesirable

128
Ibid., 11. For a more radical set of arguments, see Keith, An Exhortation & Caution to Friends Concerning Buying of
Keeping Of Negroes.
129
These words were effectively identical, simply derived from different etymologies. Servant from the Latin servi,
commonly translated as ‘slave’. Slave finds its origins in the Byzantine Greek sklabos which was linked to Slavic peoples.
130
Locke explains that a servant is a freeman who sells his services for a time; whereas slaves are captives taken in war.
Locke, Second Treatise, 340, §85.
131
Fleetwood, The Relative Duties of Parents and Children, Husbands and Wives, Masters and Servants, 275. See also Waugh,
The Duty of Apprentices and other Servants; Seaton, The Conduct of Servants in Great Families; Zinzano, The Servant’s
Calling; Barnard, A Present for an Apprentice; Jonathan Swift, Directions to Servants.
 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 21

positions the more they resisted their station. To partake of the freedom of servitude,
Christian servants were called upon to both love and willingly serve their masters. In so
doing, servants performed their salvation, embodying Christian liberty. The use of this
racialized bondage imagery was also calculated to steer servants away from the tempta­
tion to strike out on their own as mere hirelings, individuals who serve many masters for
the highest wage possible. Worse even than slaves, hirelings embodied the slavish
devotion to the lusts of the flesh.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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