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By Root 7259 0

labor gangs to do the noisome, unfamiliar work of extracting turpentine, tar, and pitch from pitch pines; children orphaned by the typhus epidemic were apprenticed off in Albany and other towns. Enraged, the Palatines mutinied, and Hunter sent troops to restore order. It then became clear that the land chosen for them was poorly suited for cultivating pitch pines—whereupon Hunter turned them loose to fend for themselves. Some found their way to the Mohawk Valley. Others scattered into New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Still others returned to the city. No one could have been happy with the outcome except perhaps the merchants who, like Lewis Morris and Robert Livingston, realized tidy profits selling them spoiled food and second-rate supplies at inflated prices. Livingston also wound up with sizable numbers of Palatines as his tenants.

Close behind the Palatines came the Irish, though on their own rather than with official backing. Roughly two out of three were the so-called Ulster Scots or Scots-Irish, the descendants of hundreds of thousands of Scottish Presbyterians driven by chronic poverty and religious persecution to settle Ireland’s northern counties during the seventeenth century. After 1715 a succession of blows—parliamentary suppression of the Irish woolens industry, crop failures and famine, rack-renting by absentee English land-lords—forced them to move again, first to Irish coastal ports, then to America. Between 1720 and 1730 the mainland colonies as a whole absorbed more than fifteen thousand Ulster Scots.

With them came between sixty and eighty thousand Roman Catholics (many of them possibly Gaelic-speaking) from Ireland’s southern counties, driven out by legal proscription, Protestant prejudice, and the erosion of traditional communities. While cheap land on the frontier was their primary goal, a substantial though undetermined number made their way to New York City. Many arrived as indentured servants who contracted to serve an employer for a stated period of time, in exchange for passage and keep (“sufficient Meate drinke and App[arel] during his said time,” as one indenture phrased it). Sometimes this was arranged in Europe, as in 1729, when tailor William Presland agreed, in the presence of the lord mayor of Dublin, to serve New York merchant John Colgan for four years. Others were advertised for sale in the New- York Gazette on their arrival. (“Redemptioners” were those who agreed to pay for their passage within a stated period after arriving in America; if they failed to “redeem” this debt, the captain who brought them could sell their services to the highest bidder as indentured servants.)

When the ship Thomas arrived from London in October 1728, its owners invited the public to purchase the indentures of “several Men, Women and Boys, Servants, amongst whom there are several Tradesmen, as Bakers, Weavers, Bricklayers, Carpenters, Shoemakers, Glassiers, Coopers, &c.” Not infrequently, entire families were on the market. “To Be Sold,” read one advertisement at the middle of the century: “A German Servant Man, with his Wife and Son, of about Six Years old, who are to serve five Years, he is as compleat a Gardner as any in America; understands a Flower and Kitchen Gardens to Perfection.” (Only a tiny fraction of these were the convicted felons routinely sent out from the mother country as indentured servants: most such “transported” convicts wound up in the plantation colonies of the Chesapeake or the West Indies.)

What drew artisans to New York was the good pay they could expect after they had served their terms. In “York city,” James Murray wrote home in 1737, “a Wabster gets 12 Pence a Yeard, a Labourer gets 4 Shillings and 5 Pence a Day, a Lass gets 4 Shillings and 6 Pence a Week for spinning on the Wee Wheel, a Carpenter gets 6 Shillings a Day, and a Tailor gets 20 Shillings for making a Suit of deaths, a Wheel-wright gets 16 Shillings for making Lint Wheels a Piece.”

Despite Murray’s assurances to those left behind that his new homeland was a “bonny Country,” a servant’s life could be a harsh one,