“Theft of Oneself”: Runaway Servants in Early Maryland: Deterrence, Punishment, and Apprehension

Abstract

Immigrant indentured and transported convict servants had an incentive to breech their labor contracts by running away. Masters and servants in colonial Maryland engaged in strategic behaviors to deal with this contract breech incentive. In the seventeenth century, masters altered the colony’s statutory laws to deter and thwart servant escape, and servants chose the escape routes that offered the best chance of not being returned to Maryland. Strategic behaviors changed by the eighteenth century. Masters quickly advertised runaway servants in Maryland newspapers, and servants selected when to run that delayed the appearance of those ads as much as possible.

Appendix: Grubb’s Murray Tribute

John Murray’s work on orphan apprenticeship in early America and my work on European immigrant indentured servitude in early America had much in common (for examples see Grubb (1992b, 2000a, 2006), Murray and Herndon (2002), and Murray (2013). Regarding these types of labor contracts, John and I often discussed contract structure, why particular contract designs were used, how contract compliance was enforced, and the behavioral incentives faced by masters, servants, and the government regarding contract performance. Typically, we discussed these issues in person at the annual meetings of the Economic History Association.

John was familiar with the work that is provided here through reading earlier working paper versions of it, but mostly through our in-person discussions of it over the years. He had encouraged me to publish it in some form. The initial working paper was written in 1980 as my first work on immigrant indentured servitude in colonial America when I was still a graduate student in economics at the University of Chicago. I sat it aside to work on other aspects of immigrant servitude. I returned to it often over the years, occasionally adding to it, but always setting it aside and not finishing it.

I aspired to use the paper as a vehicle for developing a complex mathematical model of crime and punishment, building on the work of my thesis advisor Gary Becker (1976: 39–85), and then use the colonial data to test the model. I hoped to place the piece in a general model-oriented economics journal. Alas, I have not been up to the task of mathematically modeling the issues as I envisioned them, nor do I think the data were strong enough to test the kind of model I had in mind. So while I frequently revisited the paper, I always sat it aside, waiting for better modeling inspiration that unfortunately (or fortunately) never came.

John liked the story and the data findings in the project and encouraged me to just publish the story and the evidence and not worry about trying to look modeling erudite for my economist peers. He felt that historians and economic historians would find the project interesting and a valuable addition to colonial labor history. As a tribute to his wise advice and, in a gentle way, his mentoring of an older scholar, I cleaned up the project, suppressed efforts to provide an explicit and original mathematical model of crime and punishment, and just presented the story and the evidence. Thanks John. I will miss our conversations.