Orphaned and lost

...When it came to establishing a population basis for representation in the House of Representatives women counted as full persons but only for the purpose of electing men...

...Germany and the lowlands had an impoverished peasantry and small urban property-owners yearning for a better life...

...A friend of mine, for example, found that most of one of her ancestral families — a white family living in Rutherford County, North Carolina in 1790 — had apparently disappeared without a trace...

...Joseph, aged six, went to weaver Daniel Maddan to work learning "the art and mistery'' of weaving until he 407 was entitled to freedom at twenty-one...

...Our celebration of the bicentennial of the framing of the Constitution and of the long, hot summer spent by its brilliant architects in negotiation in Philadelphia has been more scholarly than jubilatory...

...Our elementary and high school history books made no mention of the fact that half or more of the inhabitants of the thirteen colonies were white indentured servants — men, women, and children who could be bought, sold, rented out, or left as inheritances...

...What happened to daughters Anne and Judah is not clear...

...Was this what happened to the young DeFreeces...

...It was never envisioned that they would have any choice in the election...

...sometimes they were literally kidnapped...

...Perhaps they were already married off at then-not-unusual ages of twelve or fourteen to colonists needing the free labor of wives...

...N.B., the record-keepers were notoriously given to approximate and alternative spellings — DeFreece or DeFrice, Reed or Read.] After that the DeFreece children vanish from marriage records, burial records, property records...

...The others died, returned to Europe somehow, or drifted off to become the "poor whites" of legend...

...The chief risk was that the servant might die early in service...

...What became of them...

...Rebekah, aged eight, was bound over to Charles Weaks, evidently as a maid servant because she was to attain her freedom at the age of eighteen having learned "the art and mistery of a spinster...

...Agents, according to Richard Hofstadter in America at 1750, "were known to lure children with sweets, to seize on the weak and gin-sodden, and to bedazzle the credulous...

...Often their victims were taken roughly in hand, and, pending departure, held in imprisonment either on shipboard or in low-grade hostels or brothels...

...We know of the DeFreeces only because the eldest boy George was not indentured and made his way to the Tennessee frontier...

...Somehow the state of New Jersey got things wrong and allowed them the vote for a few years, but that error was soon corrected...

...Often what turns up is a surprising and sometimes a disturbing illumination of little known aspects of that history...

...Stimulated perhaps by our recent bicentennial and centennial celebrations (of the Declaration, the Treaty of Paris, the Statue of Liberty, and, currently, the Constitution), Americans are intent, on finding out where they fit into the history of the United States...

...sometimes they were recruited, wooed and gulled by false promises...

...OF SEVERAL HINDS Abigail McCarthy ORPHANED AND LOST A COUNTRY BUILT AND PEOPLED BY THE POOR As anyone at the National Archives will tell you, the researching of family history has become a popular national pastime...

...Nominally free but poor colonists fallen on hard times often had to indenture themselves and their children...

...Orphans like the DeFreeces were indentured as a matter of course...

...Some recent studies estimate that a good many more than half of all persons who went to the colonies south of New England were servants in bondage to planters, farmers, speculators, and proprietors...

...The latter were desperate for labor in the sparsely settled new country...

...by fabulous promises...

...Child labor also was taken as a matter of course...

...Women and slaves appear in the Constitution but only as a basis for population figures...

...The conditions of the labor were for the most part appalling from our modern point of view...

...Inevitably, in the wake of the civil rights and the women's movements, much has been made of the fact that the rights guaranteed by the Constitution were not universal...

...Sometimes they came freely, agreeing to a terminable period of servitude in exchange for their passage...

...In 1802, when he was probably thirteen years old, the remainder of his time (the time of "bound boy John DeFrice") was willed by Samuel Reed to his wife Sarah with the direction that his daughter Rachel was to pay half of John's freedom dues when he was free...

...Little has been said, however, of the bonded, a third group of Americans also counted but left without a voice...

...According to Hofstadter, "The chief temptation to the master was to drive the servant beyond his powers in the effort to get as much as possible out of him during limited years of service...

...In 1792 — two years after the signing of the Constitution — the children of John DeFreece, deceased, were bound over — that is, the rights to their labor were literally sold — to various members of the community...

...England had large masses of the permanently unemployed living in unspeakable slums...

...None of these children appear in records again except for little John...

...It is estimated that only two out of ten who, like his siblings, lived in such white servitude or came from such families, reached positions of moderate comfort...

...This sad fact is another facet of the history we should not forget — we are a country built and peopled by the poor...

...In order to give the Southern states more equal representation slaves were counted as three-fifths persons...

...There has been emphasis on what the document which made us a nation actually did and on how much it left undone: emphasis, too, on the conservative fram-ers' veneration of property, their limited concept of freedom, and their practical compromises...

...Three-year-old John went to farmer Samuel Read to learn to be a farmer...