Either Be Free or Die For It! The Story of America's First Uprising the York County Conspiracy of 1661
York County sits astride the waters of Chesapeake Bay, Virginia. Today York County is considered one of the state’s most populous regions, situated as it is in the Norfolk-Newport News metropolitan area.
York County takes its name from the city of Yorktown, site of the penultimate battle of America’s War for Independence in 1781. Also, the county is home to Colonial Williamsburg, one of America’s most popular historic tourist attractions, a living history site, that attracts thousands of visitors each and every year.
Not all that far from Jamestown, America’s oldest colonial town first settled in 1607, York County, Virginia was one of the first settled and most populous regions in British North America during the 17th century. It was home to wealthy tidewater farmers, who grew rich off the profits from enormous sprawling tobacco plantations, that helped finance His Majesty’s Empire in the years prior to the American Revolution.
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| Colonial Map of York County Virginia |
These plantations, and by extension all of British North America back in the 17th century, were farmed by, and built on the backs of tens of thousands of indentured servants, who at least for a number of years, signed their lives away, for the “opportunity” to leave Europe and come to the New World.
In early 1661 after a disappointing Autumn harvest, a man named Major Goodwin, a wealthy planter and owner of a substantial plantation in York County, as a cost cutting measure to make up for his lost profits, decided to limit his indentured servants to a diet of only cornbread and water.
The customary, and agreed upon diet for those contractually bound to labor for a period of indenture in York County, stipulated that servants were to receive a ration of meat at least three times per week whenever supplies permitted.
After Goodwin cut the ration to only cornbread and water there was almost immediate uproar and discontent among the indentured servants.
As reported in court testimony by servant Thomas T. Collins, “there was talk of hard usage, and talk that they had nothing but cornbread and water, which was not customary to the Law of the Country.”
At first, there was simply talk of refusing to work, but then when a man named Isaac Friend, who was bound to a term of seven year’s indenture stepped forward to address the group, the meeting took a turn towards violence.
According to Friend’s own testimony he, along with another conspirator named William Cluton said to the assembled servants that: “They would get a matter of forty of them together and get guns, and he and Cluton would be the first to lead them as they went along and cry,
“Who would be for Liberty and freed from bondage?”.
Isaac Friend then went on to testify and say that the servants further stated that, “We believed enough (servants) would come to us, and that we would go through the country and kill those that made any opposition and that we would either be free or die for it!”
Using words and phrases that echoed the spirit of independence that would embody the movement behind the American Revolution over a century later, words and phrases like, “Liberty”, “Freedom” and “Be Free or Die For It”, this meeting of forty or so indentured servants from York County Virginia, led by firebrands Isaac Friend and William Cluton became known as the York County Conspiracy and became the first ever recorded labor stoppage and organized uprising in American History!
In the end, though and probably the reason why the York County Conspiracy is generally forgotten about today in American history books unlike many other, more famous, uprisings and rebellions is that despite all of its revolutionary American rhetoric--nothing ever came of the York County indentured servants conspiracy.
The conspirators, William Cluton and Isaac Friend among them, were promptly arrested and taken into custody.
Cluton and Friend believed they would be hanged.
York County, in a legal move on behalf of those bound to indentured servitude that was centuries ahead of its time, for both its humanity and magnanimity towards the accused, held a hearing to look into the circumstances of, and causality behind, the conspiracy.
First a man named John Parkes, who worked for Major Goodwin as an overseer on the plantation testified that the servants that he was in charge of, “were very well satisfied ‘till William Cluton made it known that servants ought by ye custom of ye country have meat three times a week.”
Here, we see Parkes in the employ as an overseer of the county colonial government, firmly point the finger for conspiracy at William Cluton while also testifying to the good behavior of all of the other servants. It must be remembered that Parkes may have been trying to shift the blame to an unruly servant so that he, himself, was not brought up on any charges for failing to snuff out the burgeoning uprising before it began.
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| A 17th Century Hearing in Colonial Virginia |
Under oath before the court even Isaac Friend himself did not deny that he had talked of rebellion, guns, freedom, liberty and killing. Friend admitted that, “He might speak such words when they were all together.”
Friend testified that, essentially, he got caught up in the heat of the moment, and although he fully admitted to calling for violence he steadfastly claimed that, “He had not actually intended to lead a rebellion.”
At the end of his hearing Isaac Friend was convinced he would die, but as it turned out, the court saw it differently.
The court blamed Parkes with the admonishment that he should, “Take special care and have a more diligent eye upon Isaac Friend, his servant, who appears of a turbulent and unquiet spirit.”
Isaac Friend avoided all punishment for his part in the York County Indentured Servant Conspiracy. William Cluton (or Clutton, the historical record is unsure on the matter) was not so lucky.
Cluton was charged by the court with the crime of, “Having spoken mutinous and seditious words.”
The court ordered William Cluton held in custody, however after many testified to Cluton’s good character, including overseers and other servants, he too was released.
The York County Conspiracy of 1661 came at a time in colonial America years before the stirrings of any movement towards liberty and independence on behalf of the American colonists. But it did come at a time when the British government, along with other governments across Europe, were seeking to reform and regulate rules of indenture and servitude.
By the 1660’s and the end of the 17th century many felt that the contractual rules of indentured servitude, which often included the right of overseers and employers to inflict corporal punishments including whippings, beatings and withholding food on their servants, should be reformed to be more humane. Laws were passed during the 1660’s and 70’s stipulating the maximum length a person could be held in indenture and also limiting the types and amount of punishments that could be inflicted on a servant for any and all transgressions. Servitude for women and for children was also highly curtailed by the dawn of the 18th century.
The court hearing that arose as a result of the York County Conspiracy of 1661 was just a part of this more progressive and reformist attitude towards servitude that was taking hold across the British Empire by the end of the 17th century.
Of course, this move towards leniency and humanity applied only to white, European men, women and children at the time.
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| Enslaved Africans Brought to the Virginia Colony |
White British and European reformers of that era were not enlightened enough to afford those of non-European ancestry basic human rights and thought nothing of seeking to improve the lot of white indentured servants while at the same time keeping Africans and indigenous Americans in bondage under the cruel and inhumane conditions of race-based chattel slavery.
For that reason the plantations of the American south, which up until about the year 1650 were worked largely by indentured white men and women, gradually began to more and more be worked by enslaved Africans who were brought to our shores in chains and forced to work and die for England’s burgeoning North American colonies.
Though the York County Conspiracy that took place in Virginia way back in 1661 may not have truly embodied freedom as we know it today, in that it excluded anyone whose skin wasn’t white, and though in the end indentured servitude was replaced by the even more evil of slavery in America, it is still possible to believe that when Isaac Friend along with William Cluton and the forty odd other conspirator raised the call of, “Who Will Be For Liberty and Free From Bondage?” way back in 1661, that then, at that very moment, the seeds of the movement towards American independence were first planted by a group of discontented servants…
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