By just reading Elizabeth Sprigs' A Letter to her Father makes me pretty thankful that my parents were very strict about where I am and where I go. If I decided to do what Elizabeth did to gain independence, I would probably feel really stupid about sneaking out. A regular teen would sneak out to go to a party. She sneaking out to a whole other country. The punishment was 10 times more worse than if her parents caught her, because they treated her like crap. I guarantee you that the way her parents treated her were not that bad. I mean, today's world and the 1700's were very different, but sometimes doing things out of rebellion are not worth it; especially to be enslaved in the end.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
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2 comments:
An interesting comparison. I included this reading for two reasons. First to show what life was like for young indentured servants in the mid-18th century.
You used the term "enslaved;" she was not a slave, but she felt like one and compared her condition of servitude in Maryland to slavery. Answering the question of how some servants perceived their situation? Was her experience comparable to a slave?
Second, What did she expect when she left England for the new world? What were her motives for entering a contract of indenture? Was she looking for religious freedom? Wealth? No, she was fleeing her home, her family, her father. What does this tell us about motives for signing a contract of indenture? What kind of liberty was she seeking?
Did she think that she was signing herself into a life of toil and misery? What does this tell us about the information she had about colonial life when she signed?
Although this letter shows a lot of her sorrow, like you said, there many other indentured servants than her. In addition to that, this was also one letter. It could have possibly gotten worse for her as well.
She expected freedom, maybe not as soon as she arrived in the New World, but that was clearly her main reason for leaving her parents. I am not entirely sure how young adults acted in the 1700s but there may be a possibility that she felt as if she was enslaved. She was a young naive girl who thought that she would have it all due to all the false advertising that many people shared about the New World.
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