Join us, Tuesday, March 18, 2025 at 4pm for a Fellow’s Forum by University of Texas at Austin professor of Government, Bartholomew H. Sparrow.
Held in the Berkeley Conference Room of the Jefferson Library, this Fellow’s Forum is free and open to the public. The Presentation will begin promptly at 4pm and last for 60 minutes, including an opportunity for Q&A and discussion.
About the Presentation
A quarter of a million Europeans began their lives in Virginia and the other North American colonies as indentured servants—i.e. those who were obligated to work for a period of years in subservience to the person who agreed to pay for their transport. “Silent America” examines the effects of indentured servitude on the founders, on the founding, and on subsequent American political culture. Like several other founders, Thomas Jefferson owned, employed, and bargained for the purchase of indentured servants. He referred to indentured servants in two of the Declaration’s grievances and in later correspondence. But in his Notes on the State of Virginia Jefferson curiously omitted any discussion of indentured servants, former servants, or their propertyless descendants—those Eric Foner refers to as the “third class” of the founding—and in his reply of June 1786 to the editor of Encyclopédie Méthodique on the entry for “États Unis,” Jefferson mischaracterized the population of indentured servants and convict servants. I conclude by suggesting why Jefferson may have sought to downplay and misdescribe the reality of indentured servants and the white poor in America.
About Bartholomew H. Sparrow
Bartholomew H. Sparrow studies the interaction between extra-national factors and American political development. His current book project, “Silent America: Indentured Servitude, White Poverty, and Origins of the United States,” examines the impact that the large population of indentured servants—more than half of the European emigrants to Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and other North American colonies up until 1776—had on the founding and on American political society. His project has previously received support from the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Newberry Library, the American Antiquarian Society, and other institutions. His most recent book, The Strategist: Brent Scowcroft and the Call of National Security, is a biography of General Scowcroft, the national security advisor under presidents Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush. Sparrow is a professor of Government at The University of Texas at Austin.