In 1985, Van Der Zee, a novelist, [0] with the literary cache to gain access to library texts that remained barred to this working class writer until 2016, with digitization opening doors that universities shut in my face, produced the book that compelled, indirectly, my own examination. Van Der Zee writes wonderfully, sees people with souls rather than nameless hands with a nation to build. From my perspective, after 15 years digging in the mine he long ago prospected, the senior author dims to naive in some cases. Yet, this after writer sitting in this old plantation house in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, owes Van Der Zee the entire project. In 1992, I think, I read Michael Hoffman’s They Where White and They Where Slaves, which cited Van Der Zee as the main source. That pamphlet-sized book was the most an indie writer could manage in those pre-digital days. In 2011, researching a science-fiction novel, I re-read that book and have since been driven on a rampant quest to find and preserve the memories of those few European slaves that were named, and those armies that were not even named in their own miserable days.

Re-reading Bound Over, one sees the line of “white slavery” glowering on the basement floor of America, and then sees Van Der Zee, step short, sometimes on, but never over, that sacred line of falsified freedom. He is not permitted by his masters at Simon & Schuster to challenge the exclusive right of African Americans to ultimate oppression.

Both thematically and chronologically, Bound Over examines the progress of America from Plantation, to Colonial awakening, to Nation, in six sections: 1 Touched, 2 Bound, 3 Seized, 4 Stirred, 5 Released, 6 Transformed.

The book is introduced by another writer who falsifies the entire thing by claiming that European servants in America were voluntary actors, eager for opportunity. Claiming that only a third of American immigrants were unfree, he contradicts Van Der Zee’s repeated mention that half of all Americans were slaves. His fellow, the author, must have cringed mildly, sensing the narrative curtain dropping before his exposition of unnamed persons expiring in their suffering thousands, “in a worse than Egyptian bondage.” For In This New Isrаel, I have read Bound Over twice, and shall need assistance with the etxt in Colorado, as the eyes are troubling me again.

I will employ Van Der Zee’s work for the period quotes, dates, and in a few instances, where his literary brilliance as a social novelist shines, will quote my progenitor himself. For, in this chilling endeavor, knowing in my bones that the Postmodern American Mind, was long ago inoculated against the wicked reality of our national birth, in favor of a notional myth, I know also that John Van Der Zee is my father in this endeavor to recover what may be had from the graveyard of our grandfathers.

-JL, October 3, 2025

…

1600s America: Characters & Factors, Per Van Der Zee

“From 1609 until well after the founding of the republic, half of all colonists [2] who came to America arrived under some form of involuntary labor… This working paradise, the Big Rock Candy Mountain of its time… men staked out claims to men, stole them, lured them, fought over them and bid up their price… Indentured servitude was a structure supported by unequal contracts, resting on a foundation of punishment.”

-1633, Massachusetts Bay, servitude assigned as a penalty for thefts of food

-1656, John Hammond, captured by Maryland rebels while serving under Captain Stone, was sentenced to death, escaped and was shown mercy by captain Thomas Thoroughgood, who was “put under indictment,” for transporting Hammond back to England. In England, while composing a pamphlet promoting plantation life for laborers, he was mindful not to suggest this in person to a Londoner for fear of the cry going up, “A Spirit! A Spirit!” meaning a soul driver or kidnapper. It seems that Hammond’s Leah and Rachel was composed to buy off the warrant against him from Virginia and Maryland by promoting these two nightmare plantations as two civic sisters of plenty. Poet George Alsop did likewise a decade later. [4] Yet academics take these ransom letters by servants with literary talent equal to our modern novel and movie writers of good fame a straight travel writing, rather than the exit statement by a gulag survivor written after debriefing.

-1680s, Massachusetts assigns sentences from 6 months to 7 years for payment of debts.

-1653, John Maddison, ship’s carpenter, granted 600 acres of land in Virginia on the Mattapony River. This meant that he had the money to pay for his passage [or had worked off his own term] and the passage of 11 other persons, who would each be granted 50 acres under his control, until those persons had worked off the money Maddison fronted for their passage, which often occurred in shackles. If these persons failed to survive, under living conditions purely dictated by their master, Maddison, he would get their 50 acres. Over his life, Maddison always got their 50 acres, building a massive agricultural empire. If a servant survived his 4, 7 or 14 years of hard labor, he would be given his 50 acres, surrounded by his master’s thousands of acres, unable to compete or even eke out a living, and either falling into debt or back into bondage, or selling out to Maddison, would eventually lose his land. 40 to 50 acres, were deemed the minimal amount of American woodland, that, once cleared and cultivated, could support a man, wife and children, with nothing left over for shoes, tools, etc. On the Front Tier of the plantations, such spaces were abandoned regularly by “squatters” in their outward migration from the Planter empires.

-1670 to 1680: 5,000 servants entered Maryland, of these, at the end of their terms…

-1,300 “proved” their “freedom dues,” being tools, the clothes on their backs and 50 acres.

-3,700 either died in their toils or remained in bondage!

-900 of the 1,300 sold their acres right off, mostly to pay for passage back to England!

-241 took warrants for land, most of whom must then fall into debt and either be sold, or migrate west to the Front Tier

-139 proved their rights but took no land, meaning they sold the land rights and migrated, or stayed on as an overseer, smith, wheelwright or some other form of wage laborer or piece work artisan, whose tiny plot of land was not getting in the way of his recent Master’s eminent domain. If such a person fell into debt he might be bound again.

-4% of of servants entering Maryland finished their time and settled as freemen. 4% is the median margin for statistical error used by polling firms.

-Men shipped to the plantations as criminals, for one of the 300 plus crimes that called for death or transport, were chained to a board, by the neck, with a gang of fellows, in a hold that was 16 feet long, inhabited by rats.

Maddison’s Acreage increases:

-1657 +800 [that is land fictionally assigned to 16 servants]

-1662 +300 [6 servants]

-1664 +200 [4 servants]

-1683, Maddison passes on a patrimony including servants and Negroes gotten by renting 37 men over as many years and either working them to death, keeping them bound and unpaid, or buying them out in order to become a manorial lord of Virginia.

-1660, Virginia, freed servants could not find arable land, indicating that the promised acreage was not that which they had cleared and worked for their master, but some new acreage, which needed to be cleared, requiring a period of debt before the land produced…

-1667, Scottish servants are requested by planters of Barbados, to “… render both Commodity and Security to the planters.”

-1672, French backed negro uprisings are feared in Jamaica. Ordinance is passed stipulating that for every 10 negro slaves a planter must own a bound, and thus unpaid and forced, “Christian” servant, to serve as a soldier against any slave rising. Saint Christoper and Antigua pass similar acts, demanding unfree “Christian” men for work and to bear arms for their masters, “as experience heretofore had been had” suggesting that one Highlander had proven to be a match for ten Africans in previous uprisings. This will be echoed in the founding document of America in 1775 when the only mention of “white” men is the burden to bear arms for the republic. [3]

…

Notes

-0. Novel: Blood Brotherhood Stateline, also, Canyon: The Story of the Last Rustic Community in Metropolitan America

-1. Van Der Zee names the following secondary sources employed in his remarkable inquiry, and naively calls for properly credentialed academics to complete his study, a call answered only by a high school dropout pulp novelist:

-Colonists in Bondage, by Abbott E. Smith

-Government and Labor in Early America, by Richard B. Morris

-White Servitude in Pennsylvania, Chessman A. Herrick

-American Slavery, American Freedom, by Edmund Morgan

-2. The mandatory use of “colonist” which was not a term often used in 1600s by planters or laborers, like the term “indentured servant” which was not invented as a governmental device until about 1754 and was not used in public discourse until about 1820, are devices employed, mostly without deceptive intent. These key words mislead the reader to absorb the inquiry into early American forced labor in a subconscious manner that reinforces the notion that INVOLUNTARY labor was somehow the lot of persons who volunteered as a hallowed member of the “indentured” class seeking opportunity, when they were in fact unwilling persons referred to by all as “indented,” meaning to be acted upon according to a “contract” which they had no right to interpret, or even to question, unless they could prove themselves to have been educated in higher learning and bring their own case. See Crackerboy, 2019, JL, Yellow Negroes, about Chinese slaves in Maryland and Virginia circa 1700, as well as Job and Oglethorpe, circa 1730. I do not think Van Der Zee was naive, but that he wrote this book in submission to the editors who employed credentialed academic readers who would outrank him on any such digression I just conducted. In genius fashion, the author steers this book in the hallowed direction of 1776, which all American academia fawns over as the Holy of Holies of their collective ideal. His general conclusion is that American revolution was made possible by the simmering mistrust of Americans whose fathers were brought in chains and could not easily bend the knee once they had risen from bondage in such a ruthless school as English Ruled America.

-3. See The Greatest Lie Ever Sold, JL, 2019

-4. See Cox & Swain and Advent America for Alsop’s story.