Freedom Dues: Negotiating Race, Servitude, and Freedom in Early American Law and Literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Freedom dues were typically payments of money, land, or clothing that masters gave to servants upon completion of servitude. Using case studies, this thesis captures the arc of a historic transformation in how freedom dues were perceived between the mid-seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries; it illuminates how these dues became a humanitarian symbol and the narrative of self-actualization that arose about them. The narrative focus on freedom dues was generated through tracts advocating immigration to colonial America and was integral to early understandings of the promise of New World prosperity. The texts I address use this narrative to critique a society failing to live up to its implied ideal: enfranchisement through hard work. My thesis reveals that often relations of servitude morph into something that looks dangerously akin to chattel slavery. In Chapter One, I contrast the Lawes and Libertyes (1648), where servants were to be prevented from “be[ing] sent away emptie,” to the revisioning of this framework in the Fugitive Slave Law (1850), which enshrined slaves’ perpetual indebtedness. In Chapter Two, I use the Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt (1692-93) to examine how Tituba’s claim that the devil offered her an indenture followed by many “fine things” came to influence other testimonies. I argue that the narrative Tituba and others craft regarding the Devil's promise of servitude properly rewarded but not supplied by Massachusetts’s governors would have been shocking in New England at the time. Chapter Three analyses The Scarlet Letter (1850) and reveals that, by presenting Hester Prynne as a branded, lifelong indentured servant, Hawthorne effectively portrays a variety of servitude that appears similar to black slavery. Hester and Pearl have their customary white privileges undermined, I argue, and Hawthorne’s novel reveals abolitionist leanings. In Chapter Four, I consider Harriet Wilson’s autobiographical text, Our Nig (1859). The Bellmonts’ refusal to provide proper freedom dues to the novel’s protagonist highlights the degree to which her servitude has been slavish, and Wilson’s plea for support to remedy this wrong provides a final critique of "free" New England.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.077 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".