Noah Offenbacher

“The Poor Unhappy Transported Felon's Sorrowful Account of His Fourteen Years Transportation…” provides a narrative of a young man who was convicted of robbery and sent from London to Virginia to work off his fourteen-year sentence in the tobacco fields. Central to this poem is the concept of convict labor, particularly of individuals from Britain to the Americas. According to an analysis by Farley Grubb, this a successful economic tactic for privatizing criminal justice in Britain, while also providing ample inexpensive laborers to America. Rather than bear the expense of maintaining prisons, removing convicts from British society altogether (even if they could return eventually) was the preferred method of maintaining order.

Upon arrival, transported convicts entered into the market, where they were set in competition with voluntary servants and enslaved individuals. The metrics which determined a servant’s value are described in Part II of Revel’s poem as follows:

Some felt our hands others our legs and feet,

And made us walk to see we were complete.

Some view'd our teeth to see if they were good,

And fit to chow our hard and homely food.

If any like our limbs, or looks, or trades,

Our captain then a good advantage makes,

But they a difference make it doth appear.

'Twix… those for seven and those for fourteen years.

Grubb’s analysis of the market value of British convict labor in 18th century America corroborates these interests of prospective buyers. Much like auctions of enslaved Africans, skill, size, health, sex, and perceived trustworthiness were all factored into a laborer’s value. As estimated by his model, the auction price for the typical convict (unskilled adult male with a 7-year sentence) came out to 1.93 pounds per year of labor. For fourteen-year convicts, this estimate was 1.01 pounds per year. Both of these estimates demonstrate how convict labor was considerably discounted on the basis of criminality, as compared to the labor of a comparable voluntary indentured servant, whose labor would be priced around 2.44 pounds per year.

Works Cited

Revel, James. The Poor Unhappy Transported Felon’s Sorrowful Account of His Fourteen Years

Transportation, at Virginia, in America.[ca. 1800]. Via “Documenting the American

South,” UNC Library, 2004. 1-8.

https://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/revel/revel.html

Grubb, Farley. “The Market Evaluation of Criminality: Evidence from the Auction of

British Convict Labor in America, 1767-1775.” The American Economic Review, vol. 91,

no. 1, 2001, pp. 295–304. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2677911. Accessed 7 Nov.

2020.