Who will be for liberty?

What happened

In the winter of 1660-61 the servants on Major James Goodwin's plantation in York County, Virginia, were fed corn and water and reckoned they were owed meat three times a week. Bound for years to a master, they had no way to make him listen. One evening at the major's house Isaac Friend, one of them, said they should get about forty together and get arms; he would be the first, Thomas Collins later swore, and have them cry as they went along, "who would be for liberty, and free from bondage." Will Cheshire answered that he would be one. Word reached the county court, which took depositions on 6 January. Friend told the justices he did not remember saying it. The court dealt gently with him: a warning, and his overseer told to watch him. William Clutton, another of Goodwin's servants, was ordered arrested for seditious words about the diet. Rothbard lists the York rising among the servant revolts whose demands ran "from improved conditions and better food to outright freedom" (CiL, p. 61) and notes the "surprising leniency" of the court (p. 62). The leniency did not last. A larger servant plot in 1663 ended with its leaders executed. Men at the bottom of Virginia's labor system had named liberty as their aim more than a century before the Revolution.