Maggie Delaney


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	From Indentured Servant to Professional Mourner - Maggie Delaney’s Irish Experience in America

		By Helen E. McKinney August 19, 1762: To be SOLD, AN Irish Woman Servant, who has three Years and three Months to serve. Enquire at the New Printing Office. (The Pennsylvania Gazette)

This could have been any number of a thousand different women in America. It could have been someone who survived servitude to become your ancestor, it could have been someone whose body finally gave out from abuse and hardship before their servitude term even ended and death claimed them, or it could have been someone like Maggie Delaney who survived despite all odds.

Maggie’s story, sometimes pitiful, sometimes humorous in spite of its seriousness, carries at its core a stubborn determination to hold onto even the faintest glimmer of hope. She dredges on day by day resolved to not let the odds beat her. Maggie’s story does shine a light at the end of the tunnel for those who never lose hope, who never give up.

Maggie was forced to leave her homeland of Ireland with her husband and children to find a better life in the new American colonies. What they found was separation and sorrow as indentured servants. They were a family torn apart from one another with little thought of ever being reunited. Maggie’s tale is one of a mother making a desperate bid to reunite her family once again no matter the cost.

Maggie is fond of recounting her life story, including a final rescue of sorts by Parson John. The good Parson, her last master, was more kind to her than most. But still, she wore the collar of servitude, literally, around her neck to remind her of her lost life in Ireland and what she thought would be a new start in the American Colonies.

Maggie Delaney (a.k.a., Carol Jarboe) will return to Shelbyville on Tuesday, April 23 at 7 p.m. as Maggie Delaney. For this performance, Maggie has embarked upon the next chapter of her extraordinary life. Now a widow, she finds herself in Philadelphia, having joined up with Ould Badger, a leader of one of the underground gangs that supply doctors and medical schools with cadavers necessary for their studies, also known as Resurrectionists. All who meet this odd pair must be careful – the group is short one man and they are ardently recruiting to fill that position!

Maggie makes it a habit of explaining the Resurrectionists: who they were and why their services were necessary. When they venture forth, Ould Badger always packs the necessary equipment and tools needed for his nocturnal underground wanderings. But it is his partner, Maggie, who does all of the talking. And thinking. And talking.

Ever resourceful, Maggie has also become a Professional Mourner, with a side business of selling teeth and hair. After all, a good Irish woman has to make a living some way or other. And she can’t let Badger have all of the glory!

“I started playing Maggie after hearing a wonderful lecture on the “lower sort” of the colonies,” said Jarboe. “Being an educator at heart, I quit the “Mrs. Parson” that I was doing and began to research Indentured Servants with the intention of bringing that portion of history out at the various events that we attended.”

After about four years of research and “morphing” Maggie into “what I felt was a correct representation of an Indenture, and being Irish, I (Maggie) took up laundry as an occupation to encourage the public to speak and interact with her.”

Eleven years prior, Jarboe was asked to develop a speaking program for Fort Boonesborough for their Fireside Chats, which became “Maggie Delaney, The Life of an Indentured Servant.” As a result, “Maggie became settled into that role,” and after 5 months of preparation, made her debut.

Her story mirrors that of so many other Irish immigrants. In her homeland, “the luck of the Irish”, seemed to falter for a time, encouraging many to seek a new life in the American colonies as Ireland was in constant turmoil.

By the 17th century, England had firm political control over Ireland. Irish rights and the Catholic religion were suppressed. Prejudicial attitudes in Britain promoted the idea of the Irish being racially inferior and prone to criminal activity. As the prices for African slaves increased, the Irish soon became a target for the same (cheaper) reason. They became a source of labor in the Caribbean.

During the ensuing decades, an increasing number of Irish servants were shipped to the British colonies. Trade networks emerged in the Caribbean Islands for the buying and selling of contracts for Irish laborers. Many of these laborers were forced to relocate to the colonies as political prisoners and criminals, or simply wound up homeless and impoverished. Some Irish laborers did sign the customary contracts, making them “legal” indentured servants, although they were not treated any better. They took a chance on life as an indentured servant, because at least at the end of their servitude there was a chance of starting over with a better life in the colonies. And it was a way for those without monetary means to come to America with free passage.

In Women, Work and Family in the Antebellum Mountain South, Wilma A. Dunaway writes that “by the time of the Revolutionary War, indentured servitude had been a common practice in the United States for 150 years. According to Kenneth Stampp:




		The Resurrectionists display their tools.

Redemptioners paid their passage to America by binding themselves as servants for terms of from two to seven years. In the seventeenth century most of the servants were English; in the eighteenth century most of them were Germans, Swiss, Scots, Scotch-Irish, and Irish. Victims of kidnappers and convicts sentenced to transportation by English courts supplemented this flow of unfree labor. Probably more than half of the immigrants to the thirteen English colonies in North American came as bondsmen.”

In 1790, Maryland and Virginia received more than 1,000 indentured servants a year, most of them from Germany and Ireland, and three-quarters of them were males (Dunaway). A quick look at frontier newspaper advertisements provides a limited sense of the extent of indentured servitude. “Of 602 runaways posted in eight regional newspapers between 1790 and 1810, nearly 6 percent were rewards offered for the return of indentured laborers. Two-fifths of these runaways were immigrants, and more than one-third were females, like the missing “spinner from Ireland” posted in 1801 by an east Tennessee employer. A sixteen-year-old female escaped from her Frederick County, Maryland, employer and was believed to be on the east Tennessee frontier in 1793. The “Public” was “Warned” by Daniel Wythe “Not to Harber [his] indentured servant, Biddy Colbert, emigrant from Ireland.”

“Everyone loves a story and Maggie is just a woman who is telling her story of a life of hardship and loss,” said Jarboe. “Most everyone can connect with those two emotions and anytime you can bring out an emotion that strikes a familiar chord in another person, BAM, you’ve made a connection.”

With this new program, “Maggie has become free upon the death (she thinks) of the Good Parson and his last wishes to send her on her way. However, she finds life much harder with her freedom and ends up a partner with Ould Badger and his Resurrectionist gang.”

This time around, it is Ould Badger that is Maggie’s partner. “Maggie and Ould Badger’s relationship is one of mutual distrust and business, but they seem fond of each other,” said Jarboe. “This program is much more lighthearted and everyone should find themselves wiping tears of laughter from their eyes instead of sorrow.”

Jarboe found information on the Resurrectionists while researching a new Literature class that she was teaching and found “it was too good not to bring out. At first, I thought that it was limited to the British Isles, but after a little scratching at the surface, I found that it was all over the colonies (and the United States) and even carried on much longer than the activity in the British Isles.”

She said there are several good books written about the Resurrectionists, but the best resource came from the medical profession. “Their medical journals and Master’s papers are full of this information. In fact, there are excellent papers written on selective states and even selective medical schools.”

In America Resurrectionists generally worked in small groups to scout and pillage fresh graves. Fresh graves were generally given preference since the earth had not yet settled, thus making the digging easier.

Resurrectionists were also known to hire women to portray grieving relatives of the dead and to claim the bodies of dead at poorhouses. Women were even hired to attend funerals as grieving mourners to learn of any hardships the Resurrectionists might later encounter during the disinterment.

Several medical schools became known in Philadelphia, Baltimore and New York for body snatching activity as interest in anatomical dissection increased. Characters such as Ould Badger and Maggie provided the necessary cadavers. This demand grew as medical schools became more established in America.

In 1762, John Morgan and William Shippen Jr. founded the medical department of the University of Pennsylvania. Shippen put an advertisement in the Pennsylvania Gazette in November 1762 announcing his lectures about the “art of dissecting, injections, etc.” The cost was “five pistoles.”

Three years later, his house was attacked by a mob who claimed he had desecrated a church graveyard. The doctor denied this, declaring he only used bodies of “suicides, executed felons, and now and then one from the Potter’s Field”. One wonders if he ever met Maggie.

It is obvious that Jarboe has spent countless hours researching indentured servitude in the colonies during the 17th and 18th centuries. This new program about Maggie “is important mainly for awareness and understanding of how our medicine came to be what it is today.”

She cautions her audiences, “Don’t ever forget that it was the lower people, the street dwellers, and the poor that made the bones upon which the country fleshed itself out. Not everyone that had a great influence on our history ever had a say in anything. They just were.”


	Jarboe and her husband Frank, who accompanies her, teaches both junior high and high school classes at a private school in the Nashville area. They live in Bowling Green, Ky and she is originally from Michigan while Frank is a native of Breckenridge Co., Ky. They travel extensively, averaging about 40-42 weekends a year participating in living history events.