Anthony Johnson (colonist)
John Casor challenges Anthony Johnson's claim to his lifetime service
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Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗Casor made his appeal for freedom while Captain Goldsmith was at Johnson's house to receive a hogshead of tobacco.
A missing indenture in Northampton County
About the beginning of November 1654, John Casor approached Captain Samuel Goldsmith at Anthony Johnson's house in Northampton County and said he had come to Virginia under an indenture for seven or eight years, that he had demanded his freedom, and that Johnson had kept him seven years beyond the term.
That is the encounter the surviving record preserves. The 1653 attached to this entry belongs to a different stage — an earlier freedom claim that John Henderson Russell dated to that year.
Goldsmith asked Johnson to produce the indenture. Johnson said he had never seen one and claimed to hold Casor for life. Goldsmith's deposition adds that Robert and George Parker said they knew an indenture existed across the bay.
Reading the date back from March 1655
The encounter survives only inside a later document: the Northampton County order of 8 March 1655, which places it "about the beginning of November last." Read against that court date, the November in question is most naturally November 1654.
Some secondary accounts attach 1653 to Casor's earlier freedom claim and 1654 to the Johnson–Parker litigation; the listed entry appears to fold the two together.
Old Style dating and the gaps in the surviving records make the sequence into 1654/55 difficult to reconstruct precisely.
The appeal and its aftermath
Goldsmith reported that Johnson feared Casor might recover cattle as compensation for the years of excess service. Johnson's wife, sons and son-in-law then pressed him to let Casor go.
Casor entered the service of Robert Parker, a neighboring English planter who treated him as free to enter a new arrangement. Johnson later complained in the Northampton County court that Parker was detaining his servant under the pretense that Casor was free.
Nothing in the surviving evidence proves that Casor entered Parker's service on the same day he appealed to Goldsmith.
Sources
Researched 23 Aug 2026 4 sources 2 audit passes, 3 issues open Date disputed
How this was checked
Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →
Date disputed. Sources disagree; the research places it at ~1654-11.
What the sources leave uncertain
- The encounter is reconstructed from a later deposition rather than a document created that day.
- John Henderson Russell dated Casor's initial claim to 1653, and the listed month derives from the record's description of an encounter near the beginning of November. The surviving records and Old Style dating make the sequence into 1654/55 difficult to reconstruct precisely.
- The evidence establishes Casor's claim and Johnson's response more securely than the exact date on which Casor left Johnson or began working for Parker.