May 19, 1773

The Day Hugh Heffernan Bought His Future for £18

How an Indentured Irish Kid Timed the Revolution Like a Market Crash

I found it by accident. I was searching for something else—some hint about how my family acquired land in Pennsylvania, about how class mobility actually worked in the 18th century, about whether the American Dream had ever been anything more than a well-timed escape from debt.

The record is spare. One line in a handwritten ledger from 1773, now digitized and searchable if you know the name variants to try:

"May 19th 1773, Hugh Heffernan, indentured to Simeon Shurlock and his assigns, servant 4 years, Southwark, £18."

Fourteen words that contain an entire economic transcript.

The Arithmetic of Escape

Hugh arrived in Philadelphia as an indentured servant—a legal status one step above slavery, bound by contract to work for a master who had paid his passage from Ireland. The price was £18, roughly $3,000 in today's money, which Hugh would repay with four years of his labor.

He landed in Southwark, the working-class waterfront district of colonial Philadelphia where artisans, shipwrights, and day laborers lived in narrow houses on narrow streets. This was not the Philadelphia of Independence Hall and polished silver. This was the Philadelphia of forges and taverns, where the air smelled of iron and salt and where the Revolution would be planned in back rooms by men who had mastered the art of stoking a fire.

The timing is everything. Hugh's indenture would end in May 1777. By then, the Continental Congress had declared independence, Washington's army was losing battles but winning the war of endurance, and Philadelphia itself would soon be occupied by British troops. A skilled tradesman—especially one who had just completed his term—would have been exactly what the revolutionary effort needed.

Here's the economic context that makes Hugh's freedom a jackpot:

• In 1777, the Continental Army faced a critical labor shortage—every able-bodied man was either enlisted, hiding, or dead
• Military contracts for blacksmiths, carpenters, and millers paid triple the pre-war wage (in depreciated Continental currency, but still)
• The Quartermaster Department was desperate for skilled artisans to repair wagons, shoe horses, and build encampments
• Labor inflation meant a freed indentured servant could name his price, especially if he had a trade

Hugh didn't just gain his freedom. He gained it at the exact moment his skills became wartime currency.

From Servant to Soldier to Something Else

Here's where the documents go silent—and then speak in code. Hugh's War of 1812 pension application—the document that led me to search for his arrival record—mentions his Revolutionary service only in passing. Why does a War of 1812 pension talk about 1776 at all? Because Hugh served in both wars. The 1812 pension file references his Revolutionary service as proof of citizenship and character, a prerequisite for receiving benefits.

The timeline: Indenture ends 1777 → Revolutionary service 1777-1783 → Wartime wages and/or land bounty → Quiet accumulation 1783-1812 → War of 1812 service (likely militia) → Pension filed 1818-1820

The land is the clue that doesn't appear in the pension file but shows up in deed records. Hugh appears in Pennsylvania property rolls after the war. Not a lot of land, but enough to matter. Enough to suggest he converted wartime wages into permanent assets—the move that separates survivors from legends.

The mystery: Did Hugh claim his bounty land in Ohio (which he was entitled to as a Revolutionary veteran) and sell it for cash to buy property closer to Philadelphia? The deed records show not the original bounty but the result of a savvy investment made by a man who understood that land, not paper promises, was wealth.

The Invisible Success

Hugh's story is the inverse of the Somali Bantu story I wrote about in Gnoli. There, refugee success was invisible to official data. Here, indentured servant success is visible only in property records and pension files. Both are stories of people who outperformed their assigned status and built something that lasted.

But Hugh's story leaves me with the same question that haunts my own generation: What other stories remain invisible? How many indentured servants became landowners? How many refugees became employers? The records exist, but we have to know where to look—and we have to ask why some successes get recorded while others don't.

May 19, 1773. Hugh Heffernan bought his future for £18 and four years. The bill came due in May 1777, and he walked out of Simeon Shurlock's workshop into a revolution that had created a seller's market for his labor. He didn't just survive the war. He weaponized it.

That's not luck. That's timing. That's the strength of an idea beating the strength of presence—a man who understood that his servitude was a down payment, not a destiny.

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Dennis Morgan is a writer and educator in Cleveland. His other essays include "God Has a Womb," "Gnoli," and "Generation Why," all excavating stories that official histories failed to record.