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The rise and fall of indentured servitude
Rise of indentured servants
Indentured servitude thesis
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In the seventeenth century many of the men and women who came to America as indentured servant had done so under duress. Many were exiled by the English government, some by kidnapping, lies, many were lured into what they felt would be a better life because they were desperate to escape the one they were in. Upon signing the agreement to be an indentured servant, which would have stated that the person agreed to work for the master for 5-7 years in exchange for the master paying their fare to the United States. In many cases there were then imprisoned in the ship in order to guarantee that they would not run away. Whatever the reason for the people becoming indentured servants, they became a great source of profit for “the merchants, traders,
By the 18th century, Pennsylvania was becoming home for American Development. Many people that were drawn to Pennsylvania were servants whether, for sometimes 4 years or however long, it took to pay off debt for their travel across the Atlantic. If they weren’t servant, they were slaves who almost had no chance of freedom. Servants had a chance to become free after paying off their debts with work, but not the same for slaves.
Even if the ill-treatments did not manifest into physical or verbal abuse, the servants were exposed to crude surroundings. Among many factors included being malnourished, sleep deprivation, and/or overburden with hard manual labor. The indentured servants were treated like property instead of hard-working human beings. They could be bought and sold at any time.
During the 1600’s people began to look for different types of work in the new world. As cash crops, such as tobacco, indigo, and rice, were growing in the South, there became a need for labor. This got the attention of convicts, debtors, and other people looking for new opportunities and money. Indentured servitude was vastly growing during the 17th and 18th centuries. Approximatively 10 million men, women, and children were moved to the new world. Women during this time found themselves being sold to men for these cash crops. A commonly used term during this time for these women was tobacco brides. Almost 7.7 million of the slaves captured and moved to the new world were African Americans. Slaves and indentured servants had it rough for
The experiences that Richard Frethorne endured were in a lot of ways similar to those of James Revel. Both suffered from sickness and disease, lack of resources such as clothes and shelter, and most unfortunately limited access to food. The big distinction between these two, however, is that Frethorne was shipped to the New World on his own accord in hopes of a free and better life. While Revel was forcibly shipped as a felon, sent in punishment to serve his sentence in slavery.
The role of an indentured servant in the 1700s was not a glamorous one. They came to the New World knowing that, for a time, they would be slaves for someone they did not know and the risk of disease and death was high, but the opportunity that laid ahead of them after their time of servitude was worth everything to these settlers of the New World. They came to America for the same reasons as all of the other settlers. Religious freedom, land, wealth, and a new start were motives for both settlers and indentured servants but the one thing separating most settlers from the indentured servants was that they could afford their voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. Indentured servants couldn’t buy their ticket to the New World, but that didn’t stop
In many ways the lives indentured servants led in the colonies was seemingly privileged compared to that of a slaves. An indentured servant was an individual who had exchanged a predetermined number of years in servitude to their new masters (Faragher 2009, p. 55). Some indentured servants worked out the terms of their agreement prior to arrival. While some of the less fortunate servants were sold in a fashion similar to that of a slave (cummings, 1995). The servants who had pre-established contracts were transferred to their new masters after payment was rendered for their passage to the New World (Faragher 2009, p. 55). The term in which the servant was indebted was usually two to seven years (Faragher 2009, p. 55). However, the Masters had the upper hand because they could expand the length of servitude in accordance to bad behaviors, such as running away or becoming pregnant ("Colonial america,").
The first arrivals of Africans in America were treated similarly to the indentured servants in Europe. Black servants were treated differently from the white servants and by 1740 the slavery system in colonial America was fully developed.
By the 1700s, it was usually easy to discern an urban slave from their rural counterparts by their clothing. The elite slave owning society in the city often felt a sense of social pressure to dress their servants stationed in the city in finer clothing than they did for those that they enslaved on the plantation. Johann Martin Boltzius, a minister throughout Georgia and South Carolina, described the clothing of slaves as he witnessed in the city:
Indentured servitude was the institutional arrangement devised to increase labor mobility from Europe (particularly England) to America, and it was the labor system that preceded American slavery. Its emergence in Virginia in the seventeenth century can be seen as a development expedient to the circumstances surrounding the colony. Indentured servitude was practically the only way in which a poor person could get to the colonies and planters could be supplied with cheap labor. Richard Frethorne's document written in 1623, The Experiences of an Indentured Servant, legalized the master-servant relationship, specified the kind of labor to be performed, the length of time to be served, and the dues owed to the servant at the completion of his term.
The slave trade into the United States began in 1620 with the sale of nineteen Africans to a colony called “Virginia”. These slaves were brought to America on a Dutch ship and were sold as indentured slaves. An Indentured slave is a person who has an agreement to serve for a specific amount of time and will no longer be a servant once that time has passed, they would be “free”. Some indentured slaves were not only Africans but poor or imprisoned whites from England. The price of their freedom did not come free.
England at the time was over populated, and jobs were hard to find. So many people that could not afford the boat trip over to America offered themselves as an indentured servant for a period of time. This contractual term can last from four to seven years. Many colonists preferred having indentured servants over slaves, because they also helped ward off Native Americans from attacking settlers. The one big drawback of indentured servants was that they usually did not make it past the first year of their contract.
An indentured servant is a person who is under a contract to work for another person for a certain period of time. They are usually working with out pay, but are working for exchange of a free passage to a new country. In the seventeenth century most of the Caucasian workers coming from England were indentured servants. They were given a passage to America, food, and shelter in exchange for their work, for what was usually about four to five years.
Indentured servitude was the solution for inexpensive labor. Colonists realized that they had an abundance of land to attend to, but they didn’t have anyone to take care of it. The expense of the passage to the Colonies weighed heavy on the poor or lower class, but not the wealthy upper class. In an effort to attract laborers for working the land the Virginia Company came up with a system called indentured servitude. This system became an important aspect of the colonial economic system. Many skilled and unskilled workers were without work due to the economic decline in Europe resulting from the Thirty Years war. Indentured servitude presented many of those workers with hope for a brighter future than they would otherwise have achieved. The early immigrants who journeyed from England to the American Colonies consisted of nearly two thirds of the total amount of indentured servants. In exchange for passage, room, board, lodging and “freedom dues” they typically worked as indentured servants for 4 to 7 years. Although this life was harsh and restrictive, it wasn’t analogous to slavery.
Many of them looked forward to working in the county courts and in the House of Burgesses (Murrin, 2014). Some of the Europeans were poor so, becoming indenture became a part of survival (Murrin, 2004). Becoming indenture meant staying alive, eating decent and shelter. Europeans that signed usually had valuable skills and only signed up for four to five years (Murrin, 2014). This meant once released they were freemen and had the chance to live a prosperous life with the skills they learned and came with (Murrin, 2014). Europeans signed indentured because of historical forces. If the Europeans could have acquired freedom and land without signing their lives away for a few years they would have. Our text book states that these men were smart and had valuable skills (Murrin, 2014). This leads me to the conclusion that these men were educated enough to use the system towards their
misery in no less than 32 children in our ship, all of whom were thrown into the sea.” (Gottlieb Mittelberger, Journey to Pennsylvania in the Year 1750). Once the indentured servants arrived to their destination, they would sign a contract in agreement to serve their designated master. There was no relationship between a master and a servant. It was in agreement that the servant would work