Indentured Servant - An Indenture was a contract, in this case a labor contract. Indentured Servants, generally from England or Germany, entered into four to seven year employment contracts. In return they received passage from Europe and guarantees of work, food and lodging. Employers were their masters and the Indentured Servants had to obey their orders in all matters. Impoverished women and children in England sometimes were pressed into servitude, as were convicts. Indentured Servants were released at the end of their contracts whereas slaves remained slaves for life. As parties to a contract, Indentured Servants had rights that slaves never enjoyed. Colonial courts could be used to enforce the rights of either party. Two United States presidents were indentured servants as boys: Andrew Johnson to a tailor and Millard Fillmore to a clothmaker. (http://www.milaminvirginia.com/glossary.html Colonial Glossary of Terms) About 70% of migrants from England who came between 1630-1660 were indentured servants; Males servants outnumbered female servants; Trade in indentured servants peaked about 1620-1680, but lasted until the 1770s. (http://homepages.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~crosslin/records/va/immigrants3.html)
Indentured servitude first appeared in America a little over a decade after the settlement of Jamestown in 1607. Labor was scarce; land was abundant and transportation costs to America were high compared to wages in England. An early economist noted that ...industry is limited by capital; but, through lack of labor, its limit is not always reached in older communities and seldom if ever in newer countries. Capital is an accumulation of labor and, like land, yields most when quickened by human toil. So
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dependent is capital upon labor that what is taken to new settlements often wastes away through lack of a labor supply. Only the wealthiest persons could afford the cost of passage to the Colonies, so the Virginia Company came up with the idea of indentured servitude to attract workers.
An indentured servant typically worked four to seven years in exchange for passage, room, board, lodging and freedom dues. Although the life as an indentured was harsh it was not slavery. Indenture's had laws that protected them and gave them some rights; however life for them was not easy. An indentured could have his contract extended if he or she were to break the law such as running away, or in the case of female servants, becoming pregnant. (http://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/investigations/212_indenturedfeature.html)
White indentured servants came from all over Great Britain. Men, Women, and sometimes children alike would sign these contracts to serve a master for the specified period of time. While being paid a salary an indentured was still considered as a master's personal property and his contract could either be inherited or sold. The price of an indentured servant varied dependant upon the skills that they possessed. While under these contracts indentured servants were forbidden to marry or have children, they even needed permission to leave the plantation, to perform work for anyone else, or to keep money or to keep money for personal use. Often servant who ran away from their masters were difficult to locate, since they often spoke English and were white runaway
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servants were a lot more difficult to recapture than black slaves. (http://www.stratfordhall.org/learn/teacher/servants.php)
The three principal crimes involving servants were abuse/neglect of a servant by a master, running away by a servant, and pregnancy among female servants.
In 1619 the first black Africans came to Virginia. With no slave laws in place,
they were initially treated as indentured servants, and given the same opportunities for
freedom dues as whites. However, slave laws were soon passed - in Massachusetts in
1641 and Virginia in 1661 -and any small freedoms that might have existed for blacks
were taken away.
As demands for labor grew, so did the cost of indentured servants. Many
landowners also felt threatened by newly freed servants demand for land. The colonial
elite realized the problems of indentured servitude. Landowners turned to African slaves
as a more profitable and ever-renewable source of labor and the shift from indentured
servants to racial slavery had begun.
Before the Civil War, slaves and indentured servants were considered personal
property, and they or their descendants could be sold or inherited like any other
personalty. Like other property, human chattel was governed largely by laws of
individual states. Generally, these laws concerning indentured servants and slaves did not
differentiate between the sexes. Some, however, addressed only women. Regardless of
their country of origin, many early immigrants were indentured servants, people who sold
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their labor in exchange for passage to the New World and housing on their arrival.
Initially, most laws passed concerned indentured servants, but around the middle of the
seventeenth century, colonial laws began to reflect differences between indentured
servants and slaves. More important, the laws began to differentiate between races: the
association of "servitude for natural life" with people of African descent became
common. (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/awhhtml/awlaw3/slavery.html)
You will come to find that indentured servants had many more rights than any slave, Slaves were not considered citizens in antebellum America. Before the fourteenth amendment to the national constitution (July 28, 1868), blacks held no legal rights in this country. Whites controlled politics, and used them to keep slaves and free blacks on a subordinate societal level. George M. Stroud wrote in A Sketch of the Laws Relating to Slavery, "Slaves … had no head in the state, no name, title or register: nor could they take by purchase or descent; they had no heirs, and therefore could make no will:… whatever they acquired was their master's: they could not plead nor be pleaded for, but were excluded from all civil concerns whatsoever:…they were not entitled to the rights and considerations of matrimony, and, therefore, had no relief in the case of adultery:…they could be sold, transferred, or pawned as goods of personal estate. (http://www.bowdoin.edu/~prael/projects/gsonnen/page3.html) These were the lives of slaves and how they differed from those of and indentured servant.
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The Idea of becoming and Indentured Servant brought many types of people to America. Persons who were of European, Irish, Scottish, English and German decent who wanted to own land and make a life a new. Historians have claimed the indenture system to be exploitive, yet economists say it was efficient. It has been shown by economists that the length of servitude was equal to the cost of the voyage to America, maintenance cost of the servant, and freedom dues given to the servant at the expiration of the contract. Economists have even gone so far as to claim that those who entered servitude usually did better than those who migrated to America and immediately bought land, because a period of servitude allowed them to learn the customs, culture, and language of America. (http://eh.net/Clio/Publications/indentured.shtml)
