Gottlieb Mittelberger: An Indentured Servants

For a long time, Jamestown, VA took in many indentured servants—a worker who is under contract of an employer for up to seven years in exchange for transportation and many necessities (clothing, food, drink, and lodging)—in order to fulfill the duties that the owners couldn’t. Though employers made Jamestown seem like a loving and welcoming place, it was just the opposite. These indentured servants were treated equally to slaves, but many were willing to risk their lives in order to gain their own land. Once they obtained land of their own, they could grow their own tobacco and become extremely wealthy.

George Alsop’s memoir of his service as an indentured servant in the colony of Maryland provides an insightful look into the lives of indentured servants in Maryland during the middle of the 17th Century. Throughout this period of colonial America the British were notorious in their use of propaganda to attract young British men into indentured servitude as the use of slaves was not yet perpetual, and would not be until 1670. Alsop depicts an idealistic view of indenture servitude in Maryland during his own time of service, which may have been the case, however this view can be contested by Nathaniel

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

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

In the essay "The Evolution of Slavery in Colonial America," author Jon Butler examines the growth of the slave practice in the land which would become the United States. As the European nations began exploring North America, they overtook the native populations of the areas and turned them into unpaid laborers. However, these people were not enough to supply landholders with sufficient aid. To make up the necessary numbers, plantation owners utilized indentured servants and then a number of slaves imported from Africa. Indentured servants were people who would be taken from the Old World to the New in order to start a new life. However, since they would not have the necessary funds to pay for their transportation, their journey would be funded by either a manufacturer or a plantation owner and their debt would be paid off by working for their benefactor. Slaves were not given this opportunity. These were people who were taken from their homes and families and forced into labor by threat of violence or death. This practice did not begin in the United States, but America was still allowing slavery well into the 19th century, long after other nations had come to the conclusion that slavery was inhumane and brutal.

Slavery and indentured servitude were the primary means of help for the wealthy in America. Either as a slave or as an indentured servant a person was required to work in the fields maintain crops, as a house servant or as the owner of debtor so chooses. The treatment of both was very similar, but the method and means to which they came to America were uniquely different as the following examples will illustrate.

In the 18th century, there was a huge migration of people from Europe and Germany into the new land, America. Some fled war, discrimination, some came in as slaves, and others migrated in search of a new beginning, and new opportunities. According to the letter by Elizabeth Sprigs of Maryland to her father, there was a cost of immigration. Only a few of the immigrants like Johannes Hanner, were fully free. Others traded their freedom for a specific period of time in exchange for passage to America. In her letter, Elizabeth expresses the harsh conditions that they went through to earn the passage by working as indentured servants. Johannes, on the other hand, expresses the good life he was experiencing compared with the situation in his former

The documents state that the slaves were not able to eat, and were overwhelmed by fatigue. The author of the eighth document discusses how she lived the entire journey on the ship in fear of being killed. The source is filled with awful images of how the slaves were treated in the 1700s. The reasoning behind these experiences was once again because of race. The Africans were seen differently; therefore, they were treated differently in comparison to the European indentured servants.

An estimated seventeen million men, women, and children were enslaved and transported from Africa to the West Indies by Europeans between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Before these individuals became slaves, there were indentured servants. Between the colonial era and Revolutionary War many changes in the practice of labor were made. Expansion of slavery throughout America brought about different conditions of slave life and Paternalism. Slavery in America was very different before and after the year 1790; these changes greatly affected the conditions in which these individuals lived and are worth analyzing.

Indentured servants where men and women who signed a contract to work for a certain number of years, usually between four and seven, in exchange for transportation to the colonies. The Chesapeake Bay colonies, Virginia and Maryland, where especially condition to use indentured servants. During this essay I will explain why the Chesapeake Bay colonies were in such need of the servants and why eventually they turned to slavery to fill the void left by the indentured servants.

Indentured servants were used in early colonial times as a means of passage to the new world. The cash crops of the early settlers were exhaustingly labor intensive. In fact, U.S. History (2015) indicated that “the growth of tobacco, rice, and indigo and the plantation economy created a tremendous need for labor in Southern English America” (p. 1). The technology did not exist at the time for machinery that clears the ground and works the land as it does today. The work had to be done by hand; from clearing and prepping the fields to harvesting the crops, it was all manual labor for which the new land did not have ample supply of.

In the 17th and 18th century many were lured, some were forced, children even kidnapped to travel to America as indentured servants. These people became “commodities of profit” to everyone they were controlled by, much like the slaves. The immigrants agreed to pay the cost of their voyage to the New World by working as a servant for a master for five to seven years, they then would be free (but most likely still poor) to build a life of their own in America –that is, if they survived the whole process. Indentured servants were severely mistreated, but they did have some rights during their service- even if those rights were fist decided on by their masters (who they could marry, etc.). They were much like slaves, but they could go to court (even though the court almost always decided in favor of the

In the years from 1600 to 1783 the thirteen colonies in North America were introduced to slavery and underwent the American Revolutionary War. Colonization of the New World by Europeans during the seventeenth century resulted in a great expansion of slavery, which later became the most common form of labor in the colonies. According to Peter Kolchin, modern Western slavery was a product of European expansion and was predominantly a system of labor. Even with the introduction of slavery to the New World, life still wasn’t as smooth as we may presume. Although the early American colonists found it perfectly fine to enslave an entire race of people, they

“Indentured servitude declined over the century, and most of these domestic servants were now either free women or slave women” (Coryell, pg. 104). Those who worked in a servitude role were indentured servants, who had the ability to work a number of service years in order to earn their freedom and they would be given a small plot of land, afterwards, to continue to thrive. Eventually, in order to compensate for the growing American need of lower overall costs to purchase labor workers, longer time in servitude, and to decrease the need to give land lots, the term of indentured servant changed to slave, which limited potential freedoms and humanity. This demand for labor changed the owner and slave relationship. “Owners began providing minimal clothing and food. Owners viewed all of slaves’ labor as their own” (Coryell, pg. 105). By forcing a dependent relationship, owners were able to maintain their

By the 1670’s prices for tobacco entered a fifty-year period of inactivity and decline, as land became limited and costly. Thereafter, in 1681, Maryland abandoned its requirement for servants to obtain land with their freedom dues. This made the Chesapeake land less of an opportunity for immigrants (Norton, 42). Furthermore, the restoration of the colonies provided mirgrants other settlement options (65). As time passed throughout the 1680’s, the cost for indentured servants rose by nearly sixty percent in some colonial regions. In Europe and England with the increase of income; It then took a smaller share of one’s annual salary to purchase voyage to the colonies, enabling immigrants to refrain from entering indentured contracts. For many of