Indenture System: Society And Culture In Provincial America

The decline of indentured servitude and the rise of chattel slavery were caused by economic factors of the English settlers in the late 17th century. Colonists continually tried to allure laborers to the colony. The head right system was to give the indentured servant a method of becoming independent after a number of years of service. Colonists chiefly relied on Indentured Servitude, in order to facilitate their need for labor. The decreasing population combined with a need for a labor force, led colonists to believe that African slaves were the most efficient way to acquire a labor force that would satisfy their needs.

After slavery came to an end in the 1800s, the rise of a new source of labor that became known as indentured servitude began. Indentured servitude is a system of labor where people serve under a contract, to work for a certain number of years, with pay along with food and housing. As the Industrial Revolution continued to grow, the demand for cheap labor increased, and due to the abolishment of slavery, the request for a cheaper sources of labor also increased. Indentured servitude replaced slavery, behind the scenes it was technically slavery. Although it was not referred to as slavery, indentured service was a resolution to the abolishment of slavery, where employers could get workers to sign a contract and have them agree to all their conditions. Is the end of slavery caused laborers to engage in various extreme conditions, the

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.

William Gunnell, Jr. travelled with his parents from their home in Great Britain to Virginia sometime before his tenth birthday in 1715. In Virginia, they became indentured servants for a man named Richard Lee. Following his master’s death, William’s indenture was inherited by Richard’s son. William worked for the Lee family for six years as a clerk, running errands and keeping the books. At the age of sixteen, William’s contract ended, and he became a free man (“Indentured Servants,” n.d., para. 4). This is one of the better examples of indentured servitude in the colonies, since most servants did not live to see the end of their contracts. In the colonies, indentured servitude acted as a kind of contract-based slavery in which free people were turned into property for a term of four to seven years, on average. Their owners paid for their food, clothing, and shelter on arrival in the colonies until the servants had completed their contract, upon which they were paid “freedom dues” which could be anything from tools, land, or even guns (“Indentured Servants,” n.d., para. 1).

Indentured servants initially arrived in America within the decade following the settlement of jamestown by the Virginia Company in 1607.The idea of bound indentured was born of a requirement for affordable labor. The earliest settlers before long complete that they\'d scores of land to worry for, however nobody to worry for it. With passage to the Colonies valuable for most the rich, the Virginia Company developed the system of bound bondage to draw in employees. bound servants became very important to the colonial economy.The temporal order of the Virginia colony was ideal. The Thirty Year\'s War had left Europe\'s economy depressed, and plenty of competent and unskilled laborers were while not work. a

As settlers continued to pour into the America, colonies were still trying to stabilize the current population naturally, recruit indentured servants and capture slaves to maintain crops that boosted the economy, and instill the religious traditions on the newcomers and current colonist. Disease was still ripping through the people in the 16th century, making it harder for natural reproduction and future generations to increase especially in the southern colonies. Women were outnumbered by men, younger generations grew up without the older generations, and life expectancy for the majority was condensed to about early twenties. Marriages were also cut short by the death of a spouse reflecting a large number of blended families to conglomerate. Native-born inhabitants eventually

Indentured servants deserved to be treated as if they are human beings and not just a form of work. Although indentured servants lived comfortably in some regions, for the most part their bet interest were not taken the into consideration. Their master(s) paid little attention to their need of proper health care or health care at all, the need for a substantial amount of food and clothing. The challenges indentured servants endured were difficult and sometimes ended horribly but the willingness to work for their role and stay in this fast growing society portrayed their true loyalty and dedication despite the poor treatment and

A person under contract to work for another person for a definite period of time, usually without pay but in exchange for free passage to a new country is known as an indentured servant. The servant would become a free man after their debt was paid off. The indentured servant played an important role in the American labor scene from the early seventeenth century to the third decade of the nineteenth century (Heavner 1). Many regions of colonial America had issues with obtaining a big enough labor supply to get work done. Indentured servitude was an initial solution to this problem developed by the Virginia Company and used throughout the British colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Galenson 9).

Indentured servant- Person who came to work in the America usually people who were in trouble.

Freedom is a gift that came with America and was given to its citizens. However, that’s not always how it used to be especially in the 16th and 17th centuries. In the 17th century there were over 30,000 enslaved African Americans in North America . Many indentured servants were brought to the New World to help with growing crops and other duties. However, they were never a good fit for the new and wild America they had come to. In this essay I will be addressing the comparisons and contrasts of African American slaves and indentured servants in America.

This allowed the freed servants to be self sufficient, and in some cases, these servants would even hire their own indentured servants. However, when these dues were not sufficient and did not include land, some servants had no choice other than continue in servitude. As such, the “freedom dues” would directly affect the colonial economy, determining whether or not there would be additional land owners. The indentured servants would also prove to help the already existing landowners to gain more land. The head right system, implemented in southern colonies such as Virginia and Maryland, gave a landowner or planter 50 acres of land for each servant he paid for to come with him to live in that colony. Here, the indentured servants helped the economy by allowing landowners to expand their territory, and produce more goods/crops. While at work, the servants also had a major and direct effect on the economy. From the early 1600s to the early 1700s, indentured servants comprised the majority of labor on the plantations and farms of the colonies. Without the use of indentured servants, the colonial economy would have crashed, as there would have been no labor to work on the vast plantations. Until African slaves became a more cost-efficient option for colonial landowners, the use of indentured servants was a very much viable alternative.

Indentured servants were men and women that signed a indenture contract to agree to work on plantations and farm for 4 to 7 years for employer. The motivation to agree to this contact was free passage to America from their homeland. During the 1600s, the French had many people come to the America by such contacts and most indentured servants “returned home after their contracts expired” (pg 35) for many reasons. During the English colonization, the people who could afford to come to the America were “government officials, clergymen, merchants, artisans, and landowning farmers” (pg 53) who were able to be free people upon arrival and acquired a great amount of land. But they were only about one third of the English settlers,

“Fundamentally, indentured servitude was an institutional arrangement that was devised to increase labor mobility” (Altman and Horn, To Make America, 8)

In exchange for transportation across the Atlantic indentured servants served a master for a 3-7 years. The younger they were the longer they served. In return their master promised to give them the tools they needed, and paid for passage to new world. (Divine et al. 18) Becoming an indentured servant didn’t seem like a big deal since it was only temporary and not permanent. Once their indenture contract had been achieved they were released from servitude, and free to start a life and business of their own in the colony. Most indentured servants came to America willingly and with some hope for a future of their own. They had hope for a future. They weren’t forever owned by someone they would one day be free again.