Indentured Servants Essay

amount of time is a bonded labourer also known as a Indentured Servant. Typically the employer provided little or no monetary pay, but was responsible for accommodation, food, other essentials, training and when applicable passage to a new country. Upon completion of the term of the contract the labourer sometimes received a lump sum payment such as a parcel of land and was free to farm or take up trade of his own. In other words indentured servants are very poor people obligated to forced labor for

started to buy indentured servants, who were cheaper than slaves since they only serve for a certain time period. Indentured servants signed contracts to work to travel to America and to acquire promised freedom dues. The freedom dues could include land, clothes, money, or food. Servants would generally serve for four to seven years; children would serve for a longer time. Many signed the contracts without being fully aware of the actual conditions of labor and living. Indentured servants were treated

specifically, Virginia, in order to work as indentured servants. Their goal was to gain a profit through the process of agriculture. Primarily, the indentured servants would cultivate tobacco, as the slaves that were already submitted to this task were not enough. Thousands of men and women took up this challenge, but many of them were incapable to proceed in such harsh working conditions. Frethorne originally came to Virginia to work as an indentured servant because he was seeking to trade his labor

People were running to America from England due to the religious intolerances and harassment; political turmoil and military drafts. So to leave often someone would agree with a land owner in america to be an indentured servant in turn for the land owner to pay their passage over to the new land. Said person then would willingly work for several years until their time was up and then they were free to go on about their life. The second group of people most commonly traveling from England to America

Using Indentured Servants for Labor The origin of indentured servant’s dates to medieval serfdom. Serfdom, a condition in medieval Europe in which a tenant farmer was bound to a hereditary plot of land and to the will of his landlord (The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica, 2016). An authoritative order was put in place in June of 1349 requiring residents under sixty to meet the demands of labor requests. Indentured servants signed a one-year covenant that was renegotiated annually. With servitude

to the new land and was subject to work for as long as the contract stated. They were responsible for growing, harvesting and curing tobacco and other crops. However, life in Virginia as an indentured servant can be described as a struggle to survive. In Virginia, first-hand accounts of an indentured servant state that, “for we came but twenty for the merchants, and they are half dead just; and we look every hour when two more should go. Yet there came some four other men yet to live with us, of

The majority were indentured servants. Indentured servitude is a system of unfree labor bound to contract of obligations through an employer. Men and women servants would work skilled trades to agricultural labor for the debt they owed from the travel cost to America. Their unpaid work spawned several years, but they were provided housing food, and clothing. The idea stemmed from the need to work the vast amounts of land in the Americas, yet having no one to tend to it. Indentured servitude was a

their sights on the West Indies, looking to build their fortune on sugar cane once they acquired land. The vast majority of settlers came as indentured servants, packed like cattle on ships to the Americas. Indentured servants were similar to slaves, they could be bought and sold, whipped, and subject to punishment from their masters. However, indentured servants earn their freedom after serving several years. On the contrary, some settlers were able to pay their way into the New World; although the

Aslop was an indentured servant for four years and instead of viewing it as enslavement he viewed it as simply serving because he was more focused on the benefits and not the circumstances. For example, “And what’s a four year’s Servitude to advantage a man all the remainder

and had little knowledge on how to grow crops or sustain themselves. This spurred the need for labor and caused a dramatic increase in the development of the indentured servitude system. Frethorne’s letter home illustrates the living conditions of the servants and accurately depicts many events mentioned in Period 2. The indentured servant system accomplished its goal, allowing for many English people to migrate to the New World. However, there