Indentured Servants Essay

1. Define Indentured Servants. How were indentured servants brought over to the 13 Colonies? Why were indentured servants needed more in the Southern Colonies? The Indentured Servants have measured the particular property of their masters. Voluntary indentured servants were often expert in a craft or skill, related to an apprentice system. The people who traveled to America under this system often suffered highly troubled lives indenture contracts could be bought and sold or exchanged for goods.

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. In the Chesapeake Bay

settlers and indentured servants. Free settlers could pay for their own expenses or their own passage and owned land, while indentured servants were workers who voluntary gave up their freedom and signed a contracted with free men to work for them. In s sense, servants and slaves were almost the same with one difference, servants could be free after the termination of their contract, and also receive freedom dues like land, while slaves had to work

to be solved by the introduction of indentured servitude. Throughout the seventeenth century, the majority of Europeans coming to the America’s were Indentured Servants. Incentives were high for both employers and servants and this type of contract slave labor quickly became the method of choice for plantation owners. Increasing manual labor and land was critical to the colonies economic success, however time would eventually uncover the problems indentured servitude would create for the colonies

colony of Virginia, where institution slavery did not yet exist (Holt & Brown, 2000). The Africans and poor white people were of even value (PBS, n.d.). Black and white men and woman worked together and were punished equally. All of them were indentured servants who worked for a contracted period of time. This system was used to entice laborers to enter into contract because there was no work following The Thirty Year’s War. An

these certain topics, such as, indentured servants and the institution of slavery was minimal. The reason for this is most of my prior knowledge of these important topics were forgotten. The question I always asked myself what was the difference between indentured servants and African slaves? Through my personal studying on the subject matter, I have discovered new information that clarified all my misconceptions about historical topics like, indentured servants from Europe, African slavery, and

lives outside the frame of enslavement." Indentured servitude was technically a fancy way to call someone a slave. When the first settlers came to North America and realized they didn 't know how to survive on this unknown land, their only solution was to find someone else to figure it out for them. Because early Americans didn 't want to anything for themselves, the indentured servitude system was created, indentured servitude led to the

Hist. 330 Research Paper Indentured Servants 4/20/11 “Fundamentally, indentured servitude was an institutional arrangement that was devised to increase labor mobility” (Altman and Horn, To Make America, 8) In the early colonial days of America, there was an economic problem; labor shortages. In America the marginal productivity of a single laborer was much higher than in Europe, and there was a very wide availability of cheap or free land. The problem with taking advantage of this opportunity

to the America as indentured or contracted servants because the passage aboard was too expensive for them. By the time many Native Indians and indentured servants die from the hard labor and low morality rate, masters of the plantation purchased more slaves from Africa to profit themselves. The “Virginia Servant and Slave Laws” reveal the dominant efforts of masters to profit from their servants and slaves by passing laws to treat slaves as their properties and to control servants and slaves by suppressing

of Europeans to come to the new world for opportunity as an indentured servant. Meaning they would work certain term of years along with slaves working the fields and harvesting the crops to pay for their voyage to the new world. Servants also were looked upon in the same manner as slaves receiving similar punishments in the beginning. But, as time went on the treatment began to change in favor of the servants. Many times as the servants as they arrived in the beginning realized just how hard they