Historian Barbara Fields has observed that "There was no need to justify slavery in a society in which everybody stands in the relationship of inherited subordination to someone else - servant to master, serf to nobleman, vassal to overlord, overlord to kings, and king to King of kings.".
By 1618 the colony was exporting nearly 50,000 pounds of tobacco. But growing tobacco was extremely labor-intensive. In the search for a viable labor source, the planters at first relied on European indentured servants. To begin the activity, put students in small groups.
April 1691-ACT XVI: An act attempting to suppress runaway slave communities. [The term "white" appears] April 1692-ACT III: An act stating the procedure for a slave brought to trial for a capital offense. August 1701-ACT II: An act that offered a reward for the apprehension of a notorious runaway slave.
To profit from their venture in North America, the European settlers needed both land and the labor to work the land. Captured Indian land provided the first, and captured African labor would eventually supply the latter. According to what rules or principles would Europeans classify Indian-European "half-breeds," and European-African "mulattos"? How much "Indian blood" did you need to remain Indian, how little to be deemed white? How much "black blood" was required to remain Black? How could these designations be manipulated such as to create both a greater source of labor, and diminished resistance to the acquisition of native land?
According to historian Gary Nash, when Jamestown colonist John Rolfe took his new bride, Pocahontas (who had converted to Christianity), back to London in 1616, they caused an uproar among the lords and ladies and dukes and earls of the Court of King James.
Joan Brodsky Schur is Social Studies Curriculum Consultant to the Village Community School in New York City where she has taught Social Studies and English for over 20 years. She is co-author of In A New Land: An Anthology of Immigrant Literature and creator of the American Letters series published by Interact.
Larry Adelman, the executive producer of RACE, adds: "It may be hard for us to comprehend today that the American Indians didn't see themselves as Indians. Nor did the English see themselves as white. Neither saw themselves as a race. The peoples of the Americas were divided into separate and distinct nations - hundreds of them. Amerindian nations such as the Algonquians differentiated themselves from the Iroquois or Cherokee by religion, language and customs just as Protestant, English-speaking Britain distinguished itself from Catholic, Spanish-speaking Spain."
The American Revolution provided opportunities for indentured servants to either escape or join the Continental Army as a way of legally canceling their contracts. British prisoners of war were then added to the ranks of Hampton’s indentured servants in what historian Charles G. Steffens describes as “an ever-changing mosaic of unfree and free laborers.” Throughout the second half of the eighteenth century, local indentured servants, paid laborers, artisans, and enslaved persons all worked side by side with European indentured servants.
In the colonial period, Annapolis and Baltimore were major ports of entry for indentured servants from Europe. The Ridgelys purchased indenture contracts for at least 300 servants between 1750 and 1800. Most of these servants had been convicted of crimes in England and Ireland.
Indenture contracts were written between British agents and Ridgely indenture purchasers. All indentures were bought for only a limited time. Non-convict servants served terms of 4 to 6 years, while convicts had to serve at least 7 years. Those working within their contract found living conditions very similar to their enslaved counterparts, such as their less than substantial foodand clothingprovisions.
Tasks included extracting ore and coal, felling and cutting acres of timber, and hauling fuel, iron ore and finished products to and from the site. Farming was another facet of the work: servants produced grains to feed workers and sell in the community.
A. Royal bureaucrats imposed colonial order harshly and consistently.
D. The British ruled their American colonies in a haphazard and lax manner.
A. The print revolution made the American Reformation possible.
A. The Spanish in Florida had prohibited the sale of slaves from South Carolina.
C. James wanted to draft New Englanders into the fight against Metacom and his people.
C. French settlers expelled by the British from Nova Scotia and deported to Louisiana.
D. The Spanish governor in Florida had promised freedom to fugitive slaves.
Farmers, merchants, and shopkeepers in the British colonies found it very difficult to hire free workers, primarily because it was easy for potential workers to set up their own farms. Consequently, a common solution was to transport a young worker from Britain or a German state, who would work for several years to pay off the debt of their travel costs. During the indenture period the servants were not paid cash wages, but were provided with food, accommodation, clothing and training. The indenture document specified how many years the servant would be required to work, after which they would be free. Terms of indenture ranged from one to seven years with typical terms of four or five years. In southern New England, a variant form of indentured servitude, which controlled the labor of Native Americans through an exploitative debt-peonage system, developed in the late 17th century and continued through to the period of the American Revolution.
Indentured servitude in British America. Indentured servitude in British America was the prominent system of labor in British American colonies until it was eventually overcome by slavery. During its time, the system was so prominent that more than half of all immigrants to British colonies south of New England were white (mostly Irish) servants, ...
Indentured servitude continued in North America into the early 20th century, but the number of indentured servants declined over time. Although experts do not agree on the causes of the decline, possible factors for the American colonies include changes in the labor market and the legal system that made it cheaper and less risky for an employer to hire African slave labor or paid employees, or made indentures unlawful; increased affordability of travel to North America that made immigrants less likely to rely on indentures to pay travel costs; and effects of the American Revolution, particularly on immigration from Britain. In the Caribbean, the number of indentured servants from Europe began to decline in the 17th century as Europeans became aware of the cruelty of plantation masters and the high death rate of servants, largely due to tropical disease. After the British Empire ended slavery in 1833, plantation owners returned to indentured servitude for labor, with most servants coming from India, until the British government prohibited the practice in 1917.
Indentured servitude was a common part of the social landscape in England and Ireland during the 17th century. During the 17th century, British and Irish went to Barbados as both masters and as indentured servants. Some went as prisoners.
In any case, while half the European immigrants to the Thirteen Colonies had been indentured servants at some time, actively indentured servants were outnumbered by non-indentured workers, or by those whose indenture had expired. Thus free wage labor was more common for Europeans in the colonies. Indentured persons were numerically important mostly in the region from Virginia north to New Jersey. Other colonies saw far fewer of them. The total number of European immigrants to all 13 colonies before 1775 was 500,000–550,000 ; of these, 55,000 were involuntary prisoners. Of the 450,000 or so European arrivals who came voluntarily, Tomlins estimates that 48% were indentured. About 75% were under the age of 25. The age of legal adulthood for men was 24 years; those over 24 generally came on contracts lasting about 3 years. Regarding the children who came, Gary Nash reports that, "many of the servants were actually nephews, nieces, cousins and children of friends of emigrating Englishmen, who paid their passage in return for their labor once in America."
Indentured servitude was a method of increasing the number of colonists, especially in the English and later British colonies. Voluntary migration and convict labor only provided so many people, and since the journey across the Atlantic was dangerous, other means of encouraging settlement were necessary.
The American Revolution severely limited immigration to the United States. Economic historians differ however on the long-term impact of the Revolution. Sharon Salinger argues that the economic crisis that followed the war made long-term labor contracts unattractive. Her analysis of Philadelphia's population shows how the percentage of bound citizens fell from 17% to 6% over the course of the war. William Miller posits a more moderate theory, stating "the Revolution (…) wrought disturbances upon white servitude. But these were temporary rather than lasting". David Galenson supports this theory by proposing that British indentures never recovered, but Europeans from other nationalities replaced them.
The poor, orphaned, and unemployed made up the majority of servants who emigrated, but there were also skilled men like Owen Dawson of London, a joiner, and Edward Rogers of Purbury, Somerset, a carpenter, who were doubtless attracted by the likelihood of high wages in the plantations. Others—blacksmiths, glaziers, sawyers, tailors—were perhaps impressed by stories of high wages to be had in the colonies, or were persuaded to leave by the prospect of becoming independent landowners after what they construed as an apprenticeship in sugar planting or tobacco husbandry.
In terms of sheer numbers, the heyday of indentured servitude in English colonies was between 1635 and 1660 . During the 1640s, West Indian sugar planters began replacing white servants with enslaved Africans, the latter being considered a more profitable long-term investment. By 1660, the enslaved population (33,000) equaled that of whites in the islands. In the Chesapeake, white servitude remained the main form of field labor for another thirty years but by the last quarter of the century wealthy tobacco planters were also switching to African slaves.
Particular reasons that prompted servants to emigrate are obscure, but occasionally there are glimpses that reveal individual circumstances. Jonathan Cole, for example, "being a poor boy," contracted in 1685 to serve as servant in Barbados for seven years. Half a century before, Thomas Jarvis, from Bishopsgate, London, a tailor who had fallen on hard times, was given a £1 "towards supplying his wants" by the Drapers Company of London when he left for Virginia. James Collins from Wolvercot, Oxfordshire, moved to the capital shortly after his father died, where he was taken up from the streets as "an idle boy" in the summer of 1684. Faced with the choice of being sent to prison for vagrancy or laboring in the plantations, he opted for twelve years of service in the Chesapeake. Aboard ship, he might well have met Will Sommersett, formerly of Whitechapel, London, who had no means of supporting himself after being abandoned by his father. The length of their indentures suggests that both were no more than children when they left. Loss of one or both parents was common among poor migrants, and parishes routinely rid themselves of the expense and trouble of caring for unwanted children by indenturing them for service overseas.
During the seventeenth century, emergent societies of the English Atlantic were transformed by large-scale migrations of hundreds of thousands of white settlers. Most ended up in colonies that produced the major staples of colonial trade, tobacco and sugar: approximately 180,000 went to the Caribbean, 120,000 to the Chesapeake (Virginia and Maryland), 23,000 to the Middle Colonies, and 21,000 to New England. The peak period of English emigration occurred within a single generation, from 1630 to 1660. White immigration averaged about 8,000 to 9,000 per decade during the 1630s and 1640s, then surged to 16,000 to 20,000 per decade from 1650 to 1680, before falling back to 13,000 to 14,000 in the 1680s and 1690s. Across the century, about three-quarters of immigrants arrived as indentured servants and served usually four to seven years in return for the cost of their passage, board, lodging, and various freedom dues, which were paid by the master to the servant on completion of the term of service that typically took the form of provisions, clothing, tools, rights to land, money, or a small share of the crop (tobacco or sugar). They were mostly young, male, and single and came from a broad spectrum of society, ranging from the destitute and desperate to the lower middle classes.
For the poor, taking ships to the plantations in the Chesapeake and the West Indies was a spectacular form of subsistence migration necessitated by the difficulties of earning a living and the lack of any immediate prospect of conditions getting better. These emigrants came from a wide variety of regions and communities: London and its environs, southern and central England, the West Country and, in fewer numbers, the northern counties. Many were from urban backgrounds and had lived in small market towns, manufacturing centers, provincial capitals, ports, and cities most of their lives or had moved from the countryside a few months or years before taking ship. Those leaving directly from rural communities came mainly from populous wood-pasture districts, forests and fens, and marginal areas.
Historian Barbara Fields has observed that "There was no need to justify slavery in a society in which everybody stands in the relationship of inherited subordination to someone else - servant to master, serf to nobleman, vassal to overlord, overlord to kings, and king to King of kings.".
By 1618 the colony was exporting nearly 50,000 pounds of tobacco. But growing tobacco was extremely labor-intensive. In the search for a viable labor source, the planters at first relied on European indentured servants. To begin the activity, put students in small groups.
April 1691-ACT XVI: An act attempting to suppress runaway slave communities. [The term "white" appears] April 1692-ACT III: An act stating the procedure for a slave brought to trial for a capital offense. August 1701-ACT II: An act that offered a reward for the apprehension of a notorious runaway slave.
To profit from their venture in North America, the European settlers needed both land and the labor to work the land. Captured Indian land provided the first, and captured African labor would eventually supply the latter. According to what rules or principles would Europeans classify Indian-European "half-breeds," and European-African "mulattos"? How much "Indian blood" did you need to remain Indian, how little to be deemed white? How much "black blood" was required to remain Black? How could these designations be manipulated such as to create both a greater source of labor, and diminished resistance to the acquisition of native land?
According to historian Gary Nash, when Jamestown colonist John Rolfe took his new bride, Pocahontas (who had converted to Christianity), back to London in 1616, they caused an uproar among the lords and ladies and dukes and earls of the Court of King James.
Joan Brodsky Schur is Social Studies Curriculum Consultant to the Village Community School in New York City where she has taught Social Studies and English for over 20 years. She is co-author of In A New Land: An Anthology of Immigrant Literature and creator of the American Letters series published by Interact.
Larry Adelman, the executive producer of RACE, adds: "It may be hard for us to comprehend today that the American Indians didn't see themselves as Indians. Nor did the English see themselves as white. Neither saw themselves as a race. The peoples of the Americas were divided into separate and distinct nations - hundreds of them. Amerindian nations such as the Algonquians differentiated themselves from the Iroquois or Cherokee by religion, language and customs just as Protestant, English-speaking Britain distinguished itself from Catholic, Spanish-speaking Spain."