One method of addressing the problem of labor shortages in America was that of indentured servitude. An individual or a family wishing to migrate to America but lacking funds to pay for the voyage might offer their services by means of a labor contract under which they would agree to work for a specified period of time for whoever owned the contract. Such contracts were negotiable in the sense that they might be signed with the owner of a vessel heading to America who would then sell the contract to someone in need of labor. Needless to say, it was an imperfect system subject to various kinds of abuse.
The experience of indentured servitude was as varied as the people who practiced it, either as owners of their servants' time for a stipulated period or those whose time belonged to somebody else. Some indentured servants—say, a young married couple with skills to offer, the husband perhaps as a carpenter and the wife a seamstress—might make a decent bargain for themselves, and given a decent person for whom to work, come out of the experience with a little money, some land, an animal or two or perhaps a set of tools that they could use to start their own lives.
Periods of service varied from two or three to seven years or more, depending on all kinds of variables. Quite often, possibly in the majority of cases, indentured servants found their lives less than ideal. Laws tended to protect the masters, punishments for laziness or attempting to run away were frequently harsh, and both men and women were subject to various kinds of abuse. For most, the period of indenture was most likely seen as a trial to be endured as best one could, with a reasonable hope of some sort of a stake in the future when the service was complete.
In some cases, very warm relationships no doubt developed between servants and owners, and indentured servants might find themselves more or less adopted into the family, perhaps through marriage or formal or informal adoption. Whatever the odds may have been at any given time for any person or group, indentured service was a gamble. When the contracts were signed in Europe, those offering themselves for service had little knowledge or control over who might eventually buy those contracts. If they survived the voyage to America, they then had to go through a period of acclimatization, and if they were not brought down by diseases to which they had never been exposed, then they had at least several years of hard work before they could again call their lives their own.
Two documents about the experience of indentured servants can be found on the Academic American web site and in the appendix for this section.
• Letter of Richard Frethorne
• Journal of Gottlieb Mittleberger
Both of the above documentary descriptions of the lives of indentured servants present an extremely negative view of the experience. In many cases that description would have been accurate. But by no means should we conclude that all indentured servants' lives were so afflicted.
Most of the cases of indentured servants probably fell between the extremes of abusive, exploitative contract owners and those who, with a generous spirit, for all practical purposes
Adopted the indentures into their families. Where indentured servants got along well with the contract owners, both parties undoubtedly benefited. The host benefited from the labor provided by the indentured servants, and the indentured servants honed the skills they would need to survive on their own and built up some sort of equity upon which they could trade when their indenture was completed.5
We know little about the many individual cases of indentured servants, but we have a sense that many landowners in the later colonial period and in the years after the Revolution had risen from the ranks of those who temporarily sold their services to another person. The practice continued in somewhat modified forms well into the 19th century. Tenant farmers in the Reconstruction era had something like indentured contracts. And even in modern times, those who contract with an employer to provide services over a fixed period are entering into a similar type bargain.
The point here is simply to observe that the Frethorne letter and the description written by Gottlieb Mittleberger do not tell anything like the whole story. As Page Smith makes clear in his history of the American Revolution, many poor people, including those sent to America as prisoners, managed to prosper because labor in America was so valuable. As Smith puts it, many of those prisoners "went straight."
Many prisoners were also sent to America by the English courts, generally as a means of ridding the mother country of the chronically unemployable or incorrigibly criminal. So many were sent in one period, in fact, that the governor of Virginia sent a letter of protest to England complaining about the influx of lawbreakers. Given the conditions of chronic underemployment and want, the vast majority of crimes at that time were property crimes, sometimes accompanied by violence. Many imported thieves, however, finding opportunities available in the New World that did not exist in the old, managed to become productive citizens. Others, of course, continued their disruptive ways, to the consternation of the colonial population and authorities.
World History
