Indentured Servitude

Colonizing the New World required hard labor. Governments and investors who wanted to profit from the New World's resources needed people to build and run communities, farms, and trades. Indentured servitude, and then slavery , were the primary means of obtaining that labor.

In 1606, the Virginia Company first tried to attract settlers to the New World by offering company stock, or a share of the company's profits. The method failed when the company had no profits to share with the settlers after seven years.

In 1618, the Virginia Company tried attracting settlers using a new method called the headright system. For Englishmen who could pay for themselves and their families to travel to the New World, the company gave 50 acres (20 hectares) of land to the head of the family and additional land for every family member and servant he brought along. In exchange, the settler had to pay the company a share of profits he earned from the land. Headright systems were soon used by other companies throughout the New World, but it was difficult for the companies to collect all of their profits and difficult for the settlers to find enough labor to work the land.

Indentured servitude was a way to obtain labor for farming, production, and trade in the New World. Under the system, a landowner or producer paid to transport a person from Europe and to house, feed, and clothe him, usually for seven to fourteen years. In exchange, the person agreed to work for the landowner or producer for those years. At the end of the agreed on number of years, the person became a freeman and received from his former master a small amount of land, some money, tools of his trade, or just a set of clothes.

Many indentured servants could afford to travel to the New World but needed help establishing themselves once there. Most indentured servants came involuntarily as an alternative to punishment for crime or to escape debt or poverty. Many Germans came to the New World through a system called redemption. Under redemption, ship owners paid to transport German laborers to the New World and then sold them into servitude to redeem the cost of their passage.

The life of an indentured servant was hard. Servants had to do whatever work their masters required of them. Indentured servants, however, had more rights under the law than slaves. While some indentured servants had to extend their periods of service when they could not afford their freedom, others earned freedom after their period of service, an option unavailable to slaves who were held against their will for their entire lives.

Indentured servitude slowly came to an end in the nineteenth century. During the eighteenth century, slavery replaced servitude for operating plantations in the South, and during the nineteenth century, economies in the North, fueled by crafts, trades, and industry, attracted free labor from Europe as the cost of passage to the New World fell.