An indentured servant (also called a bonded laborer) is a labourer under
contract of the employer in exchange for an extension to the period of their indenture, which could thereby continue indefinitely
(normally it would be for seven years). In other cases, indentured servants were subject to violence at the hands of their
employers in the homes or fields in which they worked.
The labour-intensive cash crop of tobacco was farmed in the American South by indentured labourers in the 17th and 18th centuries.[1] Indentured servitude was not
the same as the apprenticeship system by which skilled trades were taught, but similarities do exist between the two mechanisms,
in that both require a set period of work.
America
On the journey to America people aboard the ship sailing to the new land were put through experiences that are inhumane. Aboard
the ship, passengers were given a portion of food set to last 2 weeks, with no opportunity for more, and no care as to the lives
of those who finished their rations early. Many passengers did not survive the trip to the new land. Some died of starvation,
disease, or suicide. In Colonial North America, employers usually
paid for European workers' passage across the Atlantic Ocean, reimbursing the shipowner
who held their papers of indenture. In the process many families were broken apart. During the time living with their masters,
their fellow indentured servants took the role of family. In return, laborers agreed to work for a specified number of years. The
agreement could also be an exchange for professional training: after being the indentured servant of a blacksmith for several years, one would expect to work as a blacksmith on one's own account after the period
of indenture was over. During the 17th century, most of the white labourers in Virginia came
from England this way. Their masters were bound to feed, clothe, and lodge them. Ideally, an
indentured servant's lot in the establishment would be no harder than that of a contemporary apprentice, who was similarly bound by contract and owed hard, unpaid labour while "serving his time." At
the end of the allotted time, an indentured servant was to be given a new suit of clothes, tools, or money, and freed.
Indentured servants who served high class masters around cities in the north would usually work around the house of their
master or be an apprentice.
On the other hand, this ideal was not always a reality for indentured servants. Both male and female laborers could be subject
to violence, occasionally even resulting in death. Female indentured servants in particular might be raped and/or sexually abused
by their masters. If children were produced the labour would be extended by 2 years.[citation needed] Cases of successful prosecution for
these crimes were very uncommon, as indentured servants were unlikely to have access to a magistrate, and social pressure to
avoid such brutality could vary by geography and cultural norm. The situation was particularly difficult for indentured women,
because in both low social class and gender, they were believed to be particularly prone to vice, making legal redress
unusual.
Indentured servitude was a method of increasing the number of colonists, especially in the British colonies. Voluntary
migration and Convict labour only provided so many people, and since the journey across the
Atlantic was dangerous, other means of encouraging settlement were necessary. Contract-labourers became an important a group of
people and so numerous that the United States Constitution counted them
specifically in appointing representatives:
- "Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union,
according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including
those bound to Service for a Term of Years...".
Most indentured servants were recruited from the growing number of unemployed poor people in urban areas of England. Displaced
from their land and unable to find work in the cities, many of these people signed contracts of indenture and took passage to the
Americas. In Massachusetts, religious instruction in the Puritan way of life was often part of
the condition of indenture, and people tended to live in towns. In the north, indentured servants were more likely to be
integrated with the community to some extent, with more household chores and town-oriented trade skills associated with their
work. What was often great mental stress and suppression in combination with hard work and the possibility of physical abuse took
its toll on many indentured servants, particularly women, who were subject to even stricter social mores than their male
counterparts. Historians have speculated that these conditions might have produced symptoms of “possession” that young women
attributed to witches.
By contrast, in Virginia, the majority of the population did not live in individual towns, and indentured servants were more
likely to work on isolated farms. The majority of Virginians were Anglican, not Puritan, and while religion did play a large role
in everyday lives, the culture was more commercially based. In the Upper South, where tobacco was the main cash crop, the
majority of labor that indentured servants performed was related to field work. In this situation, social isolation could
increase the possibilities for both direct and indirect abuse, as could lengthy, demanding labor in the tobacco fields.
Indentured servants differed from slavery. There was a continuum between the designations “free” and “un-free” in the colonial
period. In this sense, the development of racial thinking to separate and privilege the mainly white laborers from black slaves
solidified the institution of slavery even as it opened, at least in name, opportunities for lower-class whites. Ultimately,
Slavery persisted until 1865 in the South, but indentured servitude did not.
The system was still widely practiced in the 1780s, picking up immediately after a hiatus during the American Revolution.
Fernand Braudel (The Perspective of the World 1984, pp 405f) instances a 1783
report on "the import trade from Ireland" and its large profits to a ship owner or a captain, who:
- "puts his conditions to the emigrants in Dublin or some other Irish port. Those who can
pay for their passage—usually about 100 or 80 [livres tournois]— arrive in America free to take any engagement that suits
them. Those who cannot pay are carried at the expense of the shipowner, who in order to recoup his money, advertises on arrival
that he has imported artisans, laborers and domestic servants and that he has agreed with them on his own account to hire their
services for a period normally of three, four, or five years for men and women and 6 or 7 years for children."
In 1638, for example, several lashes were the punishment for running away. In the following year, the punishment was extended
to hanging the runaway. By 1641 the law was changed such that death would be the punishment unless the servant requested that his
or her service be extended after the expiration of the contract. The service could be extended up to twice the time absent, not
to exceed seven years.
In modern terms, the shipowner was acting as an contractor, hiring out his
laborers. Such circumstances affected the treatment a captain gave his valuable human cargo. After indentures were forbidden, the
passage had to be prepaid, giving rise to the inhumane conditions of Irish "coffin ships" in
the second half of the 19th century.
Indentured servitude was also used by the Hudson's Bay Company, in what is now
Canada, to staff the coal mines around Nanaimo
well into the late 1800s.
- See also: Black Codes in the
USA
The Caribbean
European settlers who came to the Caribbean islands during the 16th and 17th centuries did so as indentured servants. Commoners, most of whom were young men, with dreams of owning their land or striking it rich quick would
essentially sell years of their freedom in exchange for passage to the islands. The
landowners on the islands would pay for a servant’s passage and then provide them with food and shelter during the term of their
service. The servant would then be required to work in the landowner’s (master) field for a term of bondage (usually four to
seven years). During this term of bondage the servant was considered the property of the master. He could be sold or given away
by his master and he was not allowed to marry without the master’s permission. An indentured
servant was normally not allowed to buy or sell goods although, unlike an African
slave, he could own personal property. He could also go to a local magistrate if he
was treated badly by his master. After the servant’s term of bondage was complete he was freed and paid “freedom dues”. These
payments could take the form of land or sugar, which would give the servant the opportunity to
become an independent farmer or a free labourer. - - Indentured servitude was a common part of the landscape in England and Ireland during the 1600s. During the 1600s, many Irish were also
kidnapped and taken to Barbados. The term Barbadosed was coined for these actions
[citation needed], and Redlegs for the group concerned. Many indentured servants were captured by the English during
Cromwell’s expeditions to Ireland and Scotland, who were forcibly brought over between 1649 and 1655.
Many white Irish slaves were taken to Montserrat during the slave trade: it is the only country in the world, other than the
Republic of Ireland, to have a public holiday for St Patrick Day. - - After 1660,
the Caribbean saw fewer indentured servants coming over from Europe. On most of the islands African slaves now did all the hard
fieldwork. Newly freed servant farmers that were given a few acres of land would not be able to make a living because
sugar plantations had to be spread over hundreds of acres in order to be profitable. The
landowners’ reputation as cruel masters in dealing with the large slave populations became a deterrence to the potential
indentured servant. Even the islands themselves had become deadly disease death traps for the
white servants. Africans, on the other hand, were excellent workers: they often had experience of agriculture and keeping cattle,
they were used to a tropical climate, resistant to tropical diseases, and they could be "worked very hard" on plantations or in
mines. Yellow fever, malaria and the diseases that
Europeans had brought over contributed to the fact that during the 17th century between 33 to 50 percent of the indentured
servants died before they were freed. - - When slavery ended in the British Empire in 1838, plantation owners turned to
indentured servitude for inexpensive labour. These servants emigrated from a variety of places, including China and Portugal, though a majority came from India. This system was pioneered at Aapravasi Ghat in Mauritius and was not abolished until 1917. As a result, today Indo-Caribbeans form a majority in Guyana, a plurality in
Trinidad and Tobago and Suriname, and a
substantial minority in Jamaica, Grenada, Barbados, and other Caribbean islands.
Australia and the Pacific
In the article on the history of Vanuatu, it states that, "During the 1860s,
planters in Australia, Fiji, New
Caledonia, and the Samoa Islands, in need of labourers,
encouraged a long-term indentured labour trade called "blackbirding." At the height of the
labour trade, more than one-half the adult male population of several of the Islands worked abroad."
Over a period of 40 years, from the mid-19th century to the early 20th century, labour for the sugar cane fields of
Queensland, Australia included an element of coercive
recruitment and indentured servitude, of the 62,000 South Sea Islanders (from
Melanesia, mainly the Solomon Islands and
Vanuatu, with a small number from the Polynesian and
Micronesian islands such as Samoa, Kiribati and Tuvalu).
The question of how many Islanders were kidnapped (or blackbirded) is unknown and
remains controversial. The question of whether Islanders were legally recruited, persuaded, deceived, coerced or forced to leave
their homes and travel by ship to Queensland is difficult. Official documents and accounts from the period often conflict with
the oral tradition passed down to the descendants of workers. Stories of blatantly
violent kidnapping tended to relate to the first 10–15 years of the trade.
Australia repatriated many of these people to their places of origin in the period
1906-1908 under the provisions of the Pacific Island Labourers Act
1901 ([2]).
The Australian colonies of Papua and New Guinea (joined after the Second World War to
form Papua New Guinea) were the last jurisdictions in the world to use indentured
servitude.
The Indian Ocean
The islands of the Indian Ocean, especially Mauritius, specialized in sugar cane plantations, badly needed this intensive
labor cheaper than the emancipated workforce negotiating for higher wages.
Mauritius was to act as a plaque tournante for this coolie or indentured population,
dispatching hundreds of thousands of coolies to Africa and the Indies.
Between 1845 and 1917, 140,000+ Indians work contracted to work the plantations of the island of Trinidad. Anecdotal material
suggests that there were some similarities between the experiences of the indentured workers and the African slaves who had been
brought to Trinidad.[original research?]
See also
Further reading
- Immigrant Servants Database
- Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: Norton, 1975.
- Salinger, Sharon V. 'To serve well and faithfully': Labor and Indentured Servants in Pennsylvania, 1682-1800. New
- Khal Torabully and Marina Carter, Coolitude: An Anthology of the Indian Labour Diaspora Anthem Press, London, 2002,
ISBN 1843310031
- Saxton, Martha. Being Good: Women's
Moral Values in Early America New York: Hill and Wang, 2003.
- Brown, Kathleen. Goodwives, Nasty Wenches & Anxious Patriachs: gender, race and power in Colonial Virginia, Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
- Jernegan, Marcus Wilson Laboring and Dependent Classes in Colonial America, 1607-1783 Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
1980
- Frethorne, Richard. The Experiences of an Indentured Servant in Virgina (1623)
External links
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