The assembly wished to protect masters from terms that did not fully recoup their cost of transporting servants from England to Virginia, in addition to their subsequent care. Finally, the masters—who included most men who sat in the assembly—had an interest in prolonging terms of indenture because briefer service led to disruptive turnover, labor shortages, and an unstable workforce.
For these reasons, terms of service did not shorten even as tobacco production became more efficient and profitable. Instead, lengthy terms of service became customary and dictated by law. Legislation passed in the — session adjusted these ages: anyone under the age of fifteen should serve until he or she turned twenty-one, while anyone sixteen or older should serve for four years.
By , the law had been simplified, so that all non-indentured Christian servants older than nineteen should serve until they turned twenty-four. Lawmakers entrusted the county courts with judging the age of each servant. In the meantime, they required slightly different terms for Irish servants. Two gifted English indentured servants, carpenter and joiner William Buckland and master carver William Bernard Sears, were responsible for the interior work, helping to make Gunston Hall one of the finest homes in colonial America.
This is the only documented chair created by the pair and it is believed to be their first collaboration. This was one of a set of chairs used in the mansion's Chinese Room. Buckland designed the carvings in the house, and Sears generally did the actual woodwork. William Buckland, an architect and a builder who originally came to Virginia as an indentured servant, holds a drafting pen in this portrait by Charles Willson Peale.
On the table in front of Buckland is an architectural sketch of his final commission, the Hammond-Harwood House, in Annapolis, Maryland. The monumental colonnaded building in the background of the painting bears no resemblance to the Annapolis house. Peale began this portrait in , but Buckland died before it was finished. At the behest of Buckland's daughter, Peale completed the painting fifteen years later.
Women were entitled to fifteen bushels of corn and the equivalent of forty shillings. During the seventeenth century, freedom dues were negotiated as part of the indenture.
In addition to contract terms, the General Assembly concerned itself with servant behavior. For instance, burgesses were forced to pass laws in response to servants who ran away and to those who, while still under contract, hired themselves out to new masters under better terms. The — assembly passed a law —subsequently revised in ——requiring that servants carry certificates and punishing any master who hired a servant without proper papers.
In some cases, female servants became pregnant as the result of relationships with male servants. Beginning in , the assembly attempted to limit such relationships by preventing indentured women from marrying without permission. If the master refused to pay, then the servants were to be whipped. Servants ran away largely because their lives in Virginia tended to be nasty, brutish, and short. Although they often worked alongside their masters in tobacco fields, they usually lived apart and often under primitive conditions.
They worked from dawn until dusk, six days a week through the growing season, which on tobacco and wheat farms could last from as early as February until as late as November.
In the meantime, servants—whether seasoned or unseasoned—were treated as property subject to overwork and beatings. For instance, in Alice Proctor, whom Captain John Smith termed a proper and civil gentlewoman, arranged for her runaway maidservant Elizabeth Abbott to be beaten, and the punishment was so severe that Abbott died.
Other female servants were victims of sexual assault. DeVries worried that servants were not treated with appropriate dignity. John Pott, a Jamestown physician and future Virginia governor, ransomed her freedom for two pounds of beads.
On at least two occasions, servants banded together to protest the way they were treated. In both cases, the authorities were notififed before the plans could be carried out, and the conspirators were punished. According to Berkeley, four of the Gloucester County conspirators were hanged for their actions. The General Assembly did pass legislation aimed at protecting servants from mistreatment.
In , the assembly further directed masters not to make bargains with their servants in an attempt to trick or manipulate them into extended terms of service.
Other acts aimed to protect the limited rights of Virginia Indian servants. Of course, these laws were neither preventative nor always enforced; rather, they reflected the harsh reality of servitude in Virginia, a reality that, as time passed, became less and less distinct from chattel slavery. Morgan wrote. For much of the seventeenth century, those servants were white English men and women—with a smattering of Africans, Indians, and Irish—under indenture with the promise of freedom.
Most historians have explained this shift by citing either social or economic shifts in Virginia beginning around the s. By harnessing that discontent and, in the name of racial solidarity, pointing it in the direction of enslaved Africans, white elites could create a more stable workforce and one that was less likely to threaten their own interests.
Other historians have observed that the flow of English servants began to dry up beginning in the s and fell off dramatically around , forcing planters to rely more heavily on slaves. Slavery did not end indentured servitude, in other words; the end of servitude gave rise to slavery. The historian John C. Over time, as the supply of enslaved Africans increased and their prices decreased, farmers and planters agreed that they preferred a slave for life to a servant who had the hope of freedom.
Even so, indentured servants—particularly those with specialized skills—and convict servants continued to be imported to the colony throughout the eighteenth century. Encyclopedia Virginia Grady Ave. Redemptioners bore increased risk because they could not predict in advance what terms they might be able to negotiate for their labor, but presumably they did so because of other benefits, such as the opportunity to choose their own master, and to select where they would be employed.
Although data on immigration for the colonial period are scattered and incomplete a number of scholars have estimated that between half and three quarters of European immigrants arriving in the colonies came as indentured or redemptioner servants. Using data for the end of the colonial period Grubb b found that close to three-quarters of English immigrants to Pennsylvania and nearly 60 percent of German immigrants arrived as servants.
A number of scholars have examined the terms of indenture and redemptioner contracts in some detail see, e. They find that consistent with the existence of a well-functioning market, the terms of service varied in response to differences in individual productivity, employment conditions, and the balance of supply and demand in different locations.
The other major source of labor for the colonies was the forced migration of African slaves. Slavery had been introduced in the West Indies at an early date, but it was not until the late seventeenth century that significant numbers of slaves began to be imported into the mainland colonies. From to the proportion of blacks in the Chesapeake region grew from 13 percent to around 40 percent. In South Carolina and Georgia, the black share of the population climbed from 18 percent to 41 percent in the same period McCusker and Menard, , p.
Galenson explains the transition from indentured European to enslaved African labor as the result of shifts in supply and demand conditions in England and the trans-Atlantic slave market.
Conditions in Europe improved after , reducing the supply of indentured servants, while at the same time increased competition in the slave trade was lowering the price of slaves Dunn Like slaves, indentured servants were unfree, and ownership of their labor could be freely transferred from one owner to another.
The idea of indentured servitude was born of a need for cheap labor. The earliest settlers soon realized that they had lots of land to care for, but no one to care for it. With passage to the Colonies expensive for all but the wealthy, the Virginia Company developed the system of indentured servitude to attract workers.
Indentured servants became vital to the colonial economy. The timing of the Virginia colony was ideal. The Thirty Year's War had left Europe's economy depressed, and many skilled and unskilled laborers were without work. A new life in the New World offered a glimmer of hope; this explains how one-half to two-thirds of the immigrants who came to the American colonies arrived as indentured servants.
Servants typically worked four to seven years in exchange for passage, room, board, lodging and freedom dues. While the life of an indentured servant was harsh and restrictive, it wasn't slavery.
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