Indentured servitude was an important form of labor utilized in British North America during the colonial and early national periods. Bound laborers came in a variety of forms and their experience changed significantly over the time period, both in type of labor performed and in opportunities for advancement. The term "indentured servant" applied to the largest and broadest group of European immigrants who sold their labor for a period of years in exchange for passage to the New World. Indentured servants first appeared in the Chesapeake colonies, but they also were present in the middle colonies and the Lower South. The term "redemptioner" applies to eighteenth-century immigrants, usually from Germany and Switzerland but also from England and Ireland, who traveled to the colonies in family groups and sold their labor upon arrival to repay the cost of passage. This group was most common in Pennsylvania. A third group, transported convicts, became more prevalent after the Transportation Act of 1718 permitted the banishment of convicted felons. They usually went to Virginia and Maryland, were of English, Scottish, or Irish descent, and were the least popular form of bound laborer in the colonies. Colonists complained about the questionable character of convict servants and were thus more reluctant to purchase their services.
Likened to slaves in that masters had almost complete control over them, including the right to control their labor and the ability to severely punish them, indentured servants nevertheless possessed some legal rights that clearly distinguished them from lifetime chattel. Reflecting the colonies' British heritage, as did the impulse to enter into an apprenticelike or servant relationship in one's teens and early twenties, servants negotiated contracts, owned property, sued their owners for abuse, and testified in court while in service. Servant contracts varied in length. For adults, who were sometimes able to negotiate their contract based upon their skill level, periods of service usually lasted from four to seven years. For minors, indenture lasted until they reached adulthood. In reality, this meant that most servants did not achieve their freedom until they were in their early to mid-twenties. Until they were free, servants could not marry without the consent of their master. This restriction had long-term consequences on colonial population growth. At the end of their indenture, servants received their freedom and "freedom dues," which consisted at various times and different locations of land, clothing, corn, tobacco, a musket, blankets, or tools—or some combination of these.
Indentured servants played a critical role in the process of populating the North American colonies, and their motivation to migrate changed over time. Estimated to have made up 75 percent of the seventeenth-century migrants, servants were critical both to population growth and to successful tobacco cultivation in the Upper South. They continued to arrive in significant numbers during the eighteenth century, especially in the middle colonies. Most seventeenth-century servants were drawn from the mass of the increasingly mobile English population unable to find work because of enclosure, economic instability, and overpopulation. Eighteenth-century bound migrants came from more diverse backgrounds and for a variety of reasons. With many of the previous century's challenges in England resolved by the eighteenth century, English servant migration waned. Scottish Covenanters and Jacobites from the 1715 and 1745 uprisings were deported to American plantations as an expediency. Irish from Ulster traveled out of Belfast as indentured servants and redemptioners. Restrictions on Irish trade, the rack-renting of absentee landlords, and anti-Catholic fervor made survival in Ireland difficult and many saw emigration as an appealing alternative. Famine in the late 1720s gave particular impetus to emigration. Germans from the Rhineland and Palatinate, having survived decades of war, found themselves persecuted for their Protestant practices as the eighteenth century unfolded. The British government also sent thirty-two-hundred Germans to New York in 1710, hoping to provide a labor force to produce naval stores. Convict laborers were also more common in the later period. An estimated two-thirds of British felons were transported between 1715 and 1775, with estimated total numbers varying from twenty thousand to fifty thousand. There was a particularly intensive period of migration between the end of the Seven Years' War and the American Revolution (1763–1775).
As the southern colonies came to rely upon African slave labor in the eighteenth century, the type of labor in which indentured servants engaged and their opportunities for advancement changed. Most worked as agricultural laborers during the seventeenth century, learning the skills they hoped would one day enable them to establish their own farms. Although seventeenth-century bound laborers faced grueling conditions and high mortality rates, their opportunities for advancement and economic independence were reasonable. By the end of the early eighteenth century, however, reduced availability of land, a more complex economy combining agriculture, nascent industries, urban commercial ventures, and a more diverse and plentiful supply of labor changed the nature of servitude and the opportunities for freed servants. While some servants still engaged in agricultural work, the shift to slave labor meant that they increasingly worked as skilled laborers and in supervisory positions on farms or plantations. Indentured servants appeared with much greater frequency in craft shops and as workers for merchants and retailers either in their businesses or as domestic workers. In White Servitude in Colonial America (1981), David W. Galenson noted a rise in the eighteenth century in the percentage of servants who had skills. An estimated 60 percent of registered servants during the period from 1725 to 1750 described themselves as skilled, and that proportion jumped to 85 percent in the 1770s. Similarly, servants identifying themselves as having an agricultural background declined significantly. In northern Maryland, servants worked alongside slaves and wage laborers in the growing iron industry. In cities like Philadelphia, servants made up an increasing proportion of workers in small craft shops and in domestic trades. Bound labor in Philadelphia peaked in the mid-eighteenth century, when it accounted for nearly half of the city's workforce. (This percentage includes slave labor.) During this period, artisans purchased two-thirds of the indentured servants in the city. Given high wage rates for journeyman workers, servants were a better economic investment and were more manageable in the domestic shop structure at that time.
An important shift occurred during the Revolutionary period, especially in cities such as Philadelphia. With growing economic instability, increasing stratification of wealth, and the gradual move toward a more capitalist wage-labor economy, the proportion of bound laborers in the city shrank while that of wage laborers grew. Artisans no longer purchased long-term servants because their cost grew while that of wage laborers fell. The greater number of journeymen unable to raise the capital for their own businesses provided a ready supply of wage earners whose costs were tied to supply and demand. Wage laborers also permitted a greater flexibility in hiring that was valuable during periods of economic instability. Sharon Salinger has noted that in Philadelphia less than 15 percent of those who owned servants were artisans by 1791. As they disappeared from craft shops, servants appeared with greater frequency in the homes and businesses of merchants and retailers. This transition also signaled the end of a need for skilled servants. Servants now functioned as unskilled workers and domestic help. Concomitantly, those masters seeking servants requested and purchased female servants in much greater numbers. The shift to a market economy after the American Revolution and in the early nineteenth century signaled the demise of bound labor (apart from slaves) as an appealing choice for employers. The market revolution guaranteed the dominance of wage labor in areas where slaves were not owned, and the practice of indenture became less economically viable and desirable for most immigrants and workers. See alsoEconomic Development; Immigration and Immigrants .
Ekirch, A. Roger. Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718–1775. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1987. Galenson, David W. "'Middling People' or 'Common Sort'?: The Social Origins of Some Early Americans Reexamined, with a Rebuttal by Mildred Campbell." William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 35 (1978), 499–524. ——. White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Heavner, Robert Owen. Economic Aspects of Indentured Servitude in Colonial Pennsylvania. New York: Arno Press, 1978. Herrick, Cheesman A. White Servitude in Pennsylvania: Indentured and Redemption Labor in Colony and Commonwealth. Philadelphia: McVey, 1926. Salinger, Sharon. "Artisans, Journeymen, and the Transformation of Labor in Late Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia." William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 40 (1983): 62–84. ——. "To Serve Well and Faithfully": Labour and Indentured Servants in Pennsylvania, 1682–1800. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Smith, Abbot Emerson. Colonists in Bondage. White Servitude and Convict Labor in America, 1607–1776. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1947. Alexa Silver Cawley