PBS

Indentured Servants In The U.S.

Indentured servants first arrived in America in the decade following the settlement of Jamestown by the Virginia Company in 1607.

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. There were laws that protected some of their rights. But their life was not an easy one, and the punishments meted out to people who wronged were harsher than those for non-servants. An indentured servant's contract could be extended as punishment for breaking a law, such as running away, or in the case of female servants, becoming pregnant.

For those that survived the work and received their freedom package, many historians argue that they were better off than those new immigrants who came freely to the country. Their contract may have included at least 25 acres of land, a year's worth of corn, arms, a cow and new clothes. Some servants did rise to become part of the colonial elite, but for the majority of indentured servants that survived the treacherous journey by sea and the harsh conditions of life in the New World, satisfaction was a modest life as a freeman in a burgeoning colonial economy.

In 1619 the first black Africans came to Virginia. With no slave laws in place, they were initially treated as indentured servants, and given the same opportunities for freedom dues as whites. However, slave laws were soon passed - in Massachusetts in 1641 and Virginia in 1661 -and any small freedoms that might have existed for blacks were taken away.

As demands for labor grew, so did the cost of indentured servants. Many landowners also felt threatened by newly freed servants demand for land. The colonial elite realized the problems of indentured servitude. Landowners turned to African slaves as a more profitable and ever-renewable source of labor and the shift from indentured servants to racial slavery had begun.

In Europe, slavery was replaced by an equally odious institution, serfdom, which wasn't fully abolished there until Czar Alexander II finally did so in the Russian Empire by proclamation in 1861. The Ottoman Empire, which controlled a good portion of southeaster Europe until 1912, abolished involuntary servitude in 1882. Brazil abolished slavery in 1888.

The United States didn't really begin the formal process of abolishing slavery until 1780, one year before the Battle of Yorktown ended the Revolutionary War, when the Pennsylvania legislature passed "An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery" which provided for the freedom of all future children born to slaves. But unfortunately, all those who were held captive prior to the Act's passage were left enslaved for life. Nevertheless, Pennsylvania's Abolition Act became the model legislation that other northern states soon began to emulate.

The last slaves to be legally held in Pennsylvania were finally freed in 1847, 67 years after the Act's adoption. The last U.S. territory where slavery was legal was Guam, which had been seized from Spain by the U.S. during the Spanish-American War in 1898. Adm. Richard Leary, USN, who effectively functioned as military governor for the island, unilaterally abolished slavery by decree in February 1900.

The final country to ratify the 1926 Slavery Convention was Kazakhstan in 2008. At this point, slavery is now abolished de jure in every country and political dependency throughout the world.

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By her measure, would you similarly characterize your own home state of Pennsylvania as a "small east coast state," since its area by square mile is roughly comparable to that of Virginia and likewise less than half that of Colorado? And for that matter, is the city of New York (pop. 8,622,698) therefore a "small city"?