Indentured Servants: New Light on Some of America's “First†Families

Among the commodities which could profitably be shipped to the English plantations in America, a parcel of human beings was not the least remunerative. The colonists demanded labor, and were willing to pay for it. For a hundred years after the founding of Virginia this demand was met by the transportation and sale of white indentured servants recruited in Great Britain and Ireland, and so great was the volume of this business that the servants made up about three quarters of all immigrants coming to the colonies south of New York. During the eighteenth century their exclusive sway was gradually disputed by German redemptioners and Negro slaves, yet indentured servants continued to play a vital part in colonial life and to form an important element in colonial trade. The progenitor of many a proud American family found himself landed upon these shores not so much on account of his desire to seek freedom as because his person could be advantageously exchanged for a quantity of tobacco, lumber, or sassafras root.