Indentured servitude is a form of labor in which a person is contracted to work without salary for a specific number of years. The contract, called an “indenture”, may be entered voluntarily for purported eventual compensation or debt repayment, or imposed involuntarily as a judicial punishment.
Indentured Servitude in the Thirteen Colonies
Between one-half and two-thirds of European immigrants to the Thirteen Colonies between the 1630s and the American Revolution came under indentures. However, while almost half the European immigrants to the American Colonies were indentured servants, at any one time they were outnumbered by workers who had never been indentured, or whose indenture had expired, and thus free wage labor was the more prevalent for Europeans in the colonies. Indentured people were numerically important mostly in the region from Virginia north to New Jersey. Other colonies saw far fewer of them.
Indentured servitude began its decline after Bacon’s Rebellion, a servant uprising against the government of Colonial Virginia. This was due to multiple factors, such as the treatment of servants, support of native tribes in the surrounding area, a refusal to expand the amount of land an indentured servant could work by the colonial government, and inequality between the upper and lower class in colonial society. Indentured servitude was the primary source of labor for early American colonists until the rebellion. Little changed in the immediate aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion; however, the rebellion did cause a general distrust of servant labor and fear of future rebellion. The fear of indentured servitude eventually cemented itself into the hearts of Americans, leading towards the reliance on enslaved Africans. This helped to ingrain the idea of racial segregation and unite white Americans under race rather than economic or social class. Doing so prevented the potential for future rebellion and changed the way that agriculture was approached.