indentured servants
Debt-bound workers
Indentured servants were laborers bound by contract to work for a set period—typically four to seven years—in exchange for passage to a new country, room, board, or training.
Common in colonial America, the system brought European workers to the New World: My ancestors came over as indentured servants from England.
Unlike enslaved people, indentured servants were legally free once their term ended, though conditions during service could be harsh and contracts were sometimes extended as punishment.
The term now appears mainly in historical contexts.
- laborersWorkers doing physical tasks
- manumissionFormal freeing of enslaved
- unfreedomAbsence of liberty
- economic coercionMonetary pressure for compliance
- whipStrikes or aerates
Jamestown · bound labor · workers · bonded labor · colonial · mercantilism · triangular trade · seven years · contract · plantations · tobacco farming · tobacco fields · debt · term · tobacco · master · bondage · passage
- Jamestown ColonistsJohn Smith, Pocahontas
- Colonial AmericaGeorge Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Benjamin Franklin, Declaration of Independence
- Abolitionismabolitionists, abolitionist movement, anti-slavery, antislavery, abolitionism
- colonial historycolonization, colonies, pilgrims, Jamestown, Plymouth
- Atlantic HistoryAtlantic crossing, transatlantic trade, transatlantic crossing, Columbus, triangle trade
- Atlantic tradetriangle trade, Atlantic slave trade, slave ships, trade winds, Atlantic crossings
indentured servantsfreemen
Those no longer enslaved
chattel slaves · freedmen · serfs · bondsmen
indentured servantssalaried employees
Workers receiving fixed regular pay
independent contractors · freeholders · yeoman farmers · self-employed · chattel slaves
indentured servantsmasters
Those with dominion
landowners · planters · employers · gentry · proprietors
servant, servitude, servants, indenture, indentured, indentures, indenturing, bondservant, indentured servant