Indentured Servants Research Paper

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Although slaves contributed more in helping build colleges, indentured servants also took part in the process. A lot of North American schools used wealthy planters as a source of enrollment and income (Wilder 30). By selling slaves and indentured servants to work in the fields, the colleges were using the money to build up their schools. According to Harvard graduate, George Downing, newcomers used English indentured servants until they could afford Negros (Wilder 30). Indentured servants were cheaper than slaves (Foner 100). Although their death rate in regards to performing certain tasks was high like slaves, eventually indentured servants could gain freedom. It ended up being more of a loss for the buyer to purchase an indentured…show more content…
Most of the women that emigrated to Virginia came as indentured servants (Foner 61). By law, a woman had to complete her five to seven years of work before marrying. If indentured servant women were found pregnant while serving their terms, normally, more years would get tacked on to their services (Foner 53). Since women did not finish their terms until rather late in their lives, it was hard to produce a family because of the high death rate, unequal ratio between the sexes, and late age of marriage (Foner 62). The sex ratio was so unbalanced that the colony of Virginia promoted “tobacco brides” for males to have arranged marriages (Foner 61). Even with the tobacco brides though, there was still an uneven ratio of four or five men to one woman in the colony (Foner 61). In regards to slaves in the North, because the slave population was smaller and the law was more lenient, marriage was seen through law (Foner 100).YYYY In the South however, the law was a lot stricter.YYYYYY There were female slaves that did have children, but it was normally not by choice. The Virginia law of 1662 provided that in the case of a child one of whose parents was free and one slave, the status of the offspring followed that of the mother (Foner 101). This law was created to profit the owner of the slave. Most female slaves were normally raped by their…show more content…
In the Pennsylvania Journals, there are many advertisements in regards to runaways. Most of the advertisements are for Irish servant men running away from their masters (Pennsylvania Journal 8/27/1747 and Pennsylvania Journal 4/26/1753). These advertisements explained who the servant was, who he belonged to, what he looked like, what his attire was, and what the reward would be for the person who found and returned the servant. In Give Me Liberty!, Foner also discusses servants running away. In chapter 2, he states that “Employers constantly complained of servants running away, not working diligently, or being unruly.” (Foner 54). One can infer that life must have been bad for indentured servants, especially those who were Irish in certain locations, if they felt the need to runaway and try and escape just as slaves wished and attempted to do. Elizabeth Springs, an indentured servant in Maryland, stated that she was “forced to work day and night…then tied up and whipped.” (Foner 53). Indentured servants were supposed to come to the New World, have their housing and meals taken care of, do labor for someone for five to seven years, then be able to be free. Instead though, they were poorly mistreated, beaten, whipped, tied up, and intensely overworked YYYYYY This act of behavior, on the employer of an indentured servants end, sounds more
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