The Role Of Indentured Servants In The 1700s

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The role of an indentured servant in the 1700s was not a glamorous one. They came to the New World knowing that, for a time, they would be slaves for someone they did not know and the risk of disease and death was high, but the opportunity that laid ahead of them after their time of servitude was worth everything to these settlers of the New World. They came to America for the same reasons as all of the other settlers. Religious freedom, land, wealth, and a new start were motives for both settlers and indentured servants but the one thing separating most settlers from the indentured servants was that they could afford their voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. Indentured servants couldn’t buy their ticket to the New World, but that didn’t stop …show more content…

Mainly because so many of the settlers that came during that time were indentured servants. “Of the 120,000 English immigrants who entered the Chesapeake region during the seventeenth century, three-quarters came as servants” (Foner 61). Although many of them died while they were still under contract, a very large number of them were able to settle in the colonies. They were an important part of life just as every African slave was. They did almost all of the work that was involved in handling crops of corn, cotton, and mostly tobacco that was used during that time. They were a normal part of life during that time period that was essential to the settlement of America. Indentured servants also had an impact in the ratio of men to women in the colonies. “Men in the Chesapeake outnumbered women for most of the seventeenth century by our or five to one. The vast majority of women who emigrated to the region came as indentured servants. Since they usually had to complete their terms of service before marrying, they did not begin to form families until their mid-twenties. The high death rate, unequal ratio between the sexes, and late age of marriage for those who found partners retarded population growth and produced a society with large umbers of single men, widows, and orphans” (Foner

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