Indentured Servants In Colonial America

In 1619, Englishmen, Englishwomen, and Africans immigrated to the colonies, which was odd because of the declining Native American relations, terrible environmental conditions, high mortality rates. These women and men would continue to colonize in Virginia by establishing more tobacco plantations, but to make the plantations profitable, the owners needed workers that they would not have to pay. So, landowners bought slaves and hired indentured slaves by paying her or his way to the colonies and sometimes with the promise of land after her or his years of work. Indentured servants differed only in choice. These workers choose hard work for the opportunity to lead a more successful life than he or she would in England. Yet, the indentured servants …show more content…
Landowners desired to expand her or his land westward, which was Native American property. In retaliation, the Natives fought, and the owners forced their workers to fight the Natives and sometimes take them as slaves. Richard Frethorne explains these events in a letter he sent home, "For we live in fear of the enemy [Powhatan Indians] every hour, yet we have had a combat with them on the Sunday before Shrovetide [Monday before Ash Wednesday], and we took two alive and made slaves of them. But it was by policy, for we are in great danger..."1 Due to these actions, Native Americans ambushed these men causing more battles and tensions to rise. When the men were outnumbered, landowners demanded the indentured servants fight. Frethorne wrote about a dilemma similar to this, "… yet we are but 32 against 3000 [three thousand] if they should come. And the nighest help that we have is ten miles of us, and when the rogues overcame this place [the] last [time] they slew 80 persons."2 With tension rising and workers dying, the forced fighting stirred more combative behavior from the Native Americans causing more …show more content…
Diseases encumbered the land of the colonies, and if the sickness afflicted a worker, he or she still worked. Richard, an indentured servant, illustrates, "… by reason of the nature of the country, [which] is such that it causeth much sickness, [such] as the scurvy and the bloody flux and diverse other diseases, which maketh the body very poor and weak."3 Since these workers were not treated and working, the sickness spread throughout the indentured servants. Disease claimed these men that Richard Frethorne worked beside. He explained how four men came to live with them and only one had survived at that moment in time. The men, called the Martin's hundred, easily contracted these diseases because they were surrounded by sickness all day and night. The owners ordered them to keep working, even in sickness causing contagion amongst their

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