Colonizing the New World required hard labor. Governments and investors who wanted to profit from the New World’s resources needed
people to build and run communities, farms, and trades. Indentured
servitude, and then slavery, were the primary means of obtaining that
labor.
In 1606, the Virginia Company first tried to attract settlers to the
New World by offering company stock, or a share of the company’s profits. The method failed when the company had no profits to share with
the settlers after seven years.
In 1618, the Virginia Company tried attracting settlers using a new
method called the headright system. For Englishmen who could pay for
themselves and their families to travel to the New World, the company
gave 50 acres (20 hectares) of land to the head of the family and additional land for every family member and servant he brought along. In exchange, the settler had to pay the company a
share of profits he earned from the land.
Headright systems were soon used by other
companies throughout the New World, but it
was difficult for the companies to collect all of
their profits and difficult for the settlers to find
enough labor to work the land.
Indentured servitude was a way to obtain
labor for farming, production, and trade in the
New World. Under the system, a landowner or
producer paid to transport a person from
Europe and to house, feed, and clothe him, usually for seven to fourteen years. In exchange, the
person agreed to work for the landowner or producer for those years. At the end of the agreed
on number of years, the person became a freeman and received from his former master a small
amount of land, some money, tools of his trade,
or just a set of clothes.
Many indentured servants could afford to
travel to the New World but needed help establishing themselves once there. Most indentured
servants came involuntarily as an alternative to
punishment for crime or to escape debt or poverty. Many Germans came
to the New World through a system called redemption. Under redemption, ship owners paid to transport German laborers to the New World
and then sold them into servitude to redeem the cost of their passage.
The life of an indentured servant was hard. Servants had to do whatever work their masters required of them. Indentured servants, however,
had more rights under the law than slaves. While some indentured servants
had to extend their periods of service when they could not afford their freedom, others earned freedom after their period of service, an option unavailable to slaves who were held against their will for their entire lives.
Indentured servitude slowly came to an end in the nineteenth century. During the eighteenth century, slavery replaced servitude for operating plantations in the South, and during the nineteenth century,
economies in the North, fueled by crafts, trades, and industry, attracted
free labor from Europe as the cost of passage to the New World fell.