"What we unfortunate English People suffer here is beyond the probability of you in England to Conceive..."
What is an indentured servant?
Indentured servitude is a system of labor where an employee is under contract to work for a particular employer for a fixed period of time. The person who signs this contract could sign for multiple reasons including: passage to the New World, to pay off debts, or as a form of punishment for their previous crimes. Men, women, and children traveled to the New World with intentions of creating new lives for themselves and their families. When their contract had expired, an indentured servant was free to do whatever they desired. Indentured servitude was the main form of labor in the New World before the rise of slavery and because of this, indentured servants made up a large portion of the population in the New World. The stories of the individuals who came to the American colonies as servants share similar experiences which allowed for the creators of this website to generate stories based upon three different types of people who came over: middle to upper class men, lower class men, and lower class women. Each of these stories are fictionalized, but are based off of first and secondary sources found about indentured servitude in the American colonies.
"From the Old World to the New World" from Harper's Weekly, November 7, 1874, Public Domain
Background Image: Faded World Map. (n.d.). Retrieved from Print a Wallpaper: http://www.printawallpaper.com/detail/maps/faded-world-map
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