“What we unfortunate English people suffer here is beyond the probability of you in England to conceive. Let it suffice that I, one of the unhappy number, am toiling almost day and night, and very often in the horses’ drudgery, with only this comfort that: ‘You bitch, you do not half enough…’”    —undelivered letter from indentured servant, Elizabeth Spriggs, to her father, 1756

Wow. That’s not the way I heard it.

School history books describe an honorable method for the poor, but hard-working colonist wannabes to finance their passages across the Atlantic. The textbook, The American Journey, says “Other men, women, and children came to the colonies as indentured servants. In return for the payment of their passage to America, they agreed to work without pay for a certain period of time.”

Sounds fair.

Walter Edgar, author of South Carolina: A History, tells of the Bounty Act of 1761 where the colonial government promised four pounds Sterling for each white immigrant imported into South Carolina. An additional twenty shillings was promised as start-up money. Then why did a prominent South Carolinian call it “more cruel than the slave trade”?

Edgar, as in most references to indentured servitude, soft pedals it. “Selling their children as servants was simply a means for paying the family’s way to South Carolina,” he writes. Also, “Thrifty and industrious, the Germans of Orangeburg and Amelia turned their townships into the breadbasket of South Carolina.”

A little scratching below the surface tells a different story.

Gottlieb Mittleberger was a German schoolmaster who emigrated to Philadelphia in 1750. While he did not come as an indentured servant, he wrote of the experiences he witnessed and heard about from his countrymen who were. Totally disenchanted, Mittleberger returned to Germany in 1754. Once back in Europe, he wrote “On the Misfortune of Indentured Servants” to warn his countrymen of the horrors that possibly awaited them.

These people were scorned by the free English. According to Anthony Vaver, author of Bound With an Iron Chain, “colonists thought that anyone who abandoned family and friends to become a servant in a distant land must be lacking in character.”

These attitudes made it easy to treat such people like chattel. A common attitude was that they likely deserved whatever they got.

Because few owners wanted to make a purchase sight unseen, most indentured servants had no specific contract before they left home. The ship captain owned the immigrants until he could sell them for a profit.

According to Gottlieb Mittelberger:

a. All who did not pay their own way were required to stay aboard ship until purchased. The sick were left the longest, sometimes dying in the interim.

b. Adults were indentured for four to seven years, while children aged ten to fifteen were owned until the age of twenty-one.

c. Parents could trade or sell their children to unburden themselves of their own debt, but often did not know where they were taken and might never see them again. Entire families were often separated by being sold to different purchasers.

d. If one’s spouse died at sea, the survivor was responsible for working off both passages. If both parents died, the children had to make good on all debt.

While in servitude, disease and overwork killed off many before their indenture was over. Since the arrangement was temporary, the owners worked these people sometimes to death to “get their money’s worth.” Professor Kent Lancaster was quoted in White Cargo (Jordan and Walsh) as saying, “indentured servants were exploitable for a limited time only and that time could not be wasted on the niceties of holidays.”

Why is none of this in our history books, even today? Well, it didn’t take long for the propaganda to begin. In 1789, Thomas Jefferson minimized the influx of indentured servants and 50,000 convicts by claiming only 4000 criminals, including their descendants, then lived in the United States.

I guess he thought it was a bad look that three out of every four Americans started out in chains.

Works Cited

Edgar, Walter B. South Carolina : A History. Columbia, Sc Univ. Of South Carolina Press, 1999.

Glencoe/Mcgraw-Hill. The American Journey. Resources. New York, Glencoe/Mcgraw-Hill, 2003.

Jordan, Don, and Michael Walsh. White Cargo : The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America. New York, N.Y, New York University Press, 1 Jan. 2007.

“Journey to Pennsylvania in the Year 1750, and Return to Germany in the Year 1754 .” National Humanities Center, 2009, nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/becomingamer/growth/text9/pennsylvaniaimmigrant.pdf. Accessed 30 Aug. 2024.

Vaver, Anthony. Bound with an Iron Chain. 2012. Pickpocket Publishing, 30 June 2011.

“We Unfortunate English People Suffer Here”: An English Servant Writes Home.” Historymatters.gmu.edu, historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5796. Accessed 30 Aug. 2024.