Indentured Servants

...

servants had no freedom, no rights or no privileges. It was basically like being locked away. Crimes were also taken seriously. There is a pro and a con to how the system worked. The pro is, if a servant was to claim something to be theirs and it is actually their masters, higher power has to step in and try to figure out what the punishment is going to be. So the master would not be able to act out of anger. On the other hand, the indentured servant does not have any rights to a fair trial and they will make any action they seem to be a good fit for the crime.

Maryland was a different kind of struggle. The pain on indentured servants in Virginia was too much and was not deserved on some levels. Most of the punishments was cruel and unusual... (see what I did there. Ha). But, most of Maryland’s citizens thought indentured servants deserved to be treated in the way that they were. This does not by any means say that what they did was easy, it just soothed the minds of others when they thought about it because they thought it was normal. George Alsop, the writer of this article, says, “… the servants here in Mary-Land of all colonies, distant or remote plantations, have the least cause to complain, either for strictness of Servitude, want of Provisions, or need of Apparel:” I grasp from this that he is trying to say all of the servants should be grateful for all that is given to them because they could have it a lot worse than they already do. The masters still believed that continuing to harm the servants was benefiting them in a different kind of way. There was a law that stated, “his master whom he hath served to give him Fifty Acres of Land, Corn to serve him a whole year, three Sutes of Apparel, with things necessary to them, and Tools to work withall;”

After the British settlement in North America at Jamestown, indentured servitude became in use in the Virginia colony. Like I said before, Virginia was more than harsh about how they handled the servants in their colony. The servants and their families had to pay tons of money to get from England to Virginia. The type of money that they just do not have.