Indentured Servants In Colonial Virginia

Contract Terms

As indentured servants poured into Virginia, they came to account for fully half of Virginia’s population. Such rapid change caused problems, however, and the General Assembly passed numerous statutes designed to address them. These laws served several broad purposes, including regulation of servants’ contract terms, behavior, and treatment.

Contract terms were important for several reasons. The assembly wished to protect masters from terms that did not fully recoup their cost of transporting servants from England to Virginia, in addition to their subsequent care. The assembly also faced the problem of servants who arrived without any contracts; the English custom of requiring a single year’s service absent any other arrangement would not suffice in America, where the labor market was less stable than in England. Finally, the masters—who included most men who sat in the assembly—had an interest in prolonging terms of indenture because briefer service led to disruptive turnover, labor shortages, and an unstable workforce.

For these reasons, terms of service did not shorten even as tobacco production became more efficient and profitable. Instead, lengthy terms of service became customary and dictated by law. As early as 1619, the General Assembly required all servants to register with the secretary of state upon arrival and “Certifie him upon what termes or conditions they be come hither.” In its 1642–1643 session, the assembly passed a law mandating that any servant arriving without an indenture and who was younger than twelve years old should serve for seven years, servants aged twelve to nineteen should serve for five years, and servants aged twenty and older should serve for four years. Legislation passed in the 1657–1658 session adjusted these ages: anyone under the age of fifteen should serve until he or she turned twenty-one, while anyone sixteen or older should serve for four years. By 1705, the law had been simplified, so that all non-indentured Christian servants older than nineteen should serve until they turned twenty-four. (“Christian servants” generally referred to non-blacks and non-Indians.) Lawmakers entrusted the county courts with judging the age of each servant. In the meantime, they required slightly different terms for Irish servants.

William Buckland

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The assembly declined to dictate standard terms for privately negotiated indentures; as a result, contracts varied in length and specificity. On September 7, 1619, Robert Coopy, whose age went unnoted, signed an indenture for three years’ service to the proprietors of Berkeley’s Hundred requiring that he be “obedient” to his betters and that they “transport him (with gods assistance)” to Virginia and there “maintayne him with convenient diet and apparel.” In a much shorter document, dated March 14, 1664, Lott Richards, a merchant from Bristol, England, sold “one Sarvant boy by name William [F]reeman being about eleven years old and haveing noe indenture” to John Barnes for a term of eight years. By 1755, Thomson Mason could simply fill out a form, which he did in order to indenture for four years William Buckland, a twenty-one-year-old carpenter and joiner, to his brother George Mason, who was overseeing the construction of Gunston Hall. Buckland’s agreement was somewhat unusual in that, as a skilled worker, he was paid wages of £20 per year in addition to receiving “all necessary Meat, Drink, Washing, [and] Lodging.”

Servants whose contracts had expired typically received “freedom dues,” loosely described as a quantity of corn and clothing. The 1705 statute was the first to explicitly mention this “good and laudable custom,” and required that male servants, “upon their freedom,” be supplied with ten bushels of corn, thirty shillings (or the like value in goods), and a musket worth at least twenty shillings. Women were entitled to fifteen bushels of corn and the equivalent of forty shillings.

During the seventeenth century, freedom dues were negotiated as part of the indenture. Robert Coopy’s contract, for instance, guaranteed him thirty acres of land at Berkeley’s Hundred. John Barnes, who purchased William Freeman, was obliged only to pay the boy “his full due According to the Custom of this Country.” Depending on the time and place, this might have included corn, clothing, and tools. In 1675, an indentured servant who charged his master with cheating him asked the General Court to free him “and pay him corne & clothes.” The judges ruled in his favor, granting him “three Barrels of Corne att the Cropp.” Occasionally the owners of indentured servants refused to release them or give them their freedom dues. At Jamestown, when a male indentured servant who had fulfilled his contract insisted on receiving his “corn and clothes,” his master exploded in rage and struck him on the head with his truncheon.