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Indentured servitude was also used by governments in Britain for captured prisoners of war in rebellions and civil wars. Oliver Cromwell sent into indentured service thousands of prisoners captured in the 1648 Battle of Preston and the 1651 Battle of Worcester .
Indentured servitude in British America was the prominent system of labor in the British American colonies until it was eventually supplanted by slavery. [1] During its time, the system was so prominent that more than half of all immigrants to British colonies south of New England were white servants, and that nearly half of total white ...
Slavery was a divisive issue in the United States. It was a major issue during the writing of the U.S. Constitution in 1787, the subject of political crises in the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Compromise of 1850 and was the primary cause of the American Civil War in 1861. Just before the Civil War, there were 19 free states and 15 slave ...
In America, their labour was considered a good to be lawfully bought and sold until their indentures matured. The main differences between redemptioners and African slaves, were that redemptioners came of their own accord (even if misinformed) and that they had some legal rights and an “out-of-indenture” date to look forward to.
As a group, they were too poor to buy slaves. In the late colonial period, people found it economically viable to pay for free labor. Another factor against slavery was the rising enthusiasm of revolutionary ideals about human rights. [1]: 1 Religious resistance to slavery and the slave-import taxes led the colony to ban slave imports in 1767.
Whereas servants indentured in Britain had a fixed contract length before their sale in the colonies/states, an indentured redemptioner would negotiate the terms of the contract with the buyers. Gottlieb Mittelberger, a German migrant who travelled with redemptioners on a ship to Philadelphia, has provided a description of this process,
Domestic slave trading, however, continued at a rapid pace, driven by labor demands from the development of cotton plantations in the Deep South. More than one million slaves were sold from the Upper South, which had a surplus of labor, and taken to the Deep South in a forced migration, splitting up many families.
Robert Blake, earned the Medal of Honor as a sailor during the American Civil War, after becoming a "contraband" (i.e. a slave freed by Unionist forces) and enlisting. Robert Drury (1687–1743/1750), an English sailor who was shipwrecked on the island of Madagascar in 1702, and remained enslaved there until 1717.