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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 ...
German-Americans were the largest ethnic contingent to fight for the Union in the American Civil War [citation needed].More than 200,000 native-born Germans, along with another 250,000 1st-generation German-Americans, served in the Union Army, notably from New York, Wisconsin, and Ohio.
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.
This event set the stage for many of the slave uprisings that followed in the decades to come. It was the first occurrence of English, Irish, African and Indian indentured servants and slaves working together. [1] Regardless of their ethnicity, all of the servants and slaves were treated poorly, which served as a uniting force between them. [1]
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.
The German immigrant to Missouri, Gottfried Duden, whose published letters (1829) did much to encourage German-speaking emigration to the U.S. in the 1800s, wrote about the redemptioners. “The poor Europeans who think they have purchased the land of their desires by the hardships endured during the journey across the sea are enslaved for five ...
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,