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Indentured servants could not marry without the permission of their master, were frequently subject to physical punishment, and did not receive legal favor from the courts. Female indentured servants in particular might be raped and/or sexually abused by their masters. If children were produced the labour would be extended by two years. [14]
However, this conflation of Irish indentured servants with African chattel slaves, known as the Irish slaves myth, is incorrect and ahistorical. Chattel slavery was a different legal category based on race as codified in The Barbados Slave Code, did not cease after a period of time (usually 7 years for indentured servitude), and stripped those ...
Systems of servitude and slavery were common in parts of Africa, as they were in much of the ancient world. In many African societies where slavery was prevalent, the slaves were not treated as chattel slaves and were given certain rights in a system similar to indentured servitude elsewhere in the world.
The legal institution of human chattel slavery, comprising the enslavement primarily of Africans and African Americans, was prevalent in the United States of America from its founding in 1776 until 1865, predominantly in the South. Slavery was established throughout European colonization in the Americas.
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 ...
Fifteen years later, the Islands slave population had grown to 20,000, while indentured servants numbered 8,000. There were also more than 1,000 Irish freemen (former indentured servants whose term had expired) living on the island at that time. [10]: 230–1 By 1660, there were 26,200 Europeans and 27,100 African slaves on the Island.
In the slave-owning areas controlled by Union forces on January 1, 1863, state action was used to abolish slavery. The exceptions were Kentucky and Delaware, and to a limited extent New Jersey, where chattel slavery and indentured servitude were finally ended by the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865.
In other cases, some slaves were reclassified as indentured servants, effectively preserving the institution of slavery through another name. [ 119 ] Often citing Revolutionary ideals, some slaveholders freed their slaves in the first two decades after independence, either outright or through their wills.