Comparison of Indentured Servitude to Slavery in Early America

Slavery and indentured servitude were similar in many ways, but also had many differences. In slavery, a person was forced to work their whole life. Indentured servitude was when a person or family worked for another, as a slave would, but for only a certain amount of years. After that, they were promised a plot of their own land. Both had harsh conditions on the way over to the New World as well as when they arrived.
Indentured servants were young European men and women and even families who signed a contract that they agree to work for a certain amount of years in return for transportation, food, clothing, water, and shelter. The adults typically worked for four to seven years but the children worked for many more years, usually in plantations. If a woman got pregnant while she was an indentured servant, she and her child would also have to work for many more years to make up for lost time. Indentured servants could be sold like slaves. The Virginia Company of London paid to transport servants across the Atlantic, but the established law of the headright system in 1618 gave settlers who paid their own way 50 acres of land once their contract of labor was up. As a result, the …show more content…
Slavery helped build America’s economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1793, the growing number of cotton crops in the South made the importance of slavery even stronger. In about the mid- nineteenth century, America started growing westward. Abolitionists in the North thought it was inhumane to use and treat slaves as objects, and the conflict between the North and the South became the American Civil War in 1861-1865. This war led to the freedom of over four million slaves. Slavery truly ended when the thirteenth Amendment was confirmed on December 6,