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But when profits failed to materialize and the colony became infamous for its high mortality rate, the company began shipping servants to Virginia at its own expense and placing them on company-owned land. An Englishman willing to risk his life in order to work someone else's acreage was not usually someone who could afford transatlantic passage. Once the servants arrived, the company could rent them out to planters for a year at a time, requiring the planters to take responsibility for the workers' food, shelter, and health.
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With the introduction of marketable tobacco, however, demand for labor skyrocketed. Private investors who, alongside the company, had shipped servants at their own expense continued to do so while the company rid itself of its role as rental agent. Instead, it sold servants directly to planters at a price based on the cost of passage. Planters, mariners, and merchants then fixed the servants' years of service based on the labor required to recoup their purchase price and subsequent care.
Servants, who ranged from convicted criminals to skilled workers, in time came to occupy the lowest rung on the social ladder in Virginia. While tenants kept half of what they earned, servants kept nothing and were almost entirely at the mercy of their masters for the terms of their indentures. Movement up the ladder was limited, even once a term of service had been completed, although servants with marketable skills had a greater chance of success.
Few servants were like Robert Townshend , who arrived as an apprentice in and eventually served in the House of Burgesses. In the summer of , the Virginia Company of London announced that it would send to Virginia, at "publike charge," "eight hundred choise persons," half of whom were assigned to be tenants of company land. One hundred "yong Maides" were sent to "make wives for these Tenants," and one hundred boys to serve as apprentices.
Finally, "one hundred servants [were] to be disposed amongst the old Planters , which they greatly desire, and have offered to defray their charges with very great thankes. Soon, however, the company found it unnecessary to continue incurring the "publike charge" of transporting servants. Instead, it implemented a system by which it used the prospect of land to entice new colonists, and with them laborers. Headrights, first described in the so-called Great Charter of , awarded acres of land each to planters who had been in the colony since May , and 50 acres each to anyone who covered the cost of transporting a new immigrant to Virginia.
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These newcomers, more often than not, were indentured servants, allowing successful planters simultaneous access to land and labor, with no upfront cost to the company. Merchants and mariners reaped a benefit, too, for they recruited prospective servants, bargained their indenture terms with them, and then sold the contracts to planters in Virginia. Merchants also accumulated headrights that could be used to acquire land.
In time, these headrights, or land certificates, were bought and sold much like modern-day stock certificates. Sometimes groups of investors collectively absorbed the cost of outfitting and transporting workers to the colony. Virginia Company of London stockholders were entitled to acres per share, and high-ranking officials were furnished with indentured servants as part of their stipend. In some instances groups of investors promised to give land to their indentured servants after they fulfilled their contracts.
The Society of Berkeley Hundred 's investors offered their skilled servants parcels that ranged from 25 to 50 acres, to be claimed once they had fulfilled their contracts. Various factors fueled the need for new servants. One was demographics. Approximately 50, servants—or three-quarters of all new arrivals—immigrated to the Chesapeake Bay colonies between and The ratio of men to women among servants in the s was six-to-one. Between and , the ratio dropped to four-to-one, but even then, many men could not find wives to marry and therefore could not establish families.
As a result of this and the high mortality rate among new servants, company officials and English merchants were forced to constantly replenish the Virginia colony's servant population. Another factor creating a need for new servants was the rapidly expanding tobacco market. It created substantial opportunities for would-be planters, but because tobacco was a demanding, labor-intensive crop, it also required a large number of laborers. At the same time, tobacco's acceptance as a medium of exchange prompted planters to enhance their productivity.
Between the s and the s, the annual output of tobacco per hand rose from approximately pounds to around 1, pounds; during the same period, shipping costs decreased. Although tobacco prices had begun to decline sharply by late in the s and continued to fall, production remained profitable because planters were able to produce larger crops with fewer hands.
Yet even as they technically required fewer servants, planters demanded more. That's because tobacco consumption rose in response to lower prices, and planters, eager to meet that demand, increased their production. 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.
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As early as , 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. Legislation passed in the — 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 , the law had been simplified, so that all non-indentured Christian servants older than nineteen should serve until they turned twenty-four.
Lawmakers entrusted the county courts with judging the age of each servant. In the meantime, they required slightly different terms for Irish servants. The assembly declined to dictate standard terms for privately negotiated indentures; as a result, contracts varied in length and specificity. On September 7, , 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.
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By , 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. Servants whose contracts had expired typically received "freedom dues," loosely described as a quantity of corn and clothing. The 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. 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.
In addition to contract terms, the General Assembly concerned itself with servant behavior. Rebecca Pearcey is one of seven women of color serving as national political directors for Democratic presidential hopefuls.
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