uation a servant could have, but far better than working at the sugar plantations in the West Indies. Usually these servants, who were mostly able young men, would sign a 4 year contract to the ship’s captain. The captain would then go out and sell that contract. In England, indentured servants were given freedom dues when their servitude came to an end. Freedom dues were usually things like- money, clothing, land, cattle and other things that might get them started in their new life. In America the freedom dues given were significantly less because their passage to the new land had been paid for by their masters. They might have been given a very small amount of money or come clothes. Indentured servants were treated very poorly in the colonies until the arrival of the slaves.Overtime, it became very difficult to get indentured servants because the economic status in England became favorable and the men had no incentive to want to leave. So the need for laborers in the Chesapeake grew tremendously and by the 1650’s the plantation owners were starting to switch to slavery. They needed a way to separate the slaves from the masters- so they used the color of the people‘s skin. The slaves were treated as though they were property and not human. Slave owners were given the rights to treat their slaves as horribly as they pleased. They stated ,by law, that it would be impossible to kill a slave because that would be the equivalent of destroying your own personal property. The colonies in the Chesapeake were not the only ones benefiting from slavery.In the north the climate was different and there were less plantations for slaves to work on. Because of the short farming seasons they used family members, people in the community and indentured servants (most of these servants were from Germany at this time) to help with their work. Indentured servitude had improved a great deal by this time. They began to use the Redemeptione...
