Indentured servant

Early plantation workers included indentured servants. They agreed to work for a fixed period in return for passage overseas and other promised benefits. Planters increasingly turned to enslaved Africans, whose labour they could compel without wages or an agreed end to service.

Indentured servants worked for an agreed term, often to repay the cost of their passage; enslaved people were held as property and did not have an equivalent right to freedom when a contract ended. Enslaved Africans had been transported by force: their arrival must not be confused with voluntary immigration.

People who could not afford it sometimes became indentured servants. Someone paid their passage, and in return they agreed to work for a master for a fixed term. For Irish migrants, terms commonly lasted three to five years.