Chesapeake Indentured Servants

Indentured servants were a big part of the development of the Chesapeake region. Roughly 80 percent of the Chesapeake region was indentured servants. What is an indentured servant? An Indentured servant was a man or woman that worked for roughly four to seven years for a crop owner. After they served their time to their master’s that would be free and could live as a free person in the Chesapeake. The Chesapeake rarely had slaves in its early years of development because of the vast majority of indentured slaves. All different kinds of people from England wanted to come to the Chesapeake and become rich in the tobacco industry. The vast majority of indentured servants were those white people from England. Since the job economy was so poor …show more content…
They provided the with multiple times the profit they would have without them. A big profit to the tobacco planter was the headright they received with the servant. A headright was a free fifty acres every person got when they came to the Chesapeake. This made that tobacco planters a lot of profit off of one individual servant. Another reason planter’s liked indentured servants so much was because of the work they could do. A servant could easy pay off what it cost to buy him or her in under a year. After the year everything they did was purely profit for the tobacco planter for another three to six …show more content…
The servants also could have a new start on life when they went to the Chesapeake, which was a very good thing during this time period. They had to give a couple years of labor and then they could be free and try for themselves to make money in North America and be free in their new lives. Maybe without these servant’s tobacco wouldn’t have exploded like it did and the abundance of tobacco wouldn’t have been so high. This could of stopped the declining in price of tobacco throughout England and the Chesapeake