Indentured Servitude Agreement Sample Contracts
Similarities between northern and southern coloniesIndentured Servitude Agreement • July 20th, 2021
Consensual free labor An indenture signed by Henry Mayer, with an "X", in 1738. This contract bound Mayer to Abraham Hestant of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, who had paid for Mayer to travel from Europe. Indentured servitude is a form of labor in which a person (an indenture) agrees to work without salary for a specific number of years through a contract for eventual compensation or debt repayment. Historically, it has been used to pay for apprenticeships, typically when an apprentice agreed to work for free for a master tradesman to learn a trade (similar to a modern internship but for a fixed length of time, usually seven years). Later it was also used as a way for a person to pay the cost of transportation to colonies in the Americas. Like any loan, an indenture could be sold; most employers had to depend on middlemen to recruit and transport the workers, so indentures (indentured workers) were commonly bought and sold when they arrived at their destinations. Like prices of the enslav