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To be indentured is to be forced to work by some contract. It started out as a word for a contract between masters and apprentices. Now it describes anyone bound to work, like it or not, because of some deal. Use the adjective indentured to describe someone who's bound or attached in a legal sense.
Indentures are agreements between two parties about long-term work. The length of servitude might be a specified number of years or until the servant reached a certain age. Some people indentured themselves in order to gain passage to America or to escape debt and poverty.
Servants typically worked four to seven years in exchange for passage, room, board, lodging and freedom dues. While the life of an indentured servant was harsh and restrictive, it wasn't slavery.
Most indentured servants worked as farm laborers or domestic servants, although some were apprenticed to craftsmen. The terms of an indenture were not always enforced by American courts, although runaways were usually sought out and returned to their employer.
The indentured workers (known derogatively as 'coolies') were recruited from India, China and from the Pacific and signed a contract in their own countries to work abroad for a period of 5 years or more.
Children, many poor and/or orphaned, were contracted and bound as indentured servants because parents could not afford to care for them or the children were destitute. These children were forced to work until they reached legal age (dependent on the state), at which time, they were to be released from service.
American sources identifying indentured servants include church registers, court records, deeds, servant contracts, journals and other personal narratives, land patents, merchant account books, newspapers, passenger lists, and probate records.
Indentured servants were men and women who signed a contract (also known as an indenture or a covenant) by which they agreed to work for a certain number of years in exchange for transportation to Virginia and, once they arrived, food, clothing, and shelter.
For much of the seventeenth century, those servants were white English men and women—with a smattering of Africans, Indians, and Irish—under indenture with the promise of freedom.