From the beginning of the English colonies in their “New” World, the division between free and unfree labor was clear.

“This is to lett yow vnderstand that I am in a most miserable and pittiful Case both for want of meat and want of cloathes” (Dahlberg, 2012, p. 31). 

So wrote indentured servant Richard Frethorne from the Virginia colony to those who held his labor contract in England. Frethorne’s letter reveals the difficulties indentured laborers faced in 1623 Virginia. Considering this was his third letter, it also reveals the challenges one faced in convincing family and friends to redeem – or buy out – an indentured contract (Dahlberg, 2012).

The use of indentured servitude, while not a new practice in English society, became a popular source of labor in the colonies. Indentured servitude existed as a source of unfree labor that contractually bound an individual to work for another for a specific amount of time—usually to pay off debts or as punishment for breaking the law. It provided predictable service and manual labor in the colony’s harsh climate and also expanded the English population, which helped the English exert greater control over their territories (Musselwhite, Mancall, & Horn, 2019, p. 14). Indentured servitude was not bound by race and thus at the beginning, many indentured servants were white Englishmen. Frethorne represented one of 132,100 persons (67 percent of the English population) who came to the colonies as indentured servants in the seventeenth century (Dahlberg, 2012, p. 1). 

A few years before Mr. Frethorne’s arrival in 1619, John Smith recorded the entry of another labor source to the shores of the Americas.

“About the last of August,” John Smith wrote, “came in a dutch man of ware that sold us twenty Negars” (Sluiter, 1997, p. 395). Kidnapped from their homes in West Africa, they arrived ironically enough in Point Comfort, Virginia (p. 395). Together with white and Black indentured servants, enslaved Africans labored to support the growing plantations in existence along the Eastern seaboard (Roberts, 2016).

The agricultural model proved lucrative, but its success quickly became directly dependent on the enslavement of Africans.

With the success of the plantation model, Black lives became tied to slavery and to the economic achievement of the planter class. As historian Ira Berlin (1998) noted, “The triumph of the planter class began the transformation of black life” (p. 109). This transformation meant that by the end of the seventeenth century, an economic shift had changed the English colonies from “[a] society with slaves … to a slave society” (Berlin, 1998, p. 109). 

From the earliest days of the English colonization efforts, a labor hierarchy existed.

Poor white Englishmen and women (even those convicted of a crime) were held in labor contracts that eventually allowed them to regain their freedom. As Englishmen and women, they also operated under the legal protections afforded all citizens under the British Crown.

Africans, on the other hand, arrived as kidnapped slaves. Unable to speak the language, often sick and completely disoriented after weeks at sea, they faced a radically different future. Not considered English citizens, Africans had no rights. Very few had the good fortune to be considered indentured servants—the vast majority became one of thousands of Blacks that now made up “slave societies” along the Eastern seaboard.