What happened to the indentured servants and their descendents?

[darklordoftech]

What became of them when indentured servitude came to an end?

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

The whole point of indentured servitude is that you become a free person when your indenture ends; so it's not really a question of what became of them when the institution of indentured servitude ceased to exist (which was in the early twentieth century, BTW), but what became of individuals once they had served their indenture.

And answer is, it depends. Legally former indentured servants were no different from any other free person, so they could acquire property, take up a trade, enlist in the army, or any number of possible futures. Some struck out for the western territories, where land was more easily come by. Of course, some did not survive their indenture, and others were held illegally for many years afterwards —this was especially common for those who had been indentured as children, and in areas far from a town or city where a neighbor might alert the magistrates of what was going on. If you're an American with Irish, English, or German heritage whose ancestors arrived here in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, there's a high probability you are the descendant of indentured  servants.

[kcguy]

I'll make this about me and my grandmother's male-line ancestor, who may have been an indentured servant.

It's been theorized that he was on the losing Scottish side in the Battle of Dunbar in 1650 and was taken as a prisoner of war by Cromwell's forces, then sold into indenture in Barbados.

The first definite records of him are found in Barbados, with his marriage in 1658 and the birth of his first son in 1659.  If he had been sold into indenture in 1650, his period of indenture probably would have been 5 to 7 years, so he would have been emancipated by the time of his marriage.

It's uncertain why he left Barbados, but many small landowners in Barbados were being bought out at this time, to make way for large-scale slave-based plantations.

In 1662, he was known to be living in southern Maryland, and in 1667 he received a half-share in a patent of 220 acres in Virginia's Northern Neck for paying to transport four individuals to that colony.

At the time of his death, he appears to have been the sole owner of 340 acres, which was divided between his 3 sons.

As for his descendants, I did a search of his surname once, and I was told that 99% of people with that surname lived in the United States, so it's possible that everyone with that surname descends from him.  (The original Scottish version would have contained a "ch", but that appears to have been replaced by an "h" amongst his descendants.)  In the 19th century, there are small clusters of people with his surname in the English county of Essex and in the west of Ireland, but none in Scotland.  I haven't ever tried to trace these people, but my pet theory is that they may have been descended from Revolutionary War-era Loyalists.

[sparkey]

In Albion's Seed, Fischer argues that the indentured servants were more common in the South, and largely adopted the cultural norms of the planter class there. So even though the indentured servant descendants outnumbered the wealthy planters, they ended up helping to spread the culture of the area's elites. Of course, an individual indentured servant who lived outside of the South wouldn't have been part of that, so individual experience varied.

Nowadays most people with colonial ancestry will also have significant indentured servant ancestry mixed in differing amounts, so it's hard to generalize other than that I suppose that an average Southerner will have a bit more.

However, there were definitely time periods, like around the time of the Revolution, when it mattered how high born you were, and being from a family of indentured servants was one of the lowest. That's not to say that people from those families didn't frequently elevate in society. Thomas Sumter, for example, was the son of an indentured-servant-turned-miller, and it's interesting to read how he would get defensive about that, and had particular trouble getting along with "high born" commanders like Light-Horse Harry Lee during the Revolutionary War.

[W]

A lot of this is just gonna be purely anecdotal since most of what I know of this comes from my genealogical research. I'm also only gonna relate this to the United States since conventions may be different elsewhere.

The general outcome for indentured servants and their descendants was integration into colonial American society. That's not to say that snap once they were free all was fine, they were economically disadvantaged however not looked down upon mostly due to just how many indentured servants came to the colonies. Especially in the northeastern colonies in the 1600s, indentured servitude was incredibly common for a while. As sparkey has stated, they left no real intrinsic traces beyond a few generations. As for their descendants, if you have a single WASP line in your family tree (as I was very surprised to learn myself) it is incredibly likely you are a descendant of indentured servants.

Also an aside but funny kcguy mentioned Dunbar POWs, by total chance I'm also descended from one. Settled in Malden, MA though so probably a very different experience.

[Kingpoleon]

So even though the indentured servant descendants outnumbered the wealthy planters, they ended up helping to spread the culture of the area's elites.

I’m sorry for cherry-picking your post, but I want to point out this is always the case. The sociological so-called “cultural imperialism” is nothing more than cultural mixing. Culture is an expression of power, and the culture of the elites is almost always the dominant culture of a society.

The most notable exceptions to this rule are 1790s France and modern day Britain. Classist societies, when turned on their heads, encourage people to seem more and more like regular, working class people, especially in speech.