Indentured Servants Were Mostly. According to the caribbean atlas, minimum wages as stipulated in the contract were 25 cents per day or task for adult males and 16 cents for adult females.” Indentured servant definition, a person who came to america and was placed under contract to work for another over a period of time, usually seven years, especially during the 17th to 19th centuries.
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. Most of the servants were young and poor. However, both african men and women were capable of doing farm work and even the children started to do it at a young age.
This meant that there were much more males than females, with a sex ratio of 6 men to 1 woman.
Indentured servants were mostly uneducated europeans who were contracted into the sometimes lengthy and harsh service of an american employer to pay off the debt of their ship passage to the us. Much less well known is the important history of the indentured servants. The total number of european immigrants to all 13 colonies before 1775 was about 500,000; Indentured persons were numerically important mostly in the region from virginia north to new jersey.