Scots in Bondage

In 1978 a bill was introduced into the Georgia House of Representatives to repeal the law dealing with indentured servants. Cited as an amusing example of the anachronisms still intact in the Georgia code of laws, it was passed without any opposition the present-day inhabitants of Georgia were unaware of its existence and most were ignorant of the indenture system which had encouraged the import of white labourers or artisans to the American colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One of the last vestiges of a forgotten form of labour recruitment, the old law remained to show the former importance of indentured service. Even in the plantation economies of the West Indies, Virginia, South Carolina and Maryland, where slavery quickly became the preferred form of labour, white servants continued to be imported to serve as overseers or as contracted craftsmen. The colonies' need for white servants had a profound impact upon the patterns of emigration to the New World; as an excellent outward cargo from Europe, they also played an important part in the burgeoning trans-Atlantic trade. It is generally accepted by American historians that at a conservative estimate at least half (and some say two-thirds) of the immigrants to the thirteen mainland colonies (which later became the United States) were imported as servants.

Scots formed a significant, though relatively small, part of the servant population and colonists specifically recruited them throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Though arriving in smaller numbers than the Irish, English, and Germans, servants formed by far the largest proportion of emigrants leaving Scotland during this period.