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for transportation of servants to their new destinations and signed
contracts in which they promised intentured workers, at the expiration
of their terms, a tract of land, a new suit of clothes, a heifer, two
pigs, fire-arms and the simpler farm implements.  These were basic
conditions upon which the majority of white people became citizens of
the North American colonies from Maine to Georgia.  Nor can these
people be regarded as poor ne'er-do-wells, as so many historians have
seemed to think (1).
 
 
With these guarentees in black and white, the would-be manor lords of
Virginia and Maryland were sure to meet with difficulties.  Indentured
servants were crowded into little cabins on their masters' estates; but
with vast stretches of Indian lands not far away, these workers were
not disposed to become submissive serfs. If treatment was rough,
pressure too great, and marriage among the servants punished too
severely, they ran away to the frontier where they could hunt and fish
for a living and buy lands
 
 
1. Clark, G. N.: 
The Later Stuarts
, 1660-1714, p. 35, shows that in a population of 5,500,520 there were
1,400,000 with incomes of 6 pounds to nothing a year.  From other
evidence I am of the opinion that there was nearly a million unemployed
after 1661, except in war time.