Indentured Servants
Indentured servants were men and women who agreed to work for a master without pay for a specified number of years, usually in return for having their passages to America paid. This 1775 advertisement in Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Gazette announced that the ship Hawke had just arrived from London and was lying off the Market Street wharf with a shipment of “a few likely healthy servants” of many different trades “whose times are to be disposed of.”